In addition to composing the music for an upcoming AR game being developed by RTI (discussed in this post), I also designed the character voices and performed some of the voice-overs for the game. This article will describe the design thinking process I went through while designing the voices and voice over.
Empathize:
The main story in the game is told through a series of digital comic books, but to make the game more accessible to players that may be non-reading we decided to add voice-overs as well. With accessibility and a young audience in mind, I went into designing the voices to be fun and cartoon-ey, but not at the sacrifice of intelligibility.
Define:
As stated in the empathize section, the problem addressed by voicing the characters in the game is that players that aren’t able to read the comic books wouldn’t be able to experience the game. Above that, good voices can enhance the play experience for all players.
Ideate:
The beginning of the voice creation process began by meeting with the team and looking at character art and discussing what voices we could imagine each character having. From that discussion, I created some demos of basic character voices and sent a recording to the team.
When those voices got basic approval, I created a voice-over demo of the script of the first comic book and got feedback from the group. The feedback here was focused on how to keep the performance from veering into being too serious for kids and the team discussed other works that deal with darker subject matter, but without the melodrama that may be over the top.
Prototype:
Prototyping was done in Propellerhead Reason. Many vocal effects rely heavily on formant and pitch processing, although some of the more intense effects use distortion, compression, and auto-tuning. I did the voice acting for the prototypes, but other team members will contribute performances for the final product.
Test:
The voice design and voice acting will be tested when user testing for the complete game begins. I’m curious to see which voices are the most liked and which contribute the most to the story of the game.