Voice bleeps, yay or nay?

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Senroc
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Voice bleeps, yay or nay?

#1 Post by Senroc »

Hi all!
I'm working on a visual novel and planning out the programming/sounds of it. I don't have the budget for voice actors yet, but one thing I was considering for my first game was creating voice bleeps for characters corresponding with their dialogue showing up (e.g. like UNDERTALE/DELTARUNE, where every character has their personal voice bleep, or Animalese-like chatter as in Animal Crossing).

However, I'm not sure if this is something people would want to hear. The tone of the visual novel in question is a fantasy comedy-drama, and I plan to make the bleeps soft and sampled from human voices, not like cartoony Banjo-Kazooie noises. What are your thoughts? Would you prefer to hear voice bleeps or silent text?

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Tremarl
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Re: Voice bleeps, yay or nay?

#2 Post by Tremarl »

Maybe give an option in the settings menu to turn off the bleeps, and then you get best of both worlds.

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midgethetree
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Re: Voice bleeps, yay or nay?

#3 Post by midgethetree »

As Tremarl said, you can always make it optional - maybe even a whole volume bar, so players can adjust the volume a bit if they don't want to mute it entirely. I'd also suggest considering people like me who play on instant text speed; I always go for instant text speed and the first time I played a Ren'Py game with voice bleeps the bleeps only played for half the lines somewhat randomly, and it was overall kind of confusing/distracting. I might even suggest making voice bleeps not play at all if preferences.text_cps is 0, since I don't think voice bleeps work as well when text is shown all at once.

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Zelan
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Re: Voice bleeps, yay or nay?

#4 Post by Zelan »

Banality Man is actually one of my personal favorite games and it does this. I don't know much about the coding side of things, so I don't know if these sounds are difficult to implement correctly when text speed is changed, but it's certainly a fun feature and looking at this might be some help in implementing. Plus, as stated above, people who don't like the feature can always turn it off.

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Ryuno
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Re: Voice bleeps, yay or nay?

#5 Post by Ryuno »

Hard yay if you're doing it one sound per phoneme with programmed pitch and cadence, nay if it's per letter and randomized.

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