Discussion Game character voices

Hi,

Was curious as to what you all use for NPC character voices, do you record friends voices, use a digital text to speech program/website (if so which one please?) or other...?

Would be nice to find something that supports a wide variety of voice types...

Thanks,

V

 

I pay actors.

 

Speaking as a consumer, I absolutely hate text-to-speech. I'd rather have dead silence than text-to-speech. If you can't afford good quality voice acting (neither can I, most likely), I think the second best thing would be something like tLoZ: the Wind Waker, where it's just UI sounds and the occasional generic vocalization, like this here:

Mumble speech (like when you have nonsense, "bla-bla-bla" sort of vocal sounds for the characters speech) that's actually a good,economical way to evoke what the character's voice sounds like. It's also language-agnostic so you can still use the same sounds if you go on to provide language localizations. I say don't try to cover every syllable of dialog with this though. The repetition will be too annoying and too distracting, in my oppinion. I would just go with occasional accents here and there.

As for me- for now, I'm just doing type-writer sounds as the text writes out on the screen, but I may add a few vocal accents later on.

Also, there are some generic voice assets on the asset store that you can use, if you aren't able to find people to do voices.

 

On Fiverr.com you may find affordable voice actors, but for most game types I would not put that very high on the priority list. Make the game fun first before focusing on the dialogues where many gamers quickly click <Skip>, lol.
For exclamation sounds (like an attack sound), you may find a variety in the asset store.

 

A game I'm making has lots of magical creatures, and for their voices, I sometimes use my own voice, to make sounds, or babbling speech sounds for some of them. Zelda the Windwaker shown above, and Rayman 2, are good examples of what I'm talking about. I sometimes use Audacity and a mic, to do the characters/NPC vocal sounds.

 

From consumer perspective, if you do not have the money to hire professional actors and professionally process the audio, do not bother with the voices. Feel free to use beeps.

Basically, cheaply done voice acting shatters suspension of disbelief and actually reduces perceived quality of the game.

I kinda remember one of the first western visual novel attempts I've seen, the dev managed to create decent visuals, but then voiced characters using "friends voices" option. As a result, the moment anyone spoke, you instantly had that mental image of a human speaking into a mic, and it could not be perceived as a voice of the character. This happens often when somebody tries to put a voice in the game but does not have a budget for the actors.

If you just use text or "beeps" when somebody talking, your mind will fill the missing information and creates a mental image of the character speaking. However, if the voice is actually recorded, any slight flaw will be instantly noticed and will make the character not believable.

 

Only game I can remember that gets away with bad voice acting is the orginal silent hill. Because everything else was so excellent with that game. Strange they couldn't nail voices when everything else was top notch

 

Silent Hill 1 is originally japanese, and back then it was common for a North American localizers to hire, ahem, low-grade voice actors (same happened with anime, some dubs were awful). Speaking of which, original Witcher 1 had similar problem, as english localization was comletely butchered.

Silent Hill 2 had decent voices, though there wasn't a a whole lot of speaking.

Here's an example of what voice actor change does:

Spoiler

Voice #1 is the original (japanese pro actor)
Voice #2 is a bad choice and does not match the character at all.
Voice #3 is decent replacement, although does not perfectly match the original.

With budget option as a game dev, you'd get #2 or #3. And even #3 is not ideal.

 

There is also xvatrainer, to train a bunch of voice, then transfer acting to these voices. I think it's free on github, if you have a decent gpu.

 

It's not cheap but we've used voice bunny and got great quality voices and were able to hire the same artist a year later when we needed to expand the dialogue. But it's around $1/second of recording, cheaper if you do like 500 seconds ($350). The artist gives you several takes of each phrase it was great.

 

Make games about robots or androids, so you can use cheap AI voice-acting, you have to overprocess the voices regardless.

 

that's kind of what I was thinking, but some of the conversion programs out there now are getting super sophisticated, even thought not perfect I would think these could do a better job then bleeps. This is for VR, so I think a decent conversion would be more enjoyable then beeps... I notice beeps in 2D pixelated games and it feels okay, but for VR not so sure...

 

Nope.

As somebody who has dealt with this stuff first hand, I'll let you in on something a lot of people fail to consider when it comes to voices (and audio in general) in games:

People will immediately notice bad audio.

