I think that by now, I’ve established that the story and dialogs play an important part in our game. And with that comes, obviously, also the discussion about voice actors and what not. And I know the usual pros and cons that are thrown around in internet forums across the globe.
It makes the characters more believable, and allows some dramaturgic things that just aren’t possible or only hard to do without voice, the different tones alone are basically a great reason for it.
But what if you don’t find talented people, if their voices don’t match the characters? And, for me as a hobbydeveloper, the whole time-issue is even more important: Obviously, I can’t pay professionals to do it for my little (yet textheavy) game, and aside that, how would I record all those voices, anyway? I’d be lucky enough to even find people with matching voices (who do have a talent for that – for example, I couldn’t record the whole thing by myself, since, you know, my voice is not necessarily amazing for that stuff).
But no, I haven’t reached a definitve decision for that. It’d be easy enough to include in the code, its really only about the question: Will I find the necessary amount of people, and how do I go about recording all that? So with these factors, I had to look for an alternative – maybe just for now, but an alternative regardless.
And what else could I mean but the typical “beep”-sound whenever a letter appears, seen surprisingly often in Nintendo-games. I know what you’re thinking now, but I have to say – it works. It’s obviously not as smooth as spoken dialog, but it does add to the experience. It seems to me that it works as sort of a placeholder for the voice. For example, pauses in speech before were simply a short pause in the appearance of the letters. Now that there is the beep-sound, you can actually HEAR a pause, and that does add a lot to the effect. The frequency is altered for different characters, so they now actually sound different. I know that it might sound crazy, but its true – the beep alone works, as if our brain would interprete it as the correct voice.
Sure, you still need to read, and it won’t tell you anything, but at least there is some kind of sound when the mouth opens and closes. I’d recommend to try it, if only as a placeholder-thing.
