Breathing Life into Greek Myth: The Dialogue of 'Hades'

[Music] hello i am darren korb from supergiant games and i'm joined by greg cassaven and i am the audio director and i do all the music and sound design and voice over direction hey and i'm greg as darren mentioned i'm creative director uh i do writing and contribute other aspects of game design we all wear a bunch of different hats at supergiant since we're a pretty small team and darren and i have been working together ever since the bastion days for more than 10 years now through four different games um most recently being hades and before that pyre before that transistor uh all the way back to bastion we're here to focus on hades in particular and what we did with all the dialogue and voice over how we got to how we got to all that if you've played the game um a little bit about hades hopefully this is uh some fun trivia even if you are familiar with the game uh the big thing about it for us was that it was our first ever early access game we designed it for the from the ground up knowing that we would be getting tons of feedback from our community through much of development we also made it a roguelike dungeon crawler a genre we've never worked in before we were very interested in infusing this style of play which involves dying and restarting over and over with a continuous narrative so every time you died the story would advance that was kind of the thing that we were excited about early on um our team size remained pretty small we developed the game over a little over three years and it has been uh it has done really really well for us we're so grateful for the incredible response um including six nominations in the game developers choice awards um so yeah we're still over the moon uh about all that and uh the other key feature of the game is that it's our first ever fully voiced game of the big cast so that was a really big undertaking and we want to talk about uh how we got there but first uh here is a taste of what fully voiced meant in hades few tales are told of hades whose very name inspires fear and penitence reminding us of the inevitable fate which we all share i however mean to tell you such a tale listen carefully i understand young zagreus that you would seek to leave that bitter darkness for this bitter cold quite honestly i failed to see why but i'll age your plight why not or i can offer plenty of assistance and you soon shall grow fond of it i think your father sent me all in all i'd rather be on your bad side than his now you can turn back like a good little man or i can send you home the painful way what'll it be a gather lady debit has already got a frigid hold on you certainly not the warmest member of the clan now is she but do be patient with her she's been through a lot um just wanted to apologize because i think maybe i didn't act very appropriately last time you spoke to me but i just really really like this job and i promise i will always do my very best so i just hope i'll have another chance wow thanks again for that nectar bottle from before stuff just goes right through me like you won't believe though i hope you're not going around giving that stuff away to every bozo you know you know prince said i'd not expect it to run into you again not after all this time something i missed out of the house or what not had much company of late i warned you short one now you face before more terrible even than i the only other foe who might have faced who bested me hold fiend you'll walk not one more step toward the light of day so long as i am here [Music] so this is just a sample of uh all of the vo that we have in the game this is a little bit of a data visualization uh there's a sample of some of our 30 fully voiced characters that we have in the game we have over 21 000 voice lines in the game which we did not imagine we would have when we set out uh even karen that you heard at the end there the guy who just goes uh has 120 of those so there's quite a few yeah we did not know um we did not realize the scope of the voice over content in this game until we were basically done and having to do triple takes at this i still don't really believe it this 300 000 word uh number but um our localization team reinforces that that is indeed the case um so how did we get there we will walk you through that process for the remainder of this talk starting with the kind of macro view uh the initial questions that we have and choices that we made uh drilling down into characterization how we how we casted the different roles and then down into the nitty gritty of our day-to-day production pipeline but starting with these kind of macro decisions you know there were some big choices to make when we were starting out on hades such as what game should we even make but certain things were foregone conclusions and one of those is that uh audio and narrative would be key to this game that's something that has been key to each of our games and myself and darren um are closely involved in the in the conception of each of our games and are there early on to try and kind of discover the particular vibe and atmosphere that we want and the audio is always a really really big part of that there's nothing like music and the human voice to immediately sort of create a particular mood so we know we knew we wanted to use that and we also knew that we wanted to work with logan yes this is logan cunningham standing next to that giant bafta right there uh fun fact logan cunningham won a bafta for his