GCAP 2023: Empower

If I told you that, as a sound designer I could save you
Hundreds of thousands of dollars
Weeks of Development time
Gigabytes of memory
Seconds of load time
and enhance the narrative impact for the player, you would likely think I was speaking gibberish. But speaking “gibberish” is entirely the point.

More than any other sense, humans respond to the spoken word. It is a key part of how we communicate and the principle means of conveying emotional intent. A common limiting factor for smaller projects is the significant cost of recording live dialogue. This cost increases significantly when localised into other languages. These costs often results in projects choosing to have no recorded dialogue at all.

Solium Infernum and Jump Light Odyssey both have recorded dialogue for nearly all characters. In both projects the substantial cost of localising recorded dialogue was avoided by creating our own languages. Critically, both these artificial languages were built around emotional states and how best to convey the emotional intent of the narrative during gameplay, but they also avoided the “Skyrim Effect” of having every person in town share the same voice.

Creating and implementing an artificial language can have all of the benefits listed above. Adding to that a well-designed system gives you flexibility which accounts for late development changes or unexpected additions. This is essentially an expansion of the ideas behind Simlish, but the dynamic design creates the sentences in real time depending on the state of the characters during gameplay.

This session will explore the design and implementation of both of these artificial languages and how they were used to compliment the player’s experiences and the narrative impact of each project. This will include language design, the recording process and how the dynamic system was created and implemented in Wwise.