Overview

Dialogue, also known as voice-over or VO, is a crucial part of the soundscape in games. It can bring characters to life and make them relatable, lovable, or hateable, as well as giving narrative or gameplay information to the player and provide feedback on their actions.

Importantly, dialogue does not have to be actual spoken language, and can include the sounds made by creatures and robots without written dialogue. A great example is R2D2, whose dialogue takes the form of electronic blips that vary in pitch. Despite the lack of spoken words, the cadence of R2’s sound design and the responses from other characters give the impression of a very sassy and expressive character. For example: https://youtu.be/NeLn-l00yV8

Other great examples of dialogue sounds that don’t use traditional spoken language are the use of repeating samples in Banjo-Kazooie, or the choppy synthesised vocal sounds in Animal Crossing. These kinds of dialogue systems originated from the need to save resources when storage and processing power were limited, but they are still popular today as a means of keeping file sizes under control in dialogue-heavy games, or simply as an aesthetic choice for the vibe and character that it imparts on the game as a whole.

Emotes

Emotes area a sub-section of dialogue referring to ‘non-communicative’ sounds such as screams, efforts (e.g. exertion noises when climbing), and breaths (heavy breathing when running, a sigh of relief etc). Just like dialogue, emotes need to be planned ahead of time and recorded by the voice actors, to then be cut, processed, and implemented into the game. The implementation of emotes is often based on in-game parameters or animation tags, tying the sounds to the relevant animation or game state.

An example of this would be the breathing system in The Last Of Us Part II, in which the main characters breathing sounds become heavier when they are running, or fearful when they stand near a ledge on a high building.

Creating Languages

As characters like R2D2 show, dialogue is so much more than just recording a voice actor, editing, and then implementing their lines. One of the most creative and interesting aspects of dialogue in games is the invention of entirely new languages. While this isn’t an especially common practice, because of how much time and effort it takes to design and implement, it can add a huge amount of character and charm to a game if done well.

Notable examples of games that use their own fictional languages include The Sims and Frontier Development’s Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo titles. You can read a great article on how “Planco”, the language of Planet Coaster, was created here: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/game-design-deep-dive-creating-a-new-language-for-i-planet-coaster-i-

The Dialogue Pipeline

Overview

Lots of the info below has been summarised from the fantastic “Dialogue 101” GDC talk from Michael Csurics, which I recommend watching as it provides a fantastic overview of the topic: https://youtu.be/W7-gIHOOues

Additionally, I think it’s important to keep in mind that when you’re just starting out, your first dialogue recording sessions will likely involve recording yourself or your friends in a bedroom closet. This is, in fact, the best way to get better, as it allows you to get hands-on experience of every step of the process. While the contents of the GDC talk are written from the perspective of a developer hiring actors and recording in a studio, it and the guide below will hopefully give you the tools to make your first VO recording session a success.

Planning

The first step in the dialogue pipeline is planning. This happens in pre-production, where we want to work closely with the narrative team (the people who write the scripts for the characters) and the creative director (the person who controls the overall vision of the project) to get all the relevant information needed. This includes things like:

• Line count - how many lines of dialogue do we need to record?

• Characters - how many characters are there; what are their sex, age, race, accent, vocal traits?

• Budgeting - how much will the whole casting and recording process cost?

Casting

The next step is to find actors to perform the dialogue and emotes for you. This can be done through agencies, casting directors, online adverts or simply asking friends online and offline. The goal is to find the person who best fits the character in question, and is able to bring them to life through their performance. This includes not just the dialogue lines they have to read, but also their emotes (screams, efforts etc), which are especially important in games with combat.

Here are some tips for casting:

• Provide a Character Side to actors when they audition (an info sheet that covers the basic traits and background of the character, along with the desired lines you want them to read).

• Make the actors do emotes as well as dialogue, as emotes will likely play as important a role in the game’s soundscape as the dialogue.

• Make the actors perform a wide range of emotions, to get an idea of how their performance of your character will sound in different contexts.

With auditions done, the next step is listening back to the recordings of the different actors and deciding which ones you think are best for each character.

Recording

After the actors are chosen, it’s time to start recording for real. The two most important things when recording VO are that you don’t get too much background noise in your recordings, and that your gain staging is done correctly.

If you don’t have a dedicated studio space, then putting your microphone in a closet full of clothes can help to get a cleaner recorded sound without any reflections from your room. Large-diaphragm condenser microphones are especially good for voice recording, but as long as the levels are set correctly any microphone will do the job.

Editing & Processing

The goal of editing and processing dialogue is to make the vocals sound clean, cohesive and consistent across the different takes and characters. You want to pay particular attention to removing any unwanted noise, artifacts and clicks, as the dialogue’s prominence may make these errors more obvious.

The one thing we usually don’t want to add to the VO is reverb, as this is often added at runtime by the engine to match the acoustics of the environment the player is currently in - once we’ve baked reverb into a sound file it’s very hard to remove it again, so it’s best avoided for dialogue that’s meant to sound natural.

Here is a great tutorial from Aftertouch Audio on how to edit & process dialogue: https://youtu.be/ao_xbYTQPa4

Additionally, I highly recommend checking out this excellent beginners’ guide to dialogue editing by Alyx Jones: https://www.guildfordgameaudio.com/post/a-beginners-guide-to-dialogue-editing-for-video-games

Implementation

In this step, we import the audio files into our middleware, or if we aren’t using one, directly into the game engine. We’ll then create dialogue “hooks” that control when our lines of dialogue play back, based on in-game events or player input, such as ‘play grunt_emote_01 when the player character takes damage’ or ‘play player_character_exhausted if the player’s stamina reaches 0’.

There are many other ways of implementing dialogue, but this is the most common, basic one. If you want to learn more, check out this video on how Naughty Dog used dialogue implementation in The Last Of Us Part II to create more believable NPCs: https://youtu.be/kO3ISXkXrFQ

Localisation

This is the process of translating all of the dialogue in the game into one or multiple different languages, re-recording, and implementing it so that people can play the game in their preferred language. On games with lower budgets, it is common to localise only the subtitles, so that none of the dialogue needs to be re-recorded. Localisation is often taken care of by the publisher as they have connections with various outsourcers who do it for various languages.

Additional Learning Resources

If you want to learn more about VO and dialogue design then this incredible website full of great resources is the place to go: https://www.voicedesignresource.com/

The breathing system of The Last Of Us Part II: https://youtu.be/ICyuGEx-3-U

The system behind Hades' astounding dialogue: https://youtu.be/bwdYL0KFA_U