Voice Acting: Yeah or Nay?

[Starshine]

I've just realised something that might put a dent into the use of VAs in my game. The main character has a customisable name which comes up a lot in conversation.

In Persona 3, they just skipped over the protag's name in convos. For example, if the line read "Hey, [name].", the VAs would just say "Hey.".

Someone mentioned TWEWY, and yeah, I'm actually really for that approach. Besides cutscenes and battle quotes, the only full lines were really short things, like "Ask away." and "Sir!".

The short convos are used in many rpg games, using too much sound files take alot of space... So I guess it's properly the best way to go when creating a game. I recently was messing around with ren'py and you wouldn't belive how much space full voice acting takes. Thankfully ren'py can take ogg files which split the Megabytes in half.

[HumbertTheHorse]

Adding voices will increase your audience.

[Auro-Cyanide]

I've just realised something that might put a dent into the use of VAs in my game. The main character has a customisable name which comes up a lot in conversation.

I want to keep that aspect there to give that bit of freedom to my students (not to mention there're a few little extras should they name the character after me or another teacher, lol), but couldn't imagine having voice actors prepare a thousand names 'just in case'.

An alternative would be to modify the scripts so that we have a lot of "them" "they" "you" and so on (no he's or she's as I'm trying for genderlessness), or possibly even keep the text as is (name shown) but have the VAs use the alternative words.

Commence mulling over.

Bioware uses the last name (which is set) or a title. In Mass Effect you can pick your first name put everyone calls you Shepard or Commander and in Dragon Age 2 everyone tend to call you Hawke. Does begger the question of why they let you name your character in the first place, but it does let me tell my save files apart pretty easily.

[izukwon]

Rather than voice acting, I think good music is better for me. I mean, in a tear-jerking scene I would totally cry with the music rather than the voice. Example is (highlight the text below)

in Angel Beats when Yui disappear, the song, Ichiban no Takaramono, totally jerked my tears ><

so, if asked, nay for voice acting, except if it's totally good :3

[Tengudo]

Sorry to revive an old thread but I had a question I needed clarification on.

I'm more of a sound designer with an interest in VA and dialogue recording. I've recently become interested in programming and have been learning UDK and am thinking of trying Unity as well. I've been researching and found the other engines like Renpy for making the VN but what concerns me is how worthwhile VA is for the game.

Being an audio guy, I'm being a bit selfish in wanting to add more of an audio feel to a VN, and probably overambitious for being a beginner at programming, but I kind of can't help but want to stick with what i'm more comfortable doing.

Looking through this thread and other commentary around the net, the general consensus seems to be that while VA won't necessarily be a detriment, it will increase file size. I personally always use 48khz 24bit audio when I record, and I imagine it would be best to keep the audio in Wav format for not only the engine, but the translation between platforms. What I'd like to know is, speaking from experience, how much more of a file size can I realistically expect? I'm not really sure of the average size of a VN game in general, so knowing how the sizes look for a WithVA and WithoutVA version would be helpful.

Thanks

[SundownKid]

Wav format is terrible for games, the general consensus is that .ogg format is the best since it's compressed and there are no strings attached.

You are probably looking at a size increase of a few hundred megabytes depending on the size of the game.

[AxemRed]

It's easy to calculate the filesize of uncompressed audio.
48,000Hz * 24bit * 2 (stereo) = 2,304,000 bits/s = 2.3Mbit/s
That's 1037 MB per hour of voice acting (uncompressed).

[ViRiX Dreamcore]

Being an audio guy myself, I can say that compressing to .ogg format would work just fine as you wouldn't really hear a loss. If you look at most video games, you'll notice the music and voices have different encoding.

Voice acting may not break a game in some cases, but in this particular case where the story IS the game, it'd be a really good idea to have pretty decent voice actors. If you're unsure of the voices, then just go with semi-voice acted lines.

For the game I'm working on, I'd like both sited and blind people to play, so everything HAS to be VA'ed. Luckly there are only a few characters and it's not too long so this shouldn't be a huge problem.

[LeetMusic]

Good quality voice acting makes for a good game. Crappy "audio atrocities" quality voice acting is bad for the game.

[Ispheria]

Personally I like it when there is voice acting in a game, regardless of how bad it is (unless it's so bad that some little girl has a super deep voice or something).

Thing is though, when I play a game with voice acting, I always let them finish speaking even though I read super fast, so that drastically increases my play time, especially considering how slow a lot of voiced scenes are.