Bad audio is worse than bad visual quality, as odd as that may seem. A grating voice will have people immediately try and find ways to turn voices off. Bad sound effects will have people turn their sound down, meaning that they'll have less feedback from the game itself. Stiff, robotic voices will draw people out of any emotional connection that voices really serve to help make. Note that an emotional connection isn't necessarily "this character makes me cry," but "I am willing to pay attention to what this character is saying."

As a practical example, I helped with sorting player testing data on a game where one of the characters was delivering was part of the tutorial through dialogue. The voice actor that had been hired didn't do a particularly good job, a combination of sibilance issues and the character they were playing being younger, so there were also some cracks in the voice. Watching the footage of players and reading their feedback, some things became common occurrences:

• Each time the character spoke, you could see the player frown slightly or tense up
• Players were struggling to execute a relatively simple task (performing a rudimentary combo input)
• Frustration increased as time went on and they heard the tutorial dialogue repeated after a set amount of failures (I believe it was 3, but the specifics there aren't terribly important)

From the forms they filled out, more details emerged. The most common responses were:

• I don't like this character
• I don't know what I'm supposed to do
• This task is too difficult

This lead to a lot of internal debate because this was part of the first hour of the game, thankfully without many lines past that point having been recorded. The question ended up being "well, do we recast?" which nobody really wanted to do because while gameplay dialogue hadn't been recorded, plenty of cutscene dialogue had. This meant that it would be an incredibly expensive prospect, the kind that would drain a lot of resources from a small indie project. Somebody brought up the idea of recording a "hey!" line and popping up a dialogue box instead.

So a "hey" was sliced out of another recording temporarily and the dialogue box was implemented instead of subtitles. This was a real-time box, so gameplay would proceed until the timer ran out or it was manually dismissed, rather than a pop-up that stopped everything. The moment this was done, all the previous reactions effectively vanished, success rates in the gameplay went up dramatically, and it was taking the new testers less time to complete the task. In the end, dialogue was only used for barks and story specific stuff and some of the cutscene dialogue was rerecorded to deal with the sibilance issues.

Character voices are extremely difficult to get right, and getting them wrong can affect things that you wouldn't even consider.

 

thanks, will look into this

 

I used The Voice Realm to source an actor for The Deep Paths narration. Found the site/service quite good.

The actor I landed on (Don McCorkindale) did a fantastic job and was very affordable.

 

that's a great example thanks for sharing.

I am sure that I'm pickier than most gamers about this stuff, but thinking back, most games I instant dropped were games that had what I considered cringey dialog. And all of these were pretty well regarded AAA games.

That's just me of course, but in theory at least I agree - no voice is better than bad voice.

Ironically, in my one published game so far, I did all of the voice acting myself because no money - and it was dreadful, lol.
Some people liked it though.

 

Don't forget that we humans have aversion for our own voices for some reason, it usually just sounds wrong. I haven't met anyone who likes their own voice recordings and that includes professionals too (when they aren't marketing themselves ).
So you will always be biased against your own voice performance, no matter what.

 

Hire real voice actors if you can. If it's not in your budget, you could look into Replica Studios' AI voice actor service: https://replicastudios.com/

 

I've been playing through the Syberia series recently and I've noticed it can be pretty transparent and annoying when you have the same person doing multiple voices. Even if you change your voice and your accent, it's still really noticeable when everyone in the entire world just happens to pronounce a certain word the same weird way.

I don't know if anyone's mentioned it, but keep in mind that when playing a game with a voice-over you often hear the same clips over and over again, so anything that's even slightly cringey or irritating becomes amplified to the extreme.

 

Came to link this. Depending on what sentences you put in, the output sometimes can glitch, but it's absolutely sufficient for any kind of AI or service announcement type voice, and a lot of the time good for NPCs as well.

Most of the voices are too bland and sound like a narrator on a documentary, but some of them, especially when you select a strong emotion like angry, are great. You really have to spend some time playing around in it.

 

This is really interesting, thanks for taking the time to post this Murgilod!

 

Can you please post some of the best voices you have found so far Billy4184, especially the female ones

 

Good female voices are much harder to find IME.

It was a space game and for a generic male pirate voice I went with Bazur on 'Intimidating' and came up with a bunch of quips for when combat started. There were some station docking voices and (heavily filtered) ship computer voices as well but I don't remember which characters.

I tested some stuff with Axorian as a boss enemy and it seemed to be allright.

It was just dabbling at that point, so it wasn't an exhaustive test of the capabilities.