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Voice Acting Ponderance
🕑 Added 2025-02-23 14:25:56 +0000 UTCSo for voice acting, there's two common approaches.
If you have the budget -- fully acted out lines. Maybe not the whole game because for a narrative game that'd be tens of thousands of dollars, but at least some. If not, visual novels use "beepers" to mimic the sound of someone talking, or at least represent it aurally in the same way a thumbnail represents a painting.
For The Shadow Over Cyberspace, I drew a line and said "Anything taking place in the real world is fully acted; anything in cyberspace is a beeper." Worked pretty well! But now we're moving on to Laugh Track, the next game, and I'm hitting an conundrum.
There isn't an easy line to draw to say "Everything here is acted, everything there is not" like with SOC. So I'm thinking of a compromise -- Simlish.
If you've played The Sims, you know what Simlish is. It's a sort of nonsense gibberish the characters speak, randomized but tuned to convey emotion even if it conveys no meaning. It's a bit like Animal Crossing's "animalese" in that regard, but more sophisticated. I have voice actors record random nonsense with various emotional tilts, and use that for the characters instead of beepers or full lines.
Here's the problem, though. In the past, I've aimed to cast representatively. If a character is African-American, get an AA voice actor. If a character is Hispanic, get a hispanic voice actor. And so on. But I also have streamers and members of the community eager to work with me on this, which reduces casting (and honestly costs) quite a bit... but would mean no representative casting.
So I pose this question to you: How important is representative casting if the "dialogue" is all gibberish anyway? How do you feel about this?
I'm genuinely curious. Leave comments below or reach out directly to me. I'd like to get a feel for what the community wants from this game, so I'm being practical while not violating goodwill. Thank you.
Comments
Demian Katz
I tend to have kind of an "all or nothing" feeling for voice acting. I appreciate it when full voice acting is possible, but I am also entirely happy to just read text and imagine my own voices. I tend to like middle ground (weird noises/a few over-repeated lines) less than either extreme (but as long as I can turn it off if I don't like it, I have no major concerns about what is included). I also agree with Lahrs' sentiment that representation is important if possible, but if it isn't, then maybe "less is more" for now and the voice issue can be revisited in the future if budget permits.
Lahrs
Representative casting is important. For a Spanish character, I would be pulled out of the game if someone were voice acting "Spanish". That is the player side of me. The human side of me says representation is more important than ever. To a point. Unless we are talking actual Simlish from real-life Sims, I think anyone can help accomplish your voice acting goals and you shouldn't feel like you did something wrong. I say, save the costs now, and just see as it as savings for a future investment when actual representation is needed.
