Dooma talks about voice actors!

It’s Dooma.

I wrote a post a while ago about how I got involved with JOIN US, and some of my experiences as the game’s narrative director. 

Today I’m going to discuss the most important technology we use for creating our game’s core narrative elements.  Part of our success as a 12-person independent developer stems from choosing the right technology for the right job.  And when it comes to writing and voicing the game’s dialogue, there’s no technology like “H.I.”.

At first glance “H.I.” looks kind of like “A.I.” but instead of forming an upside-down “V”, the two vertical lines on the first letter are parallel to each other, like the goal posts in a football end zone.  “H.I.” is short for “Human Intelligence” - which is a roundabout way of saying every line of dialogue in JOIN US was written and voice-acted by actual human beings instead of robots.

Annoying the locals. But now they can talk back.

Q:  Doesn’t this take longer and cost way more than just having AI write the script and perform the voices? A:  Yes.

Q:  Isn’t relying on this technology going to put robots out of work? A:  Possibly.

Q:  Won’t this just reduce our reliance on data centers, and not, in any, way contribute to increasing electricity prices, or using all our water to cool micro-processors? A:  Yes, but it’s hard to put a price on quality.

We can't play her dialogue on a blog, but it's very closed-minded.

Collectively Louie Gibson, Joe Dietsch (JOIN US’s creative director), and I, wrote all dialogue and on-screen text in JOIN US.  With limited resources, we could only record in: Canadian French and English (JOIN US will be subtitled in many other languages).  Yanik Comeau, a (human) translator oversaw our Québécois translation.

We were fortunate to be able to record the English version at 424 Post in Hollywood – and the French version at Ubisoft’s Alice Studio just a few blocks from our office. I directed the 2-week long English recording session, and co-directed the 3-week Québécois session with Olivier Chagnon and a lot of help from Ubisoft’s incredible audio team. Our COO Michael Abbott was there for the entire ride.        

We had to really dig in on the auditions. We got hundreds of reads, and held callbacks with dozens of actors before settling on the final cast listed below:

ENGLISH CAST

FRENCH CANADIAN CAST

Fights are better with proper yelling.

Recording was fun. 

All in all, JOIN US contains over 12,000 voice lines. 

Some of the lines are pretty ridiculous, and it was hard for actors to keep a straight face. But whether the line was long or short, in the main campaign or in a side mission, we always took the time to get it right.  Sometimes this meant 10+ takes, or making a “Franken-line” where we stitched part of one take together with part of another. 

We hope you enjoy playing this game as much as we enjoyed writing it – and as much as the actors enjoyed bringing it to life. 

This has nothing to do with voice acting. It's just a cool guy. Ignore it. Keep reading.

I’ll leave you with a little monologue the actors seemed to find funny, and some images from our recording sessions:

“It's funny that people buy puzzles, isn't it? So there's a picture, and you look at the box and you know what it is, and then you buy it and take it home, and when you open the box there are just a bunch of tiny pieces. And you have to connect all the pieces and when you do, it just makes the picture that you already saw on the box? But because of all the puzzle lines, it doesn't look as good as the picture on the box. Also, a puzzle can be twenty-five bucks. Just make your own puzzle. Take any picture you like and a knife and just cut it to pieces. Or use a paper shredder. My uncle had a paper shredder and we used to put all kinds of stuff in there. I didn't realize I had been making puzzles all along. Could have been selling them for twenty-five a pop. Could have been cashing in on that instead of talking to your ass. But what are you gonna do. Can't go back in time.”