Fully Voiced RPG

[JmyDown]

Planning my first game and I'm thinking of making it a fully voiced RPG.
Has this been done before and are there any technical limitation I should be aware of? Making it with VX Ace

 

[Dirge]

Things you'll need:
- Voice actors who either have good gear themselves, or good gear and local voice actors to record it yourself
- Someone to edit/treat the audio, or the skills and gear to do it yourself
- Cash to pay voice actors. Lots of it - if you want professional voice acting for a full game, you're looking at a LOT of money.

Your game's file size will be fairly large, what with all the audio files, but I don't see any technical reason why it wouldn't actually work...

 

[JmyDown]

Things you'll need:
- Voice actors who either have good gear themselves, or good gear and local voice actors to record it yourself
- Someone to edit/treat the audio, or the skills and gear to do it yourself
- Cash to pay voice actors. Lots of it - if you want professional voice acting for a full game, you're looking at a LOT of money.

Your game's file size will be fairly large, what with all the audio files, but I don't see any technical reason why it wouldn't actually work...

Thanks for your response,

I have equipment and technical know how to record and edit audio so that's no problem. I'll do most of the main cast myself, I've voice acted before but yes it can get pricey depending who does voices.

If anyone is interested I have free doughnuts at my place

 

[Diretooth]

The thing is, you're asking people on an online forum, I live in Oregon in the United States, I would not be able to enjoy tasty, tasty doughnuts whilst recording for a game.
Second, not everyone has great voices. The best I personally can do are my own and what I describe as a 'moist old lady', even with different voices, it's still recognizably me.
Third, if you're doing a fully voiced game, that's a lot of dialogue, especially for all of the NPCs and certain situations where the main characters are just talking amongst themselves. I've tried doing a voiced game where only the important dialogue is voiced (A la Star Ocean 3 or FFX) and it is not only difficult voicing every single bit of dialogue, but you have to contend with doing the same line over and over again until it sounds just right if you want good quality. Not many people you pick up off the internet will be able to give consistently good voices.
Fourth, and as mentioned above, you also have to contend with a larger file size. I played a game called 'Once Upon The End' that had full voice acting, at least, as full as you could get without it being too ridiculous, and it was a fairly hefty file size.
There's also the dilemma of getting cheap or free voice actors vs. more expensive and more experienced voice actors.

 

[Kes]

Coming at it from a completely different angle.

This is your first game. Voice acting adds hugely to the complexity.
First games are rarely that good, unless you are prepared to spend a very long time and restart it several times until you have the art and science of making a game reasonably well developed. It follows that to VA your first game might be a bad idea and a huge waste of your resources, including money. I strongly recommend that you make a much simpler game to start with, get to discover what the engine can do and how to do it and then think about making the game you currently have in mind.

However, as this is 'Games Mechanics Design' discussion cannot be about feedback only for a specific, individual game (Ideas and Prototypes is where that would go), so a couple of general points.

Games have a multi-national player base. To allow people who do not have English as their first (or maybe second or even third) language to play, written dialogue is also needed. Then you have the problem of people reading at vastly different speeds to the speed of the spoken word. Native English speakers will have finished before the voice acting and wait impatiently for the voice to catch up, or hit the action button and move on to the next bit, which cuts off the voice. Non-native English speakers will possibly be far behind. You also need written dialogue for those who are deaf or have only partial hearing, or who for various reasons do not play with the sound on, so it's not just a requirement for appealing to different nationalities.

Non-native English speakers could well struggle with the accents of the VA. Heck, I'm a native English speaker, and I struggle to understand some US or Australian accents (I'm a Brit), which again takes away from the whole point of having voice.

I have tried playing RM games with voice acting. To be honest, all of them were somewhere on the cringe-worthy scale, many of them at the top end. I have never finished such a game, just couldn't take it. As has already been noted, unless your VAs are top notch, it will come across as amateur, hammy, insert your insult of choice. RM games rarely sell enough to cover the cost of professional VAs, so you would need to have deep pockets and be prepared to make a loss.

 

[XIIIthHarbinger]

Personally I would NEVER recommend a fully voice acted game, as a first project. NEVER.

Fully voice acted games are a rarity even amongst Triple A game studios. & even Triple A game studios occasionally produce absolutely terrible voice acted games, for example the latest entry in the Mass Effect series.

Furthermore, while the question of voice acting in RPG Maker game pops up rather regularly on these & other RPG Maker forums. I can't think of a single title that is fully voiced that anyone made with RPG Maker, let alone one that has done it well. & for a community as active in the indie dev scene as this one is, that's saying something.

I would say that if you are truly determined to use voice acting in your project, start with nothing more than a prologue, epilogue, &/or a few cutscenes. If you get to the point that you have an actual completed game, & still want to have it fully voiced at that point; then go forward with voice acting & sound editing.

 

[Wavelength]

The only technical limitations are file size, and the eventing (or scripting) that will be required to ensure that players don't jumble a lot of voice clips together by advancing the dialogue too fast (I'd recommend stopping the voice clips if the dialogue is advanced before the clip ends; that will solve it without slowing your player down).

With that being said, I'll add my agreement to all of the above advice and recommended that you avoid designing your first game with voice acting in mind. Not only is it hard (and very important) to do well, but VA is rarely at the very core of a video game's experience, and it represents a pretty big "production" task that's harder for people to appreciate than an equal production in, say, graphic design. What this adds up to is that VA work is likely to send your game into development hell, where you just can't get it done and the scope seems too large to fight through.

Here's what I'd say: design your game assuming you won't have VA. Complete your game, ensuring that the game mechanics are fun, the story is compelling, and the technical fidelity is there. If you've managed to complete that great task (and you deserve a hearty congratulations if you do because most people never get there), you can take a step back and look at your game. If you think it's a really good effort that's worthy of polishing, this is the point where you can invest your time and/or money into stuff like Voice Acting and Hand-Painted Graphics.

 

[bgillisp]

I second @Wavelength here. I've done something similar by making the game with the bare basics first for the plot, then I've gone back and polished it up. Still not ready for release as I have many cutscenes that are nothing but text (especially in the last 3 Chapters), but it's getting there. But, I lived with placeholder graphics even for a few Chapters until I was sure that I was likely to finish this game.

So...I'd recommend doing the game. 95% of so of all projects on here get abandoned. I'd say make the game first. Use placeholder graphics even (RTP will work just fine for that). Once it is playable from start to finish, then worry about the rest.

 

[onipunk]

I wouldn't ever recommend doing a voice-acted game for your first project, if you're new to the engine and to making games then you should absolutely focus on learning the engine and just getting a game out there.

And you really need to ask yourself if the voice acting will actually add anything to your project. It always feels...off to me when I see a retro-styled game with full voice acting. I personally read much faster than anyone could reasonably speak the lines clearly, and it can honestly be extremely irritating in a text-heavy game like an RPG when I'm constantly cutting off the characters partway through their spiel and I'm just getting fragmented soundbites taking me out of the experience. In my opinion it's not worth the risk. The benefits aren't high enough to offset the disaster you could have on your hands if the voice acting is bad. Bad voice acting can sink the reputation of an otherwise competent game and drive a lot of potential players away. It's just a lot of hassle for relatively little reward. At most I would say maybe have a little soundbite to play for each character so we know which one is talking, similar to how the Zelda series does it, but anything more than that just overcomplicates things massively without really being worth it.