performances in hades uh but but that's getting ahead of ourselves he has voiced characters in all of our games and been a really key part of our of our process uh knowing that he was going to be involved uh we're going to give some examples of each of the characters some of the characters he's played in each of our games so here here's a sample from bastian proper store is supposed to start at the beginning ain't so simple with this one now here's a kid whose whole world got all twisted leaving him stranded on a rock in the sky and so he plays the narrator in that game who is almost the only voice you hear he talks to you almost the entire time you play uh so he's he's very much the primary character in that game in 2014's transistor uh he is the main principal character in that game as well there we added a couple more supporting characters but he really uh still had the primary role hey red we're not gonna get away with this aren't we and then in 2017's pyre we still expanded our cast a little bit more we added more characters but logan had the only english-speaking character in the game who was of course the primary character the arch justice dare you tamper with forbidden knowledge and so yeah that's a that's just a little uh snippet of logan's performances in these games in fact in empire he ended up playing several more characters but that was his his main one yeah so we we love working with logan we love discovering um the just what else what other kinds of characters he could play um so it was exciting to go into hades knowing uh he could play any number of characters in this game uh and each of our games is kind of a reaction to the last game we worked on and uh so a special shout out to pyre our third game for informing so much of what hades is despite the big differences in those games uh in pyre it was our first time working with a larger cast and we kind of sidestepped the issue of you know not every character and not every actor is as much of a genius as logan by having just about everyone speak in like a gibberish language where there's less pressure on it to just be kind of an amazing english language performance but that gave us the confidence to work with a big cast and be able to take that next step uh into uh creating a fully voiced game that was something we were drawn to doing um on this game from the start uh mainly for this kind of bolded bullet point we felt that it would really help bring these characters to life despite having kind of limited uh presentation techniques right we don't have like uh fully performance captured amazing cutscenes and stuff like that but we do have actors like logan who can through their voice alone uh make these characters seem to pop out um of the game we wanted the narrative to do a bunch of different things particularly to mitigate the kind of sting of failure uh that can make you want to rage quit out of a roguelike game instead of experiencing what's so great about roguelike games which is that they're different every single time you play we knew voiceover was powerful um and yeah it was it was our time to take the next step and try to deliver on this tonal range that we had in mind that could range from serious to silly and again what better way to kind of deliver on a particular tone than through the variety of voices of course it raised many questions about how we would actually pull this off yes uh you know there were risks associated with with uh going fully voiced in our mind you know we never tried having a non-silent protagonist before you know we how do you reconcile uh the protagonist's characterization with how the player feels uh as that character and and how do you reconcile the the point of view and personality of that character and everything so that was something that we had to consider uh tone and accent how does the character speak how should all the characters in this game speak the gods ghosts and monsters of greek myth what do they sound like and what languages do they speak and do they have accents when they speak those languages was another consideration uh we knew we were going to have a big cast in this game the question was how big right how many characters do we want do we need what's going to what's going to fill out the cast in a satisfying way and how do we find the actors to play them using the resources at our disposal and also another consideration for us is you know not everyone is a as a bafta award-winning actor uh uh you know some of us on the team do voices in the game and stuff so part of part of the worry there was just making sure that the other performances in the game could sort of live in the same game as logan's we knew would be very good performances in the game so so just making sure that there was a sort of quality consistency across across the cast and then in terms of content volume you know it's a huge game you can play forever how many voice lines do you need to support that and to make it really feel like you're not running out of content at any particular point and then in terms of production you know what's our budget and localization plan for a massive uh game like this and we're not going to dig too much into that here but that was something we definitely considered yeah so these were big looming questions uh but we uh to to quote zagreus whatever let's try it was kind of our answer to all of them um and so uh we dug into actually creating the characters of this game knowing that they would be speaking uh starting with our boy zagrius here this