Advice with video game development

[al55]

Hey everyone,

I am currently working on a erotic video game and am in the early stages of development. It is just made by me so will probably be shit.

My question for everyone is how can I get dialogue for the game? I've seen the price for voice actors and it will run into the thousands for my indie game that no one will probably buy.

I am passionate about it, though. Does anyone have any ideas for where I can find voice actors that are:

1) affordable or
2) other methods like AI???

Thanks for any help!

Regards,
Al

 

[RejectReality]

Unless you have a group of friends who will do the voices for booze, shits, and giggles, forget voice acting on an indie game. Putting something out with AI voices in the current environment is a surefire way to get the LW treatment.

You're also a very long way away from considerations of that nature. Work on the bones of the project before you start fretting over set dressing.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Probably the easiest way would be to just use AI voice. Getting actual people to do the voice acting in an erotic game, for free or for a minor fee, probably isn't realistic.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

Sweetie, you're on the early stages of development, and you're just a single person. Even if your game is too small, it's too early in development to be concerned about voice acting. Focus on the gameplay first, then build your story around it.

Truth of the matter is you don't need voice acting in your game at all. The Monkey Island games never had it until The Curse of Monkey Island. It took 10 games into the main Final Fantasy series to get voice acting in it. Banjo & Kazooie's voice lines are gibberish made with like three or four syllables looped, pitched, and bitcrushed to oblivion. Speaking of Oblivion, voice acting in Elder Scrolls was introduced in Redguard. DDLC has no voice acting whatsoever. The Metroid games also never had any voice acting until Metroid Prime, and it wasn't even dialogue, but Samus' grunts whenever she gets hit. Actual voiced dialogue didn't arrive until Metroid Other-M.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with using text only. Some VNs other than DDLC, like the PC-98 VNs (True Love, for example) have no voice acting. In fact, if you listen closely to the dialogue in Metroid: Fusion, you'll hear the "typewriter" sound is different for each character (Samus' is more high pitched, Adam's sounds more like Pac-Man on lower pitch). VA-11 Hall-A is a VN that also uses the "typewriter" sound for dialogue, and the sound is, for the most part, gendered. Then you have Undertale, which gave each character its own unique "typewriter" sound as a way to give them voice.

Why don't you go that route first, and only when you have an actual prototype decide whether you need voiced lines or not? I mean, both Fear & Hunger games pretty much lack any voice acting. The little voice acting they have is Miro himself voicing weird sounds and whistles for a single-digit number of enemies in both games. Termina does have a typerwriter sound for the text boxes though.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

Probably the easiest way would be to just use AI voice. Getting actual people to do the voice acting in an erotic game, for free or for a minor fee, probably isn't realistic.

That seems to be changing. For someone whose career began on PornHub, MollyRedWolf has performed as a VA on hentais. I don't know which ones are, but I do remember seeing her posting about it on Xitter, with mocap.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Your most cost effective solution would likely be something like Amazon Polly.

It has a large selection of virtual voices that you could generate audio clips from and then use the free app, Audacity, to edit/modify those as needed.

There are other free TTS apps on the Internet, but their quality is questionable. Amazon Polly is more life-like than these but does have a small cost associated with it.

 

[JayHawnee]

In the world of adult video games voice acting is currently very rare and often not even really appreciated, as many people play their adult games rather without sounds. So it won't harm if you leave it out. But you may rather check out a forum, that focuses on adult video games like f95 instead of the literotica author hangout to get such a question answered.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

The advantage of using text only is that translation is really easy, FWIW.