Voice Acting

Hey everyone. I was recently thinking about having some form of voice acting

in my game, and I'd like to have your opinion on it.

Option #1: Have the entire game voice acted (including NPC dialogue).

This option, however, may end up making the file size huge, and it would

probably be a pain for your VA's, so I wouldn't go for it.

Option #2: Have only the plot-important scenes been voiced.

Option #3: Have only the battles (and certain scenes) have short

voice clips, such as grunts, taunts, etc. This is the option I'm seriously concidering.

Do you guys have any other ideas how to implement voice acting?

Or would you rather there be no voice acting, period?

Option 1 or 2 if you are able to get professional voice work for your project. Option 3 is of course the fastest way but it can make a many people wonder "why they didn't just voice-over the entire thing?".

Bad voice acting sticks out worse than a bad story.

VA is generally awful. theres a reason its mocked in rm games.

if you dont need it, dont use it

I'd just probably use it for like grunts in battles, Other than that there's no point since with voice acting most of the time they don't sound good, hard to find people to do it right and is hard to change such as if you change a bit of your dialogue etc.

Depends on the quality of voice acting you can get. If you got good actors then go with Option 1 or 2 (which option depending on the amount of time and work you want to put into the game). Poor voice acting can really stand out and pull a game down, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of people out there with both the talent and the equipment for it.

If you don't have much to work with then stick with Option 3 or none at all.

I love doing voice-acting myself. I haven't done much for other people and just have fooled around in some rpgmaker projects. My background in it mostly consists of me and my brother playing with a stereo recorder (we didn't have a lot of toys ^^ but we had a lot of imagination).

But as much as I love it, I wouldn't actually do any of it for a serious project. Only because I can only do so many voices (and don't think I'm that good at it) and it's hard to come by good voice actors. Another thing that hampers the whole thing that many don't think about is the dialogue itself can be the issue of bad acting. Sometimes the lines when said out loud emphasize how unnatural the phrasing is but when you just read it, it can be unnoticed. So both the acting AND writing of the lines needs to be sharp and on par or you run into trouble.

I've seen a lot or rpgs spruce the battle system with grunts and groans. Don't need that much talent for that and it can be fun. If you've got the resources to do it already, why not?

if you decide to do voice acting, I'd suggest only putting it in right at the very end. like, test out your people and the effect of it on your game for sure, but it would be a pain to have to re-do hours of recording and editing and tweaking just because you changed a line of dialogue halfway through dev.

but grunts and taunts and stuff in battle are always pretty impressive in games, you should definitely add those in! (as long as they don't sound silly, ofc)

voice acting doesn't work in 2D games

if you feel the need to use voice acting, then it should be in little soundbytes, not all your dialogue. like if one of your characters has a little "you're too slow" taunt at the end of a battle or something (but don't be repetitive or annoying)

Hmm.

I agree with above poster, VA would probably feel out of place in an RM style game.

Though I picked Option 2.

If you were to use Voice Acting, you let in all sorts of problems, mic quality, character voice consistency, little muffled sounds before and after speech.

I think that done well, you could make it feel in place. Just because you don't see it much doesn't mean it isn't worth a try.

Which is why you'd want to have some sort of audition/casting process, like I did. My game's being voice-acted in accordance to Option 2, and while it is extra work, as long as you have decent actors it can be worthwhile.

I'm still writing the script for the first episode of game which is like 2-3 hours long. And page count for the script so far is well over 20 pages...