is a painting uh by gen z our art director whose artwork you see throughout this presentation in fact a big shout out to her for all the incredible artwork um for for all these characters she nailed this character pretty much right away there was very little uh for her to go on other than he's the son of the god of the dead um but there really wasn't much to go on for zagreus at all we get asked sometimes um you know even if some players think that he's our own invention but he does come from classical mythology uh particularly he's referenced in this uh ancient fragment of a play about sisyphus by the poet escolus um who in this in this uh quote the hospital or is is hades himself so we're we're doing research into greek myth in the underworld and come across this scrap of like wait a minute hades had a son i've been studying greek myths since i was a little kid i never heard of this um and that alone was so compelling just to kind of uncover the story that it became the basis for the whole game um jen you know was drawn to this idea of well we were all drawn to this idea of making our first ever so-called power fantasy character which is one of the most uh tiresome ideas in in game development honestly because uh like power power fantasy characters are there all over the place we just had never done one ourselves we'd avoided the idea of making a character who's kind of explicitly kind of better than the player um you know faster stronger better looking knows what to say in every situation all that kind of stuff but we wanted to subvert the tropes around this kind of idea as well he's not quite zagreus is not quite what he appears to be he's emotionally vulnerable he's he's kind he's polite um despite uh what you may assume about him um and really uh we wanted to deeply understand his relationship with hades as being kind of at the heart of the character and we figured if we knew if we had a good understanding of that then we would get past uh some of the cliches um at the bottom of this slide here you see an example from a spreadsheet i maintain throughout development that has all the characters in it this happens to have only the row with zagreus um it has things like the the tone photo reference we'll get to uh loki there in in just a moment but it also has things like the uh highly cerebral tonality stack rank uh suggesting that the character should be cool badass and hot in that particular order so um if you want to know about our highly artful process um there you go but this is a language that jen and i understand when talking about characters uh we also understand a variety of different references and there aren't too many people at supergiant for whom all of these references click um they do click for for me maybe maybe uh for for a few others but um you know on one side with with someone like jen i'm talking about alucard and dante and spike spiegel and what darren you know we're talking about loki uh talking about the dread pirate roberts but the princess bride is a movie actually we kept coming back to is a really strong sort of tonal analogy uh it could range from silly to serious in a manner similar to what we wanted but this guy loki here he had the look he had the vibe uh similar to what we were going for so with that in mind we wrote the casting sides uh for zagreus we're like okay here he is here's our our guy let's get some auditions let's see what we could get uh for uh for his voice but we had uh a lot of trouble finding his voice this was a character that was not necessarily in logan's wheelhouse yeah and and so we got we got a few reads for zagreus um based on these sides and none of them were sort of hitting all of the marks that we wanted them to hit and we all had something specific in mind i think that they weren't quite achieving so i i ended up recording some scratch for this just to try to put something in um to to take a stab at it and just see if if we could sort of get somewhere a little bit closer on on what zag might sound like um and so this is a this is an example of of the read that i did for zagreus i'm home i'm home i'm home um carry on everyone don't mind me that could have gone better that could have gone better that could have gone better hmm well time to go get killed again i'm home when i when i heard that time to go get killed again i was like darren you've been holding out on us like how is he how daryn does all of our music all of our sound effects all the voice recording and you know he just casually delivers you know the winning audition for zagreus of course that was just my initial impression and uh it's by no means uh a unilateral uh decision so we had to get uh darren's takes uh into the game and and present them as part of our team playtest and stuff but everybody everybody liked it um and and we didn't look back but there were a lot of decisions to make along the way like we played around with zags it wasn't a foregone conclusion that zagreus would speak with a british accent for example darren did a take that was all like kind of an american accent as well uh but we decided uh certainly between us i think we both agreed that the the british accent is like the de facto uh accent of historic western uh fantasy right like from things like lord of the rings and and game of thrones it's just an accent that gets associated with uh sometimes totally imaginary worlds um and yet everyone speaks speaks neutral english uh but we do use the american accent as well to represent a kind of cultural divide in