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It’s a funny coincidence you should say that because I did recently have an experience with AI voicing in the project I ended up randomly making for Winter VN Jam (despite telling myself no more jams for 2023 after Spooktober x3 - but it was a self-soothing project that I used as a way to work through my feelings after I got my ASD diagnosis, so I kinda made an exception, haha) and I had some pretty mixed feelings on using it!

I won’t ramble about it here cos I did make a pretty lengthy post on it already so I’d just be repeating myself >.< But basically, I also wanted to include narration in the project + since it wasn’t a planned project and I was so short on time, I had a bit of an emergency with some of the VA.

The project features 2 proper human voice actors that I cast, and then everything else was a mixture of me + AI because I recorded all the remaining lines myself, then used AI speech-to-speech to dub over myself with AI voices x3

Tbh it’s quite scary how well it worked, but I do think it wasL

A - Extremely boring compared to working with actual people >.<

+

B - Only just about acceptable for characters that don’t have a particularly big emotional range. I definitely think the AI would struggle to do a decent job with more emotive characters. (It also struggled to accurately replicate my efforts & other general sounds, especially laughter!)

VA for DD isn’t THAT much of an issue now I know how I’m handling the project going forward :3 It’s the only one of my projects that has had a significant amount of funding, and pretty much 100% of that is going towards VA, so I should be able to afford everything I need eventually. It will just mean abandoning my old voice director friend’s plan of paying each VA $500 per script section.

I know he said that’s like the bare minimum acceptable/non-insulting amount to offer, but I think he was only saying that in terms of the voice actors he knew/represented. As nice as it would be to be able to pay people fairly for their work, when it comes to situations like mine, it’s not always possible to do that >.< It doesn’t mean I won’t pay people, it just means I need to look for people who are okay with doing X amount of work for X amount of money. 

I know that would probably make him mad because I guess he would think I should be in a position to afford to pay a whole cast that $500 per short script, but the reality is, I’m just not, and I probably never will be. But I do have a significant amount of funding for the project thanks to everyone’s generous support, so I should be able to at least make the most of it :3 

I’m pretty confident that I will be able to find a stellar cast and pay them for their work, it’s just not going to be like union-level pay >.< But I will be more careful in the future and when making casting decisions myself, will be sure to only cast people once everything I need for their character is fully written.

The main thing that’s actually prevented progress with DD more than anything else is having my CiQ project hanging over me x3

Now that I’ve finally put my foot down with myself and faced up to that fact, I know I’ll be able to work through things better in the future :3 Because CiQ has haunted me for far too long and I’m never gonna get anywhere with DD until CiQ is finished and released and I don’t have to think about it anymore, haha. I was just too scared in the past to come out and say that because I was terrified of potentially disappointing anyone who was waiting patiently for DD to be finished (especially considering CiQ is a project that I imagine most people following me aren’t even really aware of. The ancient demo certainly wasn’t very popular, but it was from waaaay back in the days when I was still using Tyranobuilder & the 2nd project I ever started after finishing my very first!)

It might not be the logical course of action for most people, but my brain works in weird ways, and it says that since I finished all the writing for CiQ all the way back in September 2021 or something like that (and started CiQ as a project long before I started DD), it makes more sense to actually get CiQ made before focusing on DD since DD’s writing has barely even been started. So that's what I'll do, and DD will become a priority once CiQ is all done :3