Chen’s vocal involvement began organically during the development of Ramshackle. As they wrote and storyboarded scenes, scratch recordings became a practical way to test joke timing, emotional beats, and shot rhythm before the animation was finalized, so voice work emerged from the same hands-on process that shaped the series visually.
What makes that progression especially important is that the project itself had a long runway. Chen has described Ramshackle as something they started around age 11 or 12, later reworked into a Sheridan thesis film in 2020, and eventually expanded into a crowdfunded 13-to-14-minute animated pilot with a full ensemble cast rather than a single creator handling everything alone.
Current Status and Expanded Role in Ramshackle
When the pilot premiered on April 6, 2024 on Zeddyzi’s YouTube channel, Chen’s on-mic contribution became part of a much larger public debut. By 2026, the episode had passed 9.5 million views, showing that a creator who came to performance through storyboards and temp lines could still break through to a massive audience and enter the wider indie voice-actor scene.
The pilot’s Newgrounds upload on May 27, 2024 pushed that momentum further, earning Frontpage placement, a Daily Feature, Weekly 2nd Place, and Best of the Month in May 2024. Those results make sense because the show’s personalities are immediately readable: even a quick pass through the site’s character profiles shows how much modern web animation depends on silhouette, attitude, and vocal contrast landing at the same time.
Style and Distinctive Voice Techniques
Chen’s style as a voice-focused creator is easiest to hear in the chemistry built with Joshua Waters, who voices Stone and also served as voice director on the pilot. That collaboration suggests Chen was not simply filling gaps with scratch reads, but shaping a performance language with another actor who understood comedic pressure, pacing, and scene construction from the inside.
That same clarity shows up in Sky Aurealis as Skipp, a performance that depends on velocity, sharp attitude, and instant readability. Chen’s writing gives characters quick entrances and even quicker reversals, so the voice has to establish personality almost immediately.
With Emily Gin as Vinnie, the series gains a different texture: steadier, drier, and more grounded without losing the joke. That balance matters to Chen’s approach, because not every laugh in Ramshackle comes from chaos; many land because the line is held just long enough before it snaps.
The addition of Kellyn Stephens as Maggot widens the tonal range even more. Maggot functions as both a punchline and a destabilizing force in the pilot, and Chen’s handling of that character shows a strong instinct for turning absurdity into escalation without losing control of the scene.
Collaborations with Directors and Studios
Supporting parts are just as important to Chen’s vocal world-building, and Lisa-Marie Lee helps fill out that social texture through Baylee’s Mom and additional voices. For a creator-director, those surrounding performances are what make the town feel inhabited rather than built only around the main trio.
The same principle applies to Tom Schalk, whose announcer work and extra voices add showmanship, framing, and atmosphere. Chen’s sense of voice acting is not limited to the biggest lines; it extends to all the smaller voices that sharpen the space around them.
Even performers used more selectively, such as Minh Ton, contribute to the final mix of humor, grit, and motion around the core cast. That is worth noting because Chen’s own released voice credit in the official trailer was modest—baby crying sounds—while their larger achievement was assembling a cast that still sounds unified inside the same ragged, offbeat universe.
Outside Ramshackle, Chen’s credits on Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss, Arlo the Alligator Boy, and especially Lackadaisy show how their performance instincts developed alongside hands-on production experience. Work on other animation-heavy projects sharpened their feel for acting rhythm, layout, timing, and what a pilot needs from both storyboard and vocal departments.
Industry Context and Creative Reach
The wider web-animation boom matters here. Projects such as The Amazing Digital Circus have normalized the idea that voices are part of a series’ identity from the beginning, and Ramshackle benefits from that same audience appetite for performances that are distinct, quotable, and tightly tied to character design.
A similar lesson can be found in Murder Drones, where tone shifts between comedy, menace, and emotion are carried as much by voice as by visuals. Chen’s work follows that same principle, even though the texture of Ramshackle is dirtier, looser, and more folk-punk in spirit.
The growth of newer creator-led productions such as The Gaslight District also explains why Chen’s career is increasingly described in plural terms—animator, storyboard artist, writer, director, and occasional voice performer. In indie animation, that kind of range is no longer unusual; it is often the thing that keeps a project coherent.
Future Projects and Aspirations
The most recent public updates point back to Ramshackle rather than away from it. In 2025, Chen appeared on TAAFI’s Independent Creators Panel, and festival materials described them as still working on more Ramshackle, underscoring that the creator known online as Zeddyzi remains focused on expanding that world inside the broader indie animation landscape.
That continuing momentum makes Chen’s future in voice work worth watching. Rather than separating performance from authorship, their public trajectory still centers on creator-driven productions, and the cast overlap visible in Knights of Guinevere shows how readily indie talent now circulates between adjacent projects while keeping a recognizable creative identity.