the setting so the characters native to the underworld speak american like us um and characters kind of of of greek origin or surface origin uh speak with with the british accent and and to be clear you know i was not uh expecting to voice aggress even several sessions deep into the game i think the the actual fire files themselves are called like zagreus scratch yeah and we just expected to replace them eventually and never and never ended up doing it yeah it it ended up being kind of a big additional chunk of work for you but uh hopefully hopefully you had fun um yeah it was a good time um now uh certain characters like this one are not quite as as difficult to cast as others right yes that's true i think lord hades may have been the fastest we've ever found the voice of a character uh we you know greg wrote up some sides with logan cunningham in mind we knew he was going to play this guy uh you know logan and i talked about some references like uh darkness in in uh in legend uh tim curry's character in legend and a couple other references and and we just greg sent him the sides and and this is the read that he did uh for that with a little bit of processing on it stupid boy i told you you'd be back how was your wanton ransacking of my domain and that's pretty much exactly the character i mean it was just like yep that's it we heard it and that was hades yeah so then we got to a point where um it was time to kind of put it all together right and this uh yeah darren when when did we make this thing this was uh in august of 2018 less than a year into development this is a really really early build of the game and what you're going to see here is you know you're going to hear zagreus you're going to hear hades you're going to hear the storyteller and uh it's going to help coalesce some of the tone tonal ideas we're working on through the voice over here wow damn it i'm home oh yes carry on everyone don't mind me the house of hades that dark and lavishly appointed layer of the underworld's king is home not just to him but to his willful protony shut up old man back already stupid boy i told you nobody gets out of here whether alive or dead though how was your want and ransacking of my domain greetings father my ransacking was a delight thank you for asking so i'll just be on my way again be on your way indeed what do i care you shall never reach the surface go see for yourself and you may notice if you played a lot of hades that several of these lines shipped with the actual game these are really really early and they they made it all the way through to the final release yeah we never can tell with that stuff what's gonna stick um so we were quite happy with how things were going at around the time um we put together that uh uh we don't really use the term vertical slice but that's kind of like what what it was essentially our first uh production content it was expressing this relationship between hades and zagreus that we were excited about but then we got the whole underworld it's time to figure out the supporting cast we knew we wanted the tone of the game to be much broader than than just uh you know what hades and zagreus represent so we um considered a lot of different angles on who else should be in this game one thing that came very quickly was the idea that the olympians are going to be there we quickly got a bunch of olympians um in the game um the the underworld also gives us some of these like iconic characters that you probably know from just any exposure to greek myth the the hellhound cerberus the boatman of the river six carron sisyphus internally toiling with his boulder those kind of characters were exciting to us and we wanted them to be part of this world we also thought about you know well that our vision of the house of hades is almost like a place of business who works there uh in what roles you know who was who was zagreus's father figure if hades wasn't doing it for him and these characters like achilles came came from that um and really you know we also thought about it from the production angle how many characters will be even welcome in this game how many do we have time and and room for um and a lot of our early stabs at these characters just stuck we got these characters like achilles nyx hypnose dusa skelly they were all in the game quite early they tested well with our team we had fun working on them and and we just kind of never looked back and a lot of the olympians came online uh early on as well uh our our idea for the olympians that they're kind of like the awkward uh thanksgiving family dinner uh type of idea it really informed the characterizations for them like poseidon as the boisterous inappropriate uncle and so on and so forth that made um it gave us clear ideas for the characterizations of each one and we got him in the game and um things felt like they were they were coming together quickly um at that point a lot of the other characters we just kind of trickled in over early access some we didn't even plan for at all um like alecto and patroclus um and it's it's funny to think back on how we didn't even imagine those characters at all um at the beginning when they ended up being quite uh significant to the story but that's that's part of the beauty of early access which we'll be coming back to again and again now um we have all these characters in mind it's it's time to find who's gonna portray them and what is the first question that we ask when it comes time uh to cast a new character yes the question is can