Voice acting needs voice actors. Who's down?

[JokesOnYou]

So I've been thinking about Overgrowth a whole bunch, and I feel like voice acting could really be a major addition to the game, if done right. People have brought it up in the past, along with some great ideas for how each race might sound. For example, rats could sound slightly foreign, with a little bite to 'em. Wolves could talk in a series of grunts, snuffles, barks and howls (Chewbacca, anyone?) and dogs could speak some sort of broken English/wolf hybrid language. I think the races ought to have easily distinguishable voices so we know who's talking.

Anyhow, it's been mentioned that voice acting is very costly if you hire professionals. But, wait, what about Wolfire? Are they professional game devs? Not in the traditional sense, no. They're independent. So how about this:

Community voice acting!

Basically, you tell the Wolfire gang you're interested in doing voice acting for free (yes, free) and they check out your voice over Skype or some such and decide whether or not they want your voice in the game and what kind of character your voice would fit with. Then, when they've started writing/written the script, they send you your lines along with instructions as to how each line should be performed. Perhaps for this they could use some sort of tag system, like:

grl = growly, deep voice
hpy = happy
agr = agressive
sad = ...sad
frs = frustrated or annoyed

And so on and so forth. Anyways, I certainly would be quite honored to have my voice in the game. Maybe as a dog. I sound kind of funny.

Post your thought down below and feel free to link to samples of your voice acting, if you have any! Now let's see if we can get these beasts to talk...

[Korban3]

I betcha the voice acting industry has a whole setup for relaying what they want via text. I guess this would work, if they ever really needed to get voice actors, and it would avoid the issue in Skyrim where 30 characters were all grandsired by the same guy with a dominant gene-inherited voice.

[JokesOnYou]

I betcha the voice acting industry has a whole setup for relaying what they want via text. I guess this would work, if they ever really needed to get voice actors, and it would avoid the issue in Skyrim where 30 characters were all grandsired by the same guy with a dominant gene-inherited voice.

Yeah, I bet they do. I should look into that. And the Skyrim thing is exactly what I was thinking! We could have an enormous variety of voices, which would be totally awesome.

[kehaar]

Yeah, what's up with that, anyway? Seems like a goofy way to save on expenses: huge dev projects put millions into making the visuals, animations, gameplay and sound design seem as realistic as they can get them, then blow the effect by hiring one guy to do 30 characters instead of hiring 6 or 7 different guys to do the same lines.

It isn't like they gotta have the 7 guys all be in town to come to their studios to record these days-- you can make fine recordings in any city now. Heck, in any living room, really.

Oh, and what JokesOnYou said sounds great!

[underthedeep]

hahaha yeah thats actually a pretty funny/fun idea

+1

[Neuronyx]

Awesome idea! I've always wanted to try VA work anyway. This would be a neat start.

[hamish_123]

I really do thing different accents for the races would be awesome. Given that we all come from many corners of the earth, this is very possible! Australian bandit rabbits? Im ready

[Anton]

This kind of topic has been addressed before, and I always think it's an interesting idea, but sadly not very practical. There are serious issues with most amateur home recordings that really make it difficult to create a consistent story when listening to voice acting. If it were me, and I were trying to create a sound, having these inconsistencies would make it very difficult to then release the quality product I'm working on. Also, community members working for free are very unreliable. It's not that I think this is a bad idea, it's that I think it will end up being more work, and take longer than it should, and will end up costing the team more in time than it would to hire professionals. Then, afterwards, you will still end up with a lower quality product as well.

As a side note, we were trying to do something similar with a piece of music, which ultimately we're still working on. The problem is, the quality of recordings varied from really terrific, to absolutely awful and unusable. (Performance issues aside, just recording quality.) Our biggest problem has been getting the people who agreed to record for us, to actually deliver.
Here was our first blog post on the topic: Call for Orchestra
And two years later, it was still sounding like this: Orchestra Demo - and while I think this is cool... the sound suffers a lot compared to doing a real recording session...
I can tell you that we will not be doing this for the full game, as it would never be done...

[Louiiiss]

voice acting would be amazing and im sure it wouldnt be difficult to find people to provide voices, i mean im sure a lot of supporters would be down for it

[underthedeep]

.....well i have a bluebird microphone if that helps

[Anton]

.....well i have a bluebird microphone if that helps

That is quite a nice microphone. You get an A!

But, what kind of room will you be recording in? If you record in a small bedroom with a lot of reflections, it will record those as well, and the human brain will know that you are in a small room, and not in the great vast outdoors that is Overgrowth.

[underthedeep]

to be honest i haven't even used that puppy yet because i don't have the required pre-amp for it to use it with my interface. i would generally be using it for recording vocals for music though which can be done in my room....

i could always just set my rig up in my back yard though...




we all know this shit ain't gonna happen but it's fun talking about it

[kehaar]

wow, that is a fancy piece of gear.

yeah, might be best to have some actual voice acting pros (or students) do it all in a day or two at a real studio.

Later anyone who wants to add to it could do so as a modder.

[alpineodin]

i have one of these. 17 male who sounds 12. if you need children/animal sounds XD

[Ylvali]

I think this would never fly for the official game, for the reasons Anton gave. But also because it would be too fragmented to narrate in style and artistic quality. I work with film myself, and I know that good acting doesn't come naturally sitting alone somewhere, you need a good director to inspire and guide you. I actually think voice acting is just as hard as any other type of acting, you can really tell from the voice acting in most computer games that they aren't very well directed.

But it's a pretty nice idea to save for a larger mod campaign. I'm really looking forward to when we can think more seriously about forming teams for mod projects, I'm hoping to provide some concept art and storylines for such projects in the future.