We've been at Steam Dev Days this week, learning more about all sorts of features we're exploring trying out in the game. It's been an intense few days of talks and meeting folks, and it leaves us even more excited about shipping on Steam.
Being here made me want to post something to our page,and in particular I wanted to share all the very cool panel we did back at PAX West called “The Dark Art of Video Game Voice Acting Revealed!” with a lineup of veteran voice actors, including our own Ellen McLain and John Patrick Lowrie. Joining us were Darren Korb and Logan Cunningham from Supergiant Games (makers of Bastion, Transistor, and now Pyre) as well as veteran actor Elias Toufexis (best know for playing Adam Jensen in the recent Deus Ex games).
After talking about our past projects and how actors create signature characters, we got into current projects, which naturally led to a discussion about The Church in the Darkness. A few weeks before PAX John suggested singing a song from the game as part of the panel - John’s been writing multiple songs for us, and I’ve given him free rein with them. He gets the time period, he gets the characters of Isaac and Rebecca Walker, and best of all he can write a great piece of music. He played a song called “Lost Along the Way,” a 70s-folk inspired duet between he and Ellen. The live performance surpassed all my hopes and dreams, and from the applause we know the audience liked it too.
Enterprising podcaster Dave Kramer from busygamernation.com was in the audience and was kind enough to record our session and post it at the link below. The audio’s not great in the recording, but is better than you might expect for a guy using a microphone sitting in the audience. If you want to hear the song it starts around the 23 minute mark:
http://www.busygamernation.com/podcast/bgn/TheDarkArtofVoiceActingPanel-PAXWest2016.mp3
John & Ellen will be doing more songs for the game, and how we’ll use each of them is still something we’re working out. And of course the songs will change depending on the different permutations of our narrative. We're planning on having a sound track including all their music, but we're also figuring out ways to make the soundtrack not have spoilers so players first find the songs in-game. We'll keep you posted for more information on that.
Let us know what you think about the song or what you want to hear us talk about in our next panel!
- Richard