logan do it that is the that's the first question we asked and the answer is often yes uh there are five of the six characters logan plays pictured on the screen the only reason the sixth one is not here is because he's the narrator and has no portrait uh but yes logan plays a bunch of characters in this game he's got a huge range and and part of the idea behind that is embracing our constraints as a small studio using the resources available to us and logan is an incredible actor who happens to be very close with us as a studio and as a friend so he we consider him to be an incredible resource to use as much as possible and so once the answer to that question becomes no can logan do it no not this character uh then we need to expand our search a little bit so we try to tap our network uh can any of us on the team do it this this photograph here is a photograph from me in high school with peter canivesi who is the high school my was my high school drama teacher and and he was the moderator for the improv club that logan and i were in uh he in fact plays zeus and chaos in this game uh and he did a few voices for us on pyre so uh you know he did an incredible read for zeus and and and did a great job as chaos so we were thrilled to be able to work with him again i ended up voicing zagreus and skelly and skelly is one of those characters where the character was sort of built around this silly voice that i like to do where it was kind of like this it was originally it was a guy attacked today more like that and then but skelly needed to be a little more high energy and deliver a little bit more information more quickly so he kind of got combined with almost like a joe pesci vibe like hey hey boy oh hit me over here what are you doing you know that kind of thing so um that's sort of how greg could speak a little bit more to that but that's kind of how he came about yeah skelly as you can tell is uh very deeply rooted in classical greek mythology uh and we we had a lot of fun you know with him we're testing the boundaries of the tone of this game right and like he started off as as kind of a joke um but everybody liked him and we liked working on him um so so he stuck and he's not even the first time uh something like that happened like dusa started off as as a bit more of like a frivolous character um who became really important to the game and back on pyre logan's uh principal character started off based on like a funny voice that he would do from time to time so it's just again like based on our constraints based on stuff that we enjoyed doing uh seeing what we could do with all that of course uh there would come times when uh the answer to you know can logan do it would be no the answer to can we keep it in the family you know can darren and or peter canavesi or any of us do it would also be no and then we would have to reach um a little bit further that's right yeah we we had to uh get auditions actually for for some characters from outside of our network of people who are either on the team or people that we knew immediately so you know we would look for recommendations from people that we trusted uh friends of friends that sort of thing greg spent uh a fair share of time uh scouring voice acting hashtag voice acting on twitter and other online sources and then sort of cold emailing actors that seemed promising for particular characters and then once we would receive the auditions you know i had several criteria upon which i i like to evaluate them is the characterization unique relative to our existing cast can this person kind of slot into the game and not overlap too much with any other particular character that we have is the delivery believable and natural uh does it does it sound like someone's speaking or does it sound like they're reading is the accent believable if there is one that's another thing that sort of you know leans into that previous point there and then this one to me is actually one of the most critical um is is the understanding of the text itself does the actor get it are they conveying all the sort are they mining the line for all the beats that are in there and trying to convey each one separately and and play all of the changes uh of course they're sending us an undirected audition and in the actual recording it would be directed and and if they didn't perceive all that stuff we could sort of you know direct them to to add it but just hearing that in the audition is such like a ah they get it you know it's such a relief so so we we know that it's going to be easy for us in the booth if if the audition comes back with that stuff in it and then of course the another question we have is does it meet or even exceed our expectations for the character is it exactly what we're asking for sometimes we'll get an audition we'll hear it and be like yep that's it that's perfect that's exactly what i had in my head and sometimes we'll get an audition that's like oh that's i did not expect that and i it's even better than the thing that i imagined uh and so this next character is an example of of that one yeah and this this is one of those you know you're talking about believable and natural delivery that's another one we really really uh prioritize highly because even though we have these larger than life characters or literal gods in most cases we want them to just kind of believe the circumstances that they're in this is just normal everyday life to them and they they should convey that in the in the delivery so that they're we don't try to go for like cartoonish voices um and and it's it's worked out well for us um so megura here was a really really important character in part because she's one of the only characters in hades that you can't skip uh if you don't like talking to hades you don't like talking to dusa or achilles forget about them you you could just walk right by and it's fine but megara stands in your way um as the first boss you're going to run into her over and over again and with her we wanted to express a lot of what was unique about this game where the story is is kind of constantly unfolding and advancing so you know when you play a game like this your own experience as a player is that the first time fighting a boss is different from the 20th time fighting a boss and we wanted uh the relationship between zagreus and megura to kind of reflect the player's own journey so it's a lot of pressure on this character to be a lot of things and we certainly did not have an actor an actress in mind um so we did the thing that we would do we created the the casting sides um and and we started to look for actresses though even in this case we did kind of keep this one uh in the family at least indirectly didn't we yeah sorta i you know so so the the actress who plays this who ended up playing this character uh is named avalon penrose and she is uh good buddies with courtney vignese who plays uh who plays dusa and aphrodite and who happens to be married to michael ailshai who is the voice of orpheus and a former supergiant employee so it's sort of in the family and a fun fact here is that real life meg and real life doosa are good buddies which is which is kind of nice yeah just like they are in the game so we you know we're we're kind of sweating bullets about this character who are we gonna find and and one day we just get uh this performance from avalon penrose your father sent me all in all i'd rather be on your bad side than his no you can turn back like a good little man or i can send you home the painful way what'll it be yeah and we heard that and we're just like oh that's that's it it's more interesting than the thing we thought of you know as you can see here our voice reference in the sheet is something like uh you know furiosa from mad max fury road and and this is this just is even even more subtle more interesting the sort of hushed way she's speaking it's like oh what a cool idea to have this antagonist that you fight and have this complicated relationship have this sort of hushed way of speaking very cool and and she ended up actually with the third most lines in the entire game so uh this is a really critical character and we're so glad that we found avalon yeah and then uh you know to summarize the casting process here we create the casting sides and and that's actually a great tool for us to align internally on a character before we even send them out so it's actually really useful for us from a character development standpoint and sometimes we have character art sometimes we'll have some sort of tonal reference image on the sheet depending on on the on the particular sides and then of course we asked can we cast this character internally can logan do it can somebody else on team do it can somebody we know do it and then if not if not we all be sort of reach outside of our our network of actors uh when we need to and then we'll evaluate the auditions test them in game gather feedback and uh vet the casting choices with the the wider team and then we cast apart and we scheduled the first recording and this is you and logan cast henry this is a picture yes i can't believe i forgot to mention this is logan and i henry iv in the year 2000 we're both playing middle-aged men as you can tell from our gray temples yes so going going way back yeah so that's our that's our casting process uh in a nutshell um the doing some things kind of fast and loose and seeing what we can do uh with with the folks that we have um but now it's time to get into uh the the real uh devil in the details so before we start recording we need some stuff to record um and that's where the writing process comes in um the writing process you know snugly fits onto a single slide it wasn't too fancy um the part where we had a game structure that you could play forever and keep running into the same characters over and over meant that there was no shortage of content ideas uh having like different stuff for characters to talk about the part where we were recording very frequently due to early access milestones and stuff like that um solved one of the key issues that writers such as myself experience which is procrastination nothing like a deadline to spur you out of writer's block and so on so when you know that a great actor like avalon or logan uh is is uh expecting to record some stuff soon you really want to get do a bang-up job and have enough good stuff for them um you know i committed uh sacrilege by writing most the stuff just straight into google sheets or sometimes directly into game data um and in addition to all the story content there was a high emphasis on on so-called barks just the kind of uh quick repeatable lines that uh mostly zagreus would say in all sorts of different contexts because again you can play the game forever we didn't want these lines to be repetitive so by the time we play through all the different options it has been you know hopefully hours and hours and hours and you don't notice the repeats what really helped was having an outline for the story uh early in the process