Voiced Games?

[clubanimon]

With the addtion of being able to pause midis in our games now, I was wondering if anyone had considered voiceing there game.

Really it would be a entierly new dimension in the game, and i've always been particuarly fond of drama cds or Radio storys. There was some really good ones on megatokyo awhile back but i havn't been to there forms in a long while.

So i was just wondering if anyone else was thinking of doing it for there next, or current game.

If so...any idea how you'll go about it? Casting, recording, editing...file size.

[Megaman Z]

use audacity and any given microphone. works wonders... if you can figure out how to modify the track to be exactly what you want.

(hint: tempo changes greater than +/-25% will distort the track. use less than that followed by a speed adjust to adjust the pitch better than with the pitch adjust effect...)

this may show up in the RPG project (which I need to work on again... I think I missed my initial deadline...[sweatmark])

[PyTom]

I've been strongly considering adding voice support in the 4.8 series of Ren'Py. Actually, the necessary support for playing and cancelling sound files is already in 4.8... What I need to do is to go through and build some tools that do things like annotate a script with voice information, and manage the recording process.

If someone was to come up to me with a 90% completed game and say "I want voice support", I'd go off and implement it.

I'm vaguely considering it for some game in the future, so much of the design for it is floating around in my head.

I've mostly considered the technical aspects. I would think in terms of casting and the like, it makes sense to exploit the existing fandub community... but I don't know exactly how to do that. I'm not really a mortal... err... people person.

[Beta]

well, it couldn't hurt to ask what the current way of doing the voice SFX is until you put in the code to make it easier... considering Zeta's looking for an engine to use for a little side project...

[PyTom]

Well, the audio.sound_play and audio.sound_stop (going by memory on the function names) functions should be all you need to implement voice.

My eventual plan is to wrap them into an interaction hook that executes at the start of each interaction. It'll check if the voice function has been called before the start of the interaction, and if it has, it will play the appropriate voice file. If not, it will kill the voice... I'll probably also need to implement a voice_sustain function, to keep the voice without restarting it.

Code that uses it will look like:

Code: Select all

voice "cima_2345.wav"
cima "On the Saturn V, each one of the five F-1 engines produced a million and a half pounds of force."

voice "cima_2346.wav"
cima "Our engines produce much less than that, so we had to be a lot more clever."

# No voice with this line.
p "I see."

I could code this up in under a day, if the need arose. It's the support tools (that would automatically add those voice lines) that would take more time.

[bookie]

Ah, more support is good support, but I know I'd never use voices in my game. I'm not a seiyuu fan and I'm too lazy, hehe.

But if anyone needs a female voice I can offer my services. XD

[mikey]

It'd be nice to hear some "familiar" forum voices, heh. So far though, I'm not planning anything on my end... But of course I have thought about it. It would probably inflate the game's size considerably.

[PixelWrangler]

If someone was to come up to me with a 90% completed game and say "I want voice support", I'd go off and implement it.

I may end up taking you up on that... one of the potential add-ons I've been seriously considering is voice acting, and I have a local pool of talent and recording solution to draw on.

I've also considered a "non-voice" and "voice" version of the game in the end.

For voice support, when it happens, might I suggest independent music/voice/soundFX volume controls and, as a subset of that, the ability to disable voice completely.

P.W.

[chronoluminaire]

It'd be nice to hear some "familiar" forum voices, heh.

That would be so incredibly cool. We've got a good female/male balance... But I've got no plans for voice in my next game

[Eiji]

use audacity and any given microphone. works wonders... if you can figure out how to modify the track to be exactly what you want.

(hint: tempo changes greater than +/-25% will distort the track. use less than that followed by a speed adjust to adjust the pitch better than with the pitch adjust effect...)

this may show up in the RPG project (which I need to work on again... I think I missed my initial deadline...[sweatmark])

I think a good program for audio (if you use wav format) is Acoustica...and Ithink you can get that as shareware...
as for the mic. heres a tip.. dont talk DIRECTLY into the mic..that causes the "rush" sounds... instead..keep the mic to the side of your mouth and talk "past" it.. no rush that way..

[musical74]

It has been my experience that games that have voices added take up a lot more HD space than those that don't. I realize that isn't too big an issue with hard drives having huge amounts of space but if I were to have voices for all of my ren'ai and anime games I would run out of space FAST...I do love the idea of voices included in games, however! =) It adds to the general feel of the game and I think it would make things more interesting =)

[Beta]

It has been my experience that games that have voices added take up a lot more HD space than those that don't. I realize that isn't too big an issue with hard drives having huge amounts of space but if I were to have voices for all of my ren'ai and anime games I would run out of space FAST...

...and with how little space Zeta has left, he's gonna have to rethink his ideas...

(personally, I can't believe he spent a whole hour adding an echo effect to "the Potion" to make it sound like it's in a tunnel, thus taking MORE space... what is going through that hollow head of his?)

[Megaman Z]

It has been my experience that games that have voices added take up a lot more HD space than those that don't. I realize that isn't too big an issue with hard drives having huge amounts of space but if I were to have voices for all of my ren'ai and anime games I would run out of space FAST...

...and with how little space Zeta has left, he's gonna have to rethink his ideas...

(personally, I can't believe he spent a whole hour adding an echo effect to "the Potion" to make it sound like it's in a tunnel, thus taking MORE space... what is going through that hollow head of his?)

two things:
A) I'm gonna get an 80GB one soon... [a hard drive, not a file.]

B) I thought having a "tunnel mix" of the potion sounded good. that's why I waited 50 minutes for audacity to do it's work. (I also now know how to make my voice seem more menancing. HAHAHAHAHAHA!)