On a serious note, how would you go about voice animations, and will they be included in game at somepoint?
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Maybe that could be a community driven task.
Perhaps a contest where users can submit demo recordings in a specified format of a selection of lines performed as a character in the game, following some creative guidance from the developers, for instance: "this character should have a husky sultry voice" etc. and sign a release form giving the developers use rights. Then developers could choose "winners" to provide complete and ongoing voice performances for said character and a full license to the game.
Sorry, but there'd still be a few pretty major issues.
- I'm wholly reluctant to request that players provide unpaid voice-acting for the game. It just doesn't sit well with me at all, even if people are ok with it.
- The prospect of losing touch with a voice-actor and having to completely re-cast a character or find a replacement.
- The team consists of two people at the moment (1 writer, 1 artist) and the prospect of liaising with another 10 people, at a minimum, is a truly terrifying prospect. It's just a lot of time to talk to people, even if it all goes swimmingly 100% of the time.
- There are tens of thousands of words of dialogue, and RenPy doesn't have an easy way to implement associated voices. It'd be a logistical nightmare and honestly really unfun to work on.
I'd honestly be far more comfortable pursuing something like "Animalese" from Animal Crossing, where spoken text is dynamically fed to a module that produces a sound. That being said, I haven't tested that method either, so I can't confirm that it'll be a thing either.