Voices

As I had started writing about sound in games for my other blog and we had the tutorials on sound, I decided to think more about the sounds I wanted for my own game.

I wanted to create a sound for the suits power-up and a sound for the change itself. Obviously the change would take more or less time in the game depending on when/where it was taking place but I wanted a sound that I could use for all changes that would just be stretched or shortened as needed.

For the power-up sound, obviously it had to be something electronic, something not too loud that would build into the change sound. I began looking online, especially http://www.freesound.org/ which featured some excellent power-up sounds that I would just need to alter slightly in pitch and in length to get the sound I wanted. I found the following sounds...

Sound sample 1
and

Sound sample 2

Which I think worked best.

I then began work on the transformation sound itself, which was a little more tricky as although it had to be an organic sound of muscles rending and bones shifting, I wanted it to have a electronic sound to it was well to give the feel that the change is powered by the nanobots. On Freesound I did a lot of searching and came up with the following sounds which I intended to mix...

Sound sample 3

and...

Sound sample 4

I wanted the sound to be distinctive but not a cacophony of sound it needed to flow.

While working on the sounds, I began toying with the idea of using an actual voice, as the changes are voice activated. As the game is set in the US I needed an American to do the voice so I reached out to a few of my American friends who were willing to do it for me but the friends I knew had accents that were too distinctive such as Texan or Southern. I needed a more American accent so I began to search online for people who could do the voice for me, eventually I came across these two sites...

http://librivox.org/

and

http://www.voiceactingclub.com/

Which were full of people who wanted to get into the voice acting or audio book industry whom were happy to read the lines for me. Before long I had a slew of people who wanted to 'audition' for me and a couple of them were perfect. I chose the person I wanted and got him to read the voice commands and a few extra lines as I had an idea for a short game intro.

Along with the voice for the main character, I used the voice actor again for the Wii version of my game and just got him to up his pitch for the younger version of the protagonist. For the most part this worked quite well and I got recordings for all of the voice parts I needed.