Lemma Soft Forums

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?

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

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.

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.

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