Hey guys, this is my first post with gamedev. I run a home studio, with less than adequate hardware to do voice recording. What that in mind, if I needed to provide just a bare minimum (<100 words) voice acting to a project...what are your suggestions? It's obviously an indy gig that I would probably end up losing money on if I hired a professional to send me the audio via their own recordings with proper licenses and such....should I just take it back to the dev and tell them, hey, you're going to have to get me that audio? Is that typical? Thanks for any responses!

A lot of that would depend on what you told them when they hired/contracted you. I'm guessing you're on board to do the music and sound? Did you tell them you could do the voice recording/acting as well when they brought you on? Or did they not bring that up until now? In either case you're options are going to be to sub-contract the VO out or to tell them you're not set up to do the job.

Also what is your setup? If you have a studio I assume you have some kind of recording room already. All you need beyond that is a halfway decent large diaphragm condenser mic and a pop filter. If you don't have a treated room, I would recommend something with extreme rejection like an Electro-Voice RE20. It has kind of a radio sound, but you can use it in a really noisy room and it won't pick up anything that isn't right in front of it (they're also really cheap as far as microphones go).

Hey CCH, thanks so much for the response! We have not discussed any voice acting at this point but I know it is going to come up. They are a startup, but full-time Indy developer that is tight on budget, so I wanted to prepare a little for that conversation. Typically, hwo many music sound guys also handle the voice acting?

I would love to be able to say I can do it all...but I do not have a recording room at the house...I usually barricade q closet or what not, so I couldn't ask someone to come work in that.

Anyway, thanks so much for the mic recommendation, I'll take a look at it to see if it makes sense for me.

If they asked me to contract the work out, where would you go for that? Just your local chapter? I've spoken with them before but never used them.

I run a network called Gamevoices. A casting call is free. Over 10,000 actors available. 2000 on site at www.Gamevoices.co.uk.

You contract directly with the actors.

regards

-

John

john@gamevoices.com

Typically, hwo many music sound guys also handle the voice acting?

I'd say it's fairly common for Indie games. After you work on enough VO you'll have a good sense of what something should sound like. You won't be able to size up a script and read it right in a couple minutes like a trained actor. But given basically limitless studio time plus some editing magic you'll be able to get what the client is looking for.