Voice Acting in CoG

I don’t know how every author feels about that, but I’ve seen that there are indeed some let’s plays of CoG and HG games.

  1. Whether the. Audio files are part of the app originally or downloaded later they still become part of the app. It’s best to ask @Samuel_H_Young about the additional size as his games had music.

  2. I wasn’t suggesting a voice actor would do it poorly. But pointing out what I as an author would think suits the character might not be what someone else thinks they sound like. It doesn’t matter how good the VA is if they don’t sound like what the reader believes the immersion is broken.

  3. Doing something like that would be the equivalent of using Microsoft Sam to read the story and that wouldn’t be very good. Although I’ve never used what currently is used for CoG games so I can’t comment on that.

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Maybe narrate it yourself!
I’d love to be my own narrator! It’s how I write so it’s not a big stretch :wink:

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OMG they had music. I never knew until now because I always put my phone on silent before playing to stop those annoying notifications.

*thinking I better play them again with music.

Yeah I think you are right about all that but you know something just popped up so I better be going.

Have a good day/night.

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An audio-play adaptation would be a step up form a plain LP though ponders

God I hate my voice. I used to have. A dictophone where I’d record my thoughts on UnNatural while out and about with the intention of playing it back and making written notes always quickly delete them lol

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For a few years i wanted to be a voice actor. Heck playing old video games with written texts I used to voice them. Twas fun.

But I do know how disturbing it can.be to hear yourself played back it just doesn’t sound right.

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Yeah, my first two HGs, Captive of Fortune and Trial of the Demon Hunter had music. @andymwhy did a great job on the soundtracks but unfortunately, music files drastically increase the size of the app. They’re about ten times the size of all the other HGs and CoGs which could have deterred some potential readers.

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I can understand. When I first started with voice acting I hated my voice, I was like “Is that my voice? Is that my fucking voice?”. Part of the reason why is because everyone perceives the sound of their voice differently when they are speaking, the sound that everyone else hears is different. Over time I got used to the sound of my voice and I even experimented with different registers, I felt more comfortable hearing it.

And it’s rare to find a timbre inadequate for voice acting. My voice isn’t exactly beautiful but it serves certain purposes that other voices can’t serve.

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When voice acting is the actor told exactly what inflection and/or emotion to say the lines with, or are they expected to bring their own interpretation to it? Or does it depend on the job?

I would be all over that.

That’s interesting, if you remember the titles of those games, I’d be interested in knowing how they do it. I’m also visually impaired, so I think having sound in CoG, either through voiceovers or music, would be a welcome addition.

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What I’m doing is more focused in dubbing, so it’s more trying to recreate the emotion of an already existing work of a different actor, some liberties can be taken because we are also trying to adapt that work for a different audience, but it’s essentially that.

However, even then I would say that it depends on the director, there are some who like to give more freedom to the actors, and usually then the director corrects and gives more specific indications of what the actor should try to do. One basic principle that every actor can agree with is : the director is always right, even when he is not right, he’s right. Nobody would argue with them because they usually have more experience and probably know best and because you don’t want to upset the people who have hired you.

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Well @Samuel_H_Young mentioned his, and think it was trials of the demon hunter I was thinking of in particular…Don’t know about you though, but I use google talkback, and thinking about it now, don’t think background music would work, as I might not be able to hear the text being read unless you could change the volume of it.

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Another idea I eventually rejected was to record a voice message from each of the possible romance options, then at the end of the game you’d get a code to use at the website to unlock the message, it would have been mayber 5-10 minutes and would be from the character at a time between season one and two. But the idea was dropped as getting the casting wrong would be a bad idea, So I’ve settled on possibly having an audio codex on my website ala mass effect as i think thats the best option.

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Yeah, I’ve certainly been thinking a lot about this recently. In particular because of what a great job that guy (RyanMZed?) did with Avatar of the Wolf. Just one person with some basic sound design added a lot to the experience.

The problem is, having someone read all the textual variations of every line. Like, then about the genders of protagonists and genders of ROs: you might have to read the same sentence eight times or more. And then getting the sound design to work behind that?

It’s like, if someone came to me and wanted to license our products and spend the money themselves, I’d be all for it. But it would be a hell of an investment for us.

And, yes, Sam is right that it would massively bloat the size of the apps. Though, again, I could imagine a world where a separate “Audio COG” app would exist that people could download individual stories to, rather than having as an IAP inside the primary app. :man_shrugging:

I don’t know how to do it, and we don’t have the money to even begin asking the question effectively is the tl;dr I guess.

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Trial of the Demon hunter has a 35-40 minute soundtrack and comes in at 75mb. That’s only marginally more than some of the other HGs. Captive of Fortune has a full 40 mins of music and is 59mb, but I’m not sure if the IAPs are included in that figure.

While it definitely increases the size of the app, it’s not substantial and music is a viable option now.

I think the biggest obstacle to a voiced HG or CoG is the customisable parts of a story. As mentioned above, the mc’s name would never be said out loud. I know I’ve played games (really can’t think what off the top of my head) before where there is written dialogue along with spoken word, and seeing your name in print but not hearing it read aloud ruins the immersion into the game.

The only way I could see it as easily doable and not immersion breaking would be recorded audio files you find and listen to in the game. Perhaps solving a murder you stumble upon old tapes with a confession. Or a sorcerer grants you the power to be a fly on the wall to a conversation long ago that can aid in the present. That is, there would be parts of the story with audio, but the majority without.

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Hmm, that is a problem. That would then mean that you would either use music or voiceovers exclusively, to prevent one from drowning the sound of the other.

Programming an in-game volume button is ideal, but requires foresight and planning.

I can see why sound isn’t standard yet. Although I’d rather have VO’s in exchange for ambiance. The ambiance is just further immersion.

I have the iPhone version of Hakuoki, which has an animated opening, graphics, music and some voice acting. The file is 911.6MB according to my PC. In comparison, largest choice of games on my iPhone is at 33.5MB. The primary issue with adding voice acting is that is is going to increase the file size a lot, more so if you try to use it everywhere because of all the dialogue paths.

Also bad voice acting is worse than no voice acting at all. This is also true if the voice acting is good, but the casting choice isn’t.

Wayne June voice acting choice games? It would make popularity of these games and interest sooo much higher. Of course most of us here wouldn’t be able to afford (or rather want to spend) so much money into good voice actors for their hobby games…and as someone said bad voice actors would be a turn down.

So i guess for very good choice games there could be some lines or texts that good voice actor could do, like humor ones. But not whole 100-300k word game.