Welcome everybody! It's time for a new dev blog (sorry for the week’s delay but we wanted to adjust some last things to deliver you better quality) and as promised, we want to tell you about sounds (voices) of soldiers in GoH and show you some examples of our work. This dev blog will be (beside some recordings) more text like, so please feel free to comment and rate our work below this blog (or vote a thumbs up/down) so we can evaluate your reactions and improve! Let's start!
Why are we doing new voices?
Since our BWS dev team has members from all over the world, we noticed that voices of soldiers or humans in most games often were very childish or stereotyped, which here and there brought a “-_-” to our faces, especially if you are a native speaker of whatever language, taking the historical background and realism into account.
Hence, to change this for our game and to bring realism to a higher level within our capacities, we decided to make completely new recordings of the voices for the German and Russian soldiers. Our target is to innovate and refresh all voices to a point where we create a new atmosphere and intense immersion on the battlefield!
What are the requirements?
To realize good productions, we required good professional equipment and people which are motivated and skilled in doing this job - both of this aspects are very hard to find if you have no budget to pay a third party provider. Even Triple A games often have some problems with this. Fortunately, one of our staff members has an excellent network which helped us to have a large German voice acting team with excellent voice characteristics, acting skills and motivation to do this job.
How did we do this!?
As a first step, our voice team had to prepare the voice room (which is a little music rehearsal room) to make sure our recordings are not disturbed by feedback, which often is the case when edges or flat areas or objects are near the speaker (they also used a lot of improvised and self made material to make sure that this can be guaranteed). As a next step, the team built up all of the equipment required (microphone, monitors etc.) to do some tests afterwards and to make sure about that everything is adjusted and running fine for final recording. Before the first voices were recorded, our actors practices the specific sentences while trying different emotions within this process to make sure that our demands were met.
About our GoH German voice acting team:
Our German voice team is about 16 passionate actors (among them a leader of a theater group, students of a film academy, a sound technician, musicians, a soldier and assistants) who work together. Their average age is ca. 28 years and an interesting fact is that most of them are gamers, so they know about good and bad (German) voice examples from different games and they were able to anticipate what must be done differently to make it better than anything that came before this. Before they started the whole project, they fulfilled some planning processes which included researching work to create texts and sentences that possibly could be heard in battles. They focused on the way of speaking in general, WWII era German words used, discussing all this and a lot more. A very abstract example of this work was looking at old WWII videos, but also at modern war situations, which we analysed to find out how soldiers would talk or scream when being in combat. As one of many examples, we were looking at this: Michael Wittmann interview (used to find out how he speaks and what words he used when doing that):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFtFfHGmgJA
Since one of our team members was in the German army, we also consulted him when creating visions, concepts and plans for the voices.
While our voice actors were acting, they sometimes were looking at WWII/war media to soak up the impressions and the atmosphere to be able to perform in the most realistic or plausible way possible. When doing this, the most important aspect always was and is about being authentic, in which we think we succeeded - BUT, enough said now, let's hear into some samples!
https://youtu.be/wr9BWx_J-mo
(If you don't speak German/Russian and you would like us to translate one part of the lines, post the time in the comment section and we will help you out!)
Have you ever tried voice acting? It’s really not as simple as it may seems and it takes a lot of hours (preparing, choosing good files, snipping and editing). As you´ve heard, we currently do have more actors for the German part but this will change in the future so more Russian voices will come!
What you could hear too is that the voices of our actors differ from each other (characteristics), which is very important to serve different roles ingame (young soldiers around 18 aged and older veterans etc.). Here we got some of them again speaking the same sentence to compare their voices. The following spoken line means, translated “Deckung! = Cover!”
When recording, we also make more than one version out of one line to chose the bests out of them in the very end and to have some variations ingame.
We are extremely proud of our voice team performances and hope you like their work too! If you have any suggestions to add, feel free to post your idea right here in the comments!
Did you know?
- A “good” microphone to make acceptable ingame voice recordings costs around 150 Euro (no other equipment included - if you want to seriously work with it you also need a well prepared room, some more supportive equipment and tools and software to achieve usable, final sound files).
- It took us more than 2 years to find suitable, motivated persons for the German voice part (we had so much luck to have this great team now!)
- For most sounds to be positioned and heard correctly in a 3D space, they must be in a mono format. The game will originate the sound and send the stereo result to your ears. This allows you to triangulate the position of the enemy.
- We are still looking for Russian native speakers to apply as voice actors to be heard in GoH. Tell us here or on facebook/vkontakte if you would you like to be one of them:
http://www.barbed-wire.eu/join.html
https://www.facebook.com/gatesofhellgame/
https://vk.com/gates_of_hell_game
Last but not least (mostly for German natives), we want to share some outtakes with you!
And that's it for today! We hope you enjoyed this dev blog and we are curious about your feedback. See you in the comments!