DEVLOG XXXI - CASTING & RECORDING VOApologies, this will be a boring devlog but Voice Over has been my life the last two months and it will continue to be for at least one more. It's all been a bit of a blur. The amount of time it has taken to run open casting, the amount of hours spent sorting, organizing, choosing, and responding to emails. Then recording the live sessions, organizing recordings, audio cleanup, and implementation is immense. I completely underestimated the level-of-effort needed to do this for the Demo. It's a testament to how much MORE work recording the remainder of the game will be when the demo alone is such a huge time-sink.
"Are you saying you wouldn't do VO again?"No, its been a great learning experience and I've been overwhelmed with the positive feedback and quality we're getting, but I definitely didn't know it would be this huge to coordinate. I say all this for other devs to be aware who may be considering it for their own projects. Granted, Moonbriar has a large cast and is dialogue heavy, so you're mileage may vary but it's worth noting it will take more time than you think it will.
The Open Casting DataWe did an open-casting call for 14 roles. During the two-week session of open casting, we received over
1,600+ auditions from
370 Voice Actors. This was an average of almost
115 auditions per role to listen, rank, and decide on. And just to give you a hint of the time needed to process the auditions, to just listen to all the auditions ONE time (and you'd need to listen to them more than that) would take you
25 hours. For context, you could read Moby Dick cover-to-cover at least 2 or 3 times in that same span.
In the end, after much deliberation, we cast all 14 roles and are lucky that many of them have years of experience in gamedev voice acting which has been a big boon for the recording process to go smoothly and professionally. The list of credits the cast has been involve with is gigantic: Dark Souls 2, Warhammer 40k, Diablo: Immortal, Total War - Warhammer 3, Life is Strange, Warframe, Return of the Obra Dinn, World of Tanks, PayDay 2, and many, many more. At some point soon I will likely do a casting announcement on Twitter.
Recording SessionsCurrently, we've scheduled out about 16 hours of recording for the demo (the demo wont have 16 hours of voice of course, just the hours needed to record enough takes for all the characters). And we're about half-way through all those sessions, with the remainder slated through the end of May. So the hope is to have about 90% of all the voice recording we need completed by June. I will end up spending pretty much all of June working through the cleanup and implementation process for all of the final takes into the demo. That is going to be many hours of work.
The only voice over not recording in May, is for the main protagonist, Fern, who is slated to be played by
Savannah Steyn (most notable for her role in the new
House of the Dragon TV show on HBO). Savannah is slated to begin recording early in June, after she returns from filming elsewhere. Doing the voice over for the main character in a Visual Novel is a very large undertaking, since the main character is a part of 90% of all the conversations that happen in the game. So, I'm expecting multiple hours of recording sessions just for the demo + many additional hours later when we return for the remainder of the game.
Long-term: We'll need to cast around 8-10 other characters for the remainder of the game + recording will be 3+ times as large so that is going to be a huge effort that I cannot even fully begin to fathom. My guess is we'll end up spending somewhere around 25 hours to record the demo, which means the full game may be something in the range of
90-100+ hours of live recording sessions, which is a little mind-numbing if I'm honest.
Savannah Steyn as Fern
Public Demo & Festival PlansSo, at this point, you may be wondering what the plan is for the demo? I'm working towards trying to have a fully voice-acted public demo ready for August. Moonbriar will be participating in its first Steam festival in August (more details to come) and I am hoping to have a public demo ready by then for the first act of the game.
Essentially, that means I have approximately 60 days to get all the voice acting pulled together and implemented, plus testing the hell out of (and fixing) issues I find in the demo. A public demo is always nerve-wracking, especially since this game has only ever really been played by a limited audience so I'd be lying if I said I wasn't scared to death of the prospect, but I realize these sorts of things are a large part of trying to drive Wishlists and traffic on your Steam page. So that's the plan. Hoping it doesn't backfire!
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This looks awesome! Forwarded the casting call to my actor friends. I wanted to audition myself, but alas I cannae spaek en an English accent. I agree making trailers for visual novels is the worst!
Thanks so much nathy after dark! Appreciate you forwarding the casting and the kind words about the teaser! I also cannot fake an English accent haha. Ended up that about 90% of the cast is British, but there are a couple Americans who did a good enough job faking it to pull through.
So great, congratulations! Wishlisted!
Thanks for the WL Alain!
Congratulations! This is a big step
Haha, thank you Ramos. It was definitely good to finally get that off the plate. The page, teaser, capsules etc. all eventually need to get replaced but they will do the trick for now so I at least have something live.