To Voice or Not to Voice?

[Enerccio]

I can see definitely what you're saying. Bad voice acting could ruin a good game...

So how do you find good VAs? I mean, I thought all the VAs of Senior Year were at least listenable, if not good.

well personally i think Mirielle is very good
try VAA

[Mirielle]

try VAA

Seconded. You'll find amazing quality AVA's there and even some pro ones. (They'll do it for free too!)

[e-imi]

For my secret game, I am thinking of doing a bit of voice acting, but in Japanese since 1. The language is more expresive then english and 2. It's more traditional to bishoujo games.

I take Japanese outside of school (1 on 1 lessons) and I know that my teacher would be more then happy to help me out with the dialogue.

Although, I may try it in englsih too.

-loves voice acting-

... the only reason why I take Drama at my school...

[Hime]

I love voice acting too, though I've never done it "for real" - in other words, my experiences are most likely from speaking something random with a random voice and some random feeling and recording it. ^^; I'm not too good at it, and because of my bad pronouncing of English, I think that I wouldn't be a good voice actress for a game where the voicing is in English. Unless you want some kind of a "exotic transfer student"-type. I can pronounce Japanese somewhat well though. And another problem is that my voice in general isn't a good one, but well.... Anyway. I enjoy playing voiced games, because having voices gives the characters a whole new dimension, kind of. Makes them deeper and a bit more real. ^^

[Mirielle]

It's great to see other aspiring voice-actresses here! It's a fun hobby and I consider it work now...I have a lot of requests...

I also found it hard to speak in another accent at first, I have a stupid Australian accent originally and so I have to change into "American Mode!" But now I can't get in front of a microphone anymore without losing my natural accent...

I've been learning japanese for 6 going on 7 years now. If I worked hard enough, I could probably translate my game into japanese. But I'm lazy~

But as I said before...VA-ing is a choice. There are pro's and con's for both. I lean towards the Yay! VA! side but that's only because I want to go pro one day. It's really up to the maker.

[miriam]

So how do you find good VAs?

Audition people with your eyes closed. It is amazing how easy it is to get swayed by people's physical charm and misled into thinking the voice works.

I have a stupid Australian accent originally and so I have to change

I notice a lot of Australians thinking this, but it is a big mistake. The Australian accent is viewed by other people as wonderful, and other people are hopeless at doing Australian accents. If you already have one then you have a great advantage over them. I'm not saying don't work on being able to do other accents too, but don't neglect your natural one. Often, standing out from the crowd is what can give you that edge. Far too much emphasis is placed on immersing yourself in the large, anonymous crowd.

I think voiced stories are a great idea. Filesizes are a major problem though. If a way could be found to break downloads into two parts it would bring the advantages of both voiced and unvoiced to a single work. A game could be downloaded and then the voices could be downloaded if the user has the net bandwidth. Of course this would require the game to not come to a grinding halt when it can't find voices if someone doesn't have them.

Two things may help with voices:
- better forms of audio compression (these are on the way)
- and computer speech synthesis (it doesn't necessarily mean robotic sounding speech and new schemes would still require a voice actor to set the parameters).

[lordcloudx]

Hmm.... I could think of a practical workaround to this two download thingy in ren'py. Just make some blank sound files with the same filenames as the voice files in the original distribution and leave the real voice files for another download. (I'm not sure if it will work other OS aside from windows)

[lordcloudx]

Hmm.... I could think of a practical workaround to this two download thingy in ren'py. Just make some blank sound files with the same filenames as the voice files in the original distribution and leave the real voice files for another download. (I'm not sure if it will work other OS aside from windows)