The spark of life

Voice acting in games is somewhat of an ambivalent matter. If it’s done good, the game’s atmosphere and subsequently the game itself benefits greatly. However, even the best game’s effort to capture the player can be crushed by bad voice acting. After all, games – not unlike movies – are all about suspension of disbelief and escape to an alternate reality. If that reality is disrupted by a component like, say, a game character who doesn’t sound believable, this will afflict the whole experience and diminish the game’s fun factor.

As I didn’t want this to happen to this game, I had no intention of including speech at all. Quality voice actors are almost impossible to come by if you’re on a shoestring budget, so I thought I’d rather not include voices at all than to accept bad performances just to have a cool feature (that would ultimately turn out not to be cool but devastating). Oh boy… was I in for a surprise.

Just out of curiosity I started scouting for voice talent as soon as I had a couple of screenshots and a demo to show. I had high demands and very low expectations that they could be met. And then I was blown away by the auditions I received, most importantly by their excellent quality both in technical terms and performance-wise. I was also surprised by the short response time and eagerness of so many great actors who thought this could be a very interesting project to be in. I’m a bit biased as I’m the developer of this game, and of course I wouldn’t bother with it if I didn’t think it would be any good – but I still didn’t expect so many talented people to take an interest in it so quickly.

The scouting and auditioning is still in progress and will be so until March, which is when the final cast is going to be announced. But based on all that I’ve heard I can already confidently say that this is going to be very, very good. I can see every character coming to life so believably and it’s all going to be a tremendous improvement for the overall atmosphere.

So here’s to you, voice talents :o)