[In Development] FF8 Voiceover Project

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I mailed you an audition. Do whatever you feel like with my voice and weird accent lol
 
Well, progress is coming along, and 1/6 of the planned sounds are working in the game right now, while about 50% is recorded but not edited yet. Eventually, I will need a small group of people to help test the mod before it's released, to make sure sounds don't play in the wrong place, aren't too loud/soft, etc. If you're interested, please PM me with the subject "FF8 Voiceover Testing" and give me your email address. I will not reply to these PMs, I'll just be collecting them and checking them all later in the year when the project is close to complete.
 
New video! Squall's Speech during the Garden Battle
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Great work!

I had a question about the voiceover project:  Is there a general director, or are the actors given free reign?  I really like the voice of Squall, but there really seems to only be one or two parts that sound very emotive, and at this point in the game, it's supposed to be our first real glimpse into how inspirational a leader Squall can be.  The only reason I bring it up is because this part is so essential and it kind of felt a little 'dry'.
 
I direct most of the actors live. I wanted Squall to be less emotive than the other characters for the first part of the game. He gets more emotive and emotional after disc 2 when Rinoa goes comatose. I did something similar for Rinoa's character. She takes a personality 180 over the course of the story.
 
I direct most of the actors live. I wanted Squall to be less emotive than the other characters for the first part of the game. He gets more emotive and emotional after disc 2 when Rinoa goes comatose. I did something similar for Rinoa's character. She takes a personality 180 over the course of the story.
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Ahh, well then I apologize and just need to play it in context! :)  Thanks for the reply.
 
I realize this is going to amount to a pretty silly request, but given what happened to the earlier FF7Voice project, I want to make it: Please, please don't let this (or the companion FF7 project) die before you've gotten something out. There's so much potential here.
 
1/3 of the dialogue is done, and 99% of the backend work is done. It would be pretty silly of me to NOT finish this. I'm glad you're excited, but these things take time.
 
Oh, I certainly didn't mean to sound impatient, it's more... Stuff like this has been attempted before and then abandoned. :P So I wanted to express my sincere wishes that this be completed.

Glad to see you're already so far along though, that's... extremely impressive.
 
would it be possible to release a public beta of the 33% of the voice work that is done, what would be nice if it was disc 1 only, then that whole disc can be fully voiced and anyone can install it and give it ago.

don't be worried of people running into issues, that is fine as it would be a public beta.
 
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would it be possible to release a public beta ... don't be worried of people running into issues, that is fine as it would be a public beta.
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Despite what the younger generation has been misled to think by garbage game developers like Blizzard 2.0, the point of a public beta is not to give people your unfinished, buggy work for the fun of it.

I don't do public betas for the same reason I don't walk outside with half my clothes missing.

And just to update while I'm here, I recently got a new job and moved, so I haven't actually done anything for this project (except a few recordings) in the last month or so. Once I'm settled into my new place, things will speed up again.
 
haha okay fair enough, on a semi related note I played through cmt's halo SPv2 beta and it was pretty buggy, but they seem to release it anyway and peolpe play through it on forums, but you have your rights as the creator of sorts.

I still think it would be a good idea to release the mod by disc number, so in that case you could say release disc 1 voiced for november 2015, disc 2 for february 2016 etc, I think this would be better than releasing the whole thing in late 2016.

Obviously those dates are just examples.
 
I also think it would look much better to have a character portrait in the dialogue box instead of text if there is voice over work, this would resemble the game 'silver'


when FFX has a static camera scene there are no portraits or dialogue boxes


but in ffx the person talking is very animated where as that wont be the case in ff8, so I think a character portrait for who is talking would be better.

this off course would be an option for the game, they can choose the character portrait only or subtitles instead.
 
I still think it would be a good idea to release the mod by disc number, so in that case you could say release disc 1 voiced for november 2015, disc 2 for february 2016 etc, I think this would be better than releasing the whole thing in late 2016.
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The thing is, I don't work on things in chronological order. 1/3 of the voices are done, but that doesn't mean it's all on disc 1. A lot of it is on disc 2. They're all over the place. I couldn't release a disc-1-only mod even if I wanted to (I entertained that idea but I have little control over when each disc gets finished).

Your portraits idea is really sweet. Unfortunately that will never happen because the game can't and never will be able to do that.
 
ah right I assumed as much as by this time there would have been a mod for that, even the FF7 fan de-make on the NES had character portraits.

anyway my other suggestion is just to have the names come up but with no words, just so you know who's talking, overall if there's voice, i wouldn't want text that matches the voice, i generally don't subtitle games and in the case of ff8 with voices it will look like a very strange way to subtitle a game.

on the music volume side of things, I was thinking it would be like kingdom hearts, where when the voice acting happens the music drops in volume, and when there is no voice acting it will return to its original volume, but it seems after seeing your Squall's Speech during the Garden Battle video that the music will always be at a lower than normal volume.

it's quite a tough thing to decide as the games were originally designed with mute characters and loud music that drew a lot of attention to itself, it certainly wasn't designed as background music to voiced characters like the ffx was most of the time.

But to me the two videos I have seen sound great, just hearing voices dramatically changes the game, even if you had to sacrifice the music by having it at a low volume at all times, that would be an acceptable loss.
 
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on the music volume side of things, I was thinking it would be like kingdom hearts, where when the voice acting happens the music drops in volume, and when there is no voice acting it will return to its original volume, but it seems after seeing your Squall's Speech during the Garden Battle video that the music will always be at a lower than normal volume.
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Actually, the mod already does this on a by-cutscene basis. Your game music while exploring will be normal, and will only be reduced during cutscenes.

If you have a few hours free, you can go to my twitch archive and watch me play through most of the game with partial voices. I give a lot of developer commentary on various things, some of which you've talked about here.
 
okay I watched that video.

Squall, Rinoa, Zell and Quistis sound really good

Seifer sounds not like what I expected, he's sounds okay-ish to me, sorry if that offends the voice actor, but not everyone can like everyone's voice.

Headmaster cid sounds a bit too young, I envisioned a different voice.

everything flows so much better as well, there are real pauses in speech that match what would be spoken by someone, I don't know why the game doesn't represent that correctly with the game's text.

I noticed that you fixed some of the dialog as well, like when quistis says you need to pass 'this prerequisite', you changed it to pass 'the prerequisite', which makes sense, since there is only one prerequisite.

it's cool that you allow skipping the texts and the voice skips it.

The echoes in the cavern do sound cool, I never took that into account when reading it without voice.

The music volume works really well, I can still appreciate the music while also hearing the voices.

I think the whole Guardian Forces thing being abbreviated to GF won't flow very well during speech at all, so I think it would be a good idea to consider changing the speech to say Guardian Force instead of GF, I mean honestly who would say that in real life?


I don't know what effect you're going to put on squalls voice when he's 'in thought', but I think it will have to be something different to normal speech, things like that have been done a lot in TV and movies, but I can't recall a specific case to link to you.
 
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Wow, this project looks awesome  :o Im looking forward to the release! I'll definetely play FF8 again with this mod!  :mrgreen: Keep up the good work^^ If you need some voice acting i could help if needed. I have a professional Microphone and stuff. Just PM me  ;)
 
Is there any openings? What voices have no been done? if so, here is what i sound like. This is a video that i made a few years ago. I do know how to make quite a few accents too. So, if there is any NPC, main character, secondaries... I'm in.

Thank You,
Fr3aKeD

The Video -
 
Oh yeah, Why not use a computer voice for all the voices that hasn't been done yet to kind of complete it, and as you get the real voices, replaces it? Just a suggestion?
 
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