So, how do you guys tackle the issue of voice acting (if required) as an ‘indie’ developer?
I’m contemplating the idea of making a story-driven indie game, however, with widespread, talented voice actors dominating AAA games it seems almost ludicrous to try and make a story based game without voice acting.
Thoughts?
If you ain’t got the money to pay professionals you can do them yourself with friends. What you need is a good microphone and a quiet room. Professional studio visits for recording also cost money. But you can still do some good records by yourself. Don’t let yourself down by comparing with AAA studios.
From my experience… many enjoyable games only work because a lot of work has gone into the assets. When you’ve done all these professions once by yourself you realize how much work every single one of it is. Sound and voice is very important for the atmosphere of a game. Therefore it takes a lot of attempts to get it right. Even amateur voice acting… I thought it could be done in an afternoon, well… no. And after it was done, much of it had to be re-edited, cut, mashed, whatever.
It’s probably one of these things some indie developers (especially one-man-armies) will sooner or later realize that this won’t work out well, without costing too much lifetime.
So far, I don’t. The rule of thumb I’ve heard pretty often as far as voice acting is concerned is, ‘if you can’t do it well, don’t do it at all; no voice acting trumps bad voice acting any day.’
Check this forum out: http://www.audiodramatalk.com/
Full of people who create audio plays and will work for credits. Some of them are troupes who routinely work together and have access to professional recording equipment. I used them for almost all the animations in my signature. The guy who runs it, Jack, is awesome and loves doing this stuff and would probably love to work on a video game. He’s the one who did the Blue Defender and The Lighter in my animations. I just added the animations (with his permission of course). We started working on some stuff, but I sort of stopped doing animations when I started doing games. Only have so much time!
I do a mean Gollum saying “…nasty potatoes”
Alas I have a limited repertoire…
The team that made system shock did all there Voice acting.
check here also, 5usd:
Nice one guys!
Gonna single out Asvarduil here though with what I reckon is the best piece of advice:
For a one man team, it strikes me that the I’d probably be better off toiling to make a great text/cutscene based story that I know I could do well rather than half-ass it with some cheap voice acting.
Look thomas was alone, or stanley parable. All you need is one guy with a golden voice and make sure hes british
You can use audacity to vocode a tone or some noise into some bad voice acting. Then it sounds awesome 
This was one of the services that I was planning on using…
I was going to have relatively limited voice over work though compared to what you might have in a story driven game.
If you have a $5 bill lying around…
fiverr.com
QFT
I’ve worked almost 25 years in the professional audio business. I did a lot of different things from music recording, mixing over dubbing to sound design of movies and TV series.
When you need voice acting you should hire an actor. When you need an overdub speaker you should hire a professional narrator. It makes all the difference between works and works not.
…and:
a good microphone can’t save a bad room
a good recording sounds good without any correction
a bad recording won’t sound good because of correction
FX is not a fix.
Last but not least there is a reason why there are books about miking and why they are full of math. Unless you know things like the reverberation formula of Sabine you should ask someone who knows what he is doing.
Bad voice acting!
If you’re basing your requirements on what AAA games are doing, then by the same reasoning you shouldn’t start a game without a AAA budget. So just do what makes sense for yourself.
To the Moon? The Banner Saga? Child of Light? There are quite a few widely acclaimed story-oriented titles that are selling brilliantly at the moment. You need to choose for yourself what your game calls for, not try to adhere to an arbitrary standard.
I’m with Asvarduil. Don’t even try.
Plenty of amazing RPGs did great without it. Final Fantasy 1-9, Vagrant Story, Legend of Dragoon, etc…
You won’t be able to afford a team of pro voice actors, and without that much it’ll just be horrible.
Even in modern AAA games, a fair number of them only use voice acting in key place because it’s just so expensive.