The plan from the start for Reina & Jericho was to have the game fully voiced. Somewhere along the way we gave up on that as a cost-saving measure, but we had the opportunity to work with some voice actors from Funimation to handle the various vocalizations. When a character gets hit and lets out a grunt of pain, well, someone needs to make the grunting sound. We had a great group of professional voice actors to work with to record those sounds, so we did. And in theory that was going to be the end of it for the time being.
Then we needed to make a trailer for PAX. Which we did. And it worked well enough without any voice over, but it worked better with Reina’s voice actor recording a few lines, so we had a quick recording session and that was it. I told the voice actors that we would investigate recording voiceover for a future release of the game, but we didn’t have the time or the money to put it in the initial release of the game. I had taken some of the recorded lines and plopped them in the game and it was neat but it they also stuck out in a weird way, so I didn’t feel too bad about removing voice acting for the time being.
Eventually three discoveries would occur that led to the reversal of that decision and going back to the original plan.
First, a game only releases for the first time once. Yes, sometimes there are special launch events for major updates, and if a game has a poor launch a “second launch” may be attempted from a marketing point of view, but for each person that plays a game we can only make a first impression one time. It’s important to hold nothing back in that moment.
Second, after we released the demo of Reina & Jericho for Steam Next Fest and later an updated version of it for PAX, players started streaming themselves playing the game. When the cutscenes came along, the streamers just did their own voice acting. That was a pretty good sign that it should have been in there from the start. The game was getting voice acting in it one way or the other, so we might as well go with the professional voice actors recording in proper audio booths, with direction, with knowledge of their character’s motivations and backstories.
Lastly, as I mentioned already, the voiced lines I put in the game seemed a little out of place, but I hadn’t considered the obvious reason why. If a cutscene is 90% unvoiced and then, out of nowhere, a few random lines that happened to get recorded for a trailer are spoken, of course they don’t fit in. Lines in isolation don’t work, they are part of conversations between characters and when there isn’t the back and forth of proper dialogue it just doesn’t work. Once we started the process of recording the lines for the game and I began placing them into cutscenes they were completely transformed by the recorded dialogue.
All of this is to get to the final point of this update: for the last two weeks or so we’ve been wrapping up the final cutscenes in the game (with dialogue) and are now starting to go back through previous cutscenes and add the voiceover work. The results have been spectacular. We have a great story and we have an incredible cast of voice actors bringing it life.
We have something special here.