Bringing the music and sound of Necromunda: Hired Gun to life - Part 2
[h2]Hello everyone![/h2]
In this week’s blog, StreumOn’s sound designer Olivier will dive into further detail on the voice recording and its implementation in-game.
[h3]The voices of the Underhives[/h3]
What is a great way to bring some immersion into a solo narrative game? Voice over.
This part was a first for all of us, both in terms of code and sound design. The work on the voice recording was divided into several steps.
Before any recording was made, the casting process was done with SIDE (the studio in charge of recording the actors), Games Workshop, Focus, and our creative team.
At the studio, when we saw several of the actors involved in the French version, we were like teenagers. For the French VO, knowing that actors like Emmanuel Bonami (Solid Snake from MGS), Patrice Baudrier (Geralt from The Witcher 1), or Jose Lucionni (Torbjörn from Overwatch or Marcus Fenix from Gears of War) were working on the different characters of our game was extremely exciting.
When the recordings took place, Victor (our Producer) and Zoran (Producer at Focus Home) supervised all recordings with SIDE for all languages. From there, SIDE produced the final files and sent us all the archives containing all the performances for the three languages.
Then the implementation began. One of our coders was working on the dialogue and localization system in Unreal Engine while I was working on the audio implementation. We have over 2000 lines in three languages, so I had to find a solution to batch process all the files. I had to normalize all the voices to fit our needs, check volumes to have the same loudness perception amongst all lines, and find a good balance between the ambient sounds, main sounds (weapons for instance) and all the dialogue you can hear in-game, from basic dialogue in the hub to battle sequence barks.
The files being ready, I was afraid that it would be a pretty long process to iterate inside the engine. Luckily, Unreal Engine 4 also has batch processing tools which allowed me to quickly iterate through the recordings. The engine also allowed me to create some really nice voice effects for some of the most important NPCs you will encounter in the game.
Voice over is a long and complex process. Even with only a bit more than 6000 files, we had several misnamed files, localization issues and dialogue orders that were incorrect. I cannot even start to imagine the complexity for games that have way more lines than that. And even when you’ve reached the stage where all the files are fixed and properly localized, finding the good balance of volume, distance, and importance depending on the situations is a long process.
The upside to this is that your game immediately starts to become alive when you hear the first voice lines in-game. Even if this is a complex task, it is an extremely rewarding side of the sound design when everything starts to work.
If you want to catch the full intensity of the voice acting, don’t hesitate to check this video:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Necromunda: Hired Gun releases on June 1st on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Pre-order are open here: https://www.focus-home.com/games/necromunda-hired-gun#shop
This wraps up the voice topic for Necromunda: Hired Gun! Don’t miss the last part of this series that will come next week!
-The StreumOn team
In this week’s blog, StreumOn’s sound designer Olivier will dive into further detail on the voice recording and its implementation in-game.
[h3]The voices of the Underhives[/h3]
What is a great way to bring some immersion into a solo narrative game? Voice over.
This part was a first for all of us, both in terms of code and sound design. The work on the voice recording was divided into several steps.
Before any recording was made, the casting process was done with SIDE (the studio in charge of recording the actors), Games Workshop, Focus, and our creative team.
At the studio, when we saw several of the actors involved in the French version, we were like teenagers. For the French VO, knowing that actors like Emmanuel Bonami (Solid Snake from MGS), Patrice Baudrier (Geralt from The Witcher 1), or Jose Lucionni (Torbjörn from Overwatch or Marcus Fenix from Gears of War) were working on the different characters of our game was extremely exciting.
When the recordings took place, Victor (our Producer) and Zoran (Producer at Focus Home) supervised all recordings with SIDE for all languages. From there, SIDE produced the final files and sent us all the archives containing all the performances for the three languages.
Then the implementation began. One of our coders was working on the dialogue and localization system in Unreal Engine while I was working on the audio implementation. We have over 2000 lines in three languages, so I had to find a solution to batch process all the files. I had to normalize all the voices to fit our needs, check volumes to have the same loudness perception amongst all lines, and find a good balance between the ambient sounds, main sounds (weapons for instance) and all the dialogue you can hear in-game, from basic dialogue in the hub to battle sequence barks.
The files being ready, I was afraid that it would be a pretty long process to iterate inside the engine. Luckily, Unreal Engine 4 also has batch processing tools which allowed me to quickly iterate through the recordings. The engine also allowed me to create some really nice voice effects for some of the most important NPCs you will encounter in the game.
Voice over is a long and complex process. Even with only a bit more than 6000 files, we had several misnamed files, localization issues and dialogue orders that were incorrect. I cannot even start to imagine the complexity for games that have way more lines than that. And even when you’ve reached the stage where all the files are fixed and properly localized, finding the good balance of volume, distance, and importance depending on the situations is a long process.
The upside to this is that your game immediately starts to become alive when you hear the first voice lines in-game. Even if this is a complex task, it is an extremely rewarding side of the sound design when everything starts to work.
If you want to catch the full intensity of the voice acting, don’t hesitate to check this video:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Necromunda: Hired Gun releases on June 1st on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Pre-order are open here: https://www.focus-home.com/games/necromunda-hired-gun#shop
This wraps up the voice topic for Necromunda: Hired Gun! Don’t miss the last part of this series that will come next week!
-The StreumOn team