Making the Voices of Chronautical

Once the decision to record vocal barks was made, we had to decide how we were going to accomplish this.

First, we needed to find our voice actors. We knew we wouldn’t be able to compensate them very much, so we chose first from people already on the team. It worked out well that most of our team is very into Dungeons and Dragons, and both our producer and programmer got a lot of practice doing voices because of it. My girlfriend also loves doing voices, and so we had our cast. We wanted to include our creative director’s girlfriend as well, but because she lives far away and we wanted the recording setup to be consistent, we decided against it. From there, we had those less affiliated with the characters read through a character document provided by our narrative designer to get a feel for which characters they resonated with the most, and did some practice reading of lines to decide who would be voicing who. Ideally this would have been done as a group, but it was done individually due to time and scheduling constraints.

Then I needed to write the lines that the voice actors would be saying. I decided on a mix of short phrases and wordless utterances, each within one of 8 categories: happy, angry, sad, fearful, surprised, thinking, greetings, and farewells. Other than the greetings and farewells, these categories are broad enough that they can be applied to different types of situations and still make sense and give the characters a vocal expression of their emotions at the time. In addition, there are several special categories for individual characters, such as when Director Crabb makes his announcements. These specific lines serve different purposes; for example, Crabb’s lines give him a sense of authority and let the player know how he feels about the news he is giving before he gives it.

While recording, I had to make sure every voice actor performed each line several times in multiple ways so that we had a few to choose from, for randomization purposes. Even if they are saying the same thing, it is nice for players to hear something different so that it feels more organic and less stiff. The editing process involved cutting these recording sessions into individual phrase clips so that I could implement them into a multi-instrument in FMOD. This tool allows me to have a random clip from a set of my chosen clips play when it is called. For example, if I set a call to the “happy” sound, it might play the character saying “wow!”, “aha!”, or “cool!”.

In this way, I made voice barks that give a suggestion of how the character is feeling, without using the resources of full voice acting.