Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This week’s diary I’m taking charge and going to write about Voice Over’s for the (unannounced) Story Pack coming alongside the 1.8 ‘Čapek’ update! We still can’t tell you any further details about the name or release date of the Story Pack, but stay tuned for future dev diaries!
For the upcoming Story Pack we felt that we wanted to experiment with VIR, our friendly advisor, see how it would feel to have different set of VO cues depending on your Empire’s ethic. A VO Cue is a term that we use to describe a Voice Over line that triggers at a certain point in the game as for example “Hostile Fleet Detected” or “Research Complete”.
We started with a test case in-house to try it out and we concluded that it was a great experience! From then on we moved on with the process and allocated time to write unique script for each role, character description, casting, auditions and finally recording sessions. It has been personally a long and hard process but in the end I’m really pleased to finally show of 3 samples out of 10 Voice Packs!
There will be a automatic settings for the VO Packs in the game so that the VO will switch depending on what Ethic you start with in the game and also switches while you're playing if you decided with switch Ethic's in your campaign. If you're not into that you will be able to select with set of VO Cues you want to play and you will always be able to switch back to the original VO if you desire.
Now that you have heard some of the results you might ask yourself how the whole procedure works with recording VO? So I’ll describe to a certain detail how the whole process goes by.
First of you need to write a script and if you have talented Content Designers. and we do have in our team, there is no problem to get good a script. Once the script is complete and approved it gets handed to me and I take it to the next step: Casting!
Casting of it’s own is also a long process which takes time. With help of a Casting Director you can get in touch with several possible Voice Actors that can help you to deliver the best result out of each script. When you have picked out potential actors that you think will suit for the role, you bring them in for a audition. In an audition you let the actor read a certain part of the script which usually depict the character the most and also give the best material for the Voice Actor so that they can perform as good as possible. After all the auditions are done you pick the actor that suited the best for the role. Sometimes during auditions actors comes for a certain role to read but during the session you realize that the actor would be more fitted for another role and that happened to our Militarist! We brought her in to do a audition for another role first but while she was reading the part for the first role I heard that she might be better suited as a angry general, so I asked her to try out for the Militarist and it was a really good fit! So good that we ended up with her as the Militarist.
With all the casting/auditions done you move on to the actual recording session, get as much possible material from your actors. It is important that you’re there to act as a “director” for the actors so that you can give the instructions and guidelines so that they can give you all the right emotions and takes that you require for your character in the game.
As soon as the recordings were done I moved on to editing. There is a lot of editing when it comes to VO since it is not only about how the recording equipment sound but also the sheer amount of assets you need to go through..
While editing you usually “zoom in” really close in the waveforms of the recordings to mess around/cutting noise such as clicks and pops. So yes, we Sound Designers tend to get really nerdy when it comes to VO editing:
After you have done all the editing which is removing “clicks” and “pops”, ugly breath takes, add fade in/out, you move into adding “effects” to the VO so we can get that cool Robotic style. For each VO I gave them something else than just using the same settings as for “Default VIR”.
So in short terms that is how you record VO!
That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about robots and robotic modification.
For the upcoming Story Pack we felt that we wanted to experiment with VIR, our friendly advisor, see how it would feel to have different set of VO cues depending on your Empire’s ethic. A VO Cue is a term that we use to describe a Voice Over line that triggers at a certain point in the game as for example “Hostile Fleet Detected” or “Research Complete”.
We started with a test case in-house to try it out and we concluded that it was a great experience! From then on we moved on with the process and allocated time to write unique script for each role, character description, casting, auditions and finally recording sessions. It has been personally a long and hard process but in the end I’m really pleased to finally show of 3 samples out of 10 Voice Packs!
There will be a automatic settings for the VO Packs in the game so that the VO will switch depending on what Ethic you start with in the game and also switches while you're playing if you decided with switch Ethic's in your campaign. If you're not into that you will be able to select with set of VO Cues you want to play and you will always be able to switch back to the original VO if you desire.
Now that you have heard some of the results you might ask yourself how the whole procedure works with recording VO? So I’ll describe to a certain detail how the whole process goes by.
First of you need to write a script and if you have talented Content Designers. and we do have in our team, there is no problem to get good a script. Once the script is complete and approved it gets handed to me and I take it to the next step: Casting!
Casting of it’s own is also a long process which takes time. With help of a Casting Director you can get in touch with several possible Voice Actors that can help you to deliver the best result out of each script. When you have picked out potential actors that you think will suit for the role, you bring them in for a audition. In an audition you let the actor read a certain part of the script which usually depict the character the most and also give the best material for the Voice Actor so that they can perform as good as possible. After all the auditions are done you pick the actor that suited the best for the role. Sometimes during auditions actors comes for a certain role to read but during the session you realize that the actor would be more fitted for another role and that happened to our Militarist! We brought her in to do a audition for another role first but while she was reading the part for the first role I heard that she might be better suited as a angry general, so I asked her to try out for the Militarist and it was a really good fit! So good that we ended up with her as the Militarist.
With all the casting/auditions done you move on to the actual recording session, get as much possible material from your actors. It is important that you’re there to act as a “director” for the actors so that you can give the instructions and guidelines so that they can give you all the right emotions and takes that you require for your character in the game.
As soon as the recordings were done I moved on to editing. There is a lot of editing when it comes to VO since it is not only about how the recording equipment sound but also the sheer amount of assets you need to go through..
While editing you usually “zoom in” really close in the waveforms of the recordings to mess around/cutting noise such as clicks and pops. So yes, we Sound Designers tend to get really nerdy when it comes to VO editing:
After you have done all the editing which is removing “clicks” and “pops”, ugly breath takes, add fade in/out, you move into adding “effects” to the VO so we can get that cool Robotic style. For each VO I gave them something else than just using the same settings as for “Default VIR”.
So in short terms that is how you record VO!
That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about robots and robotic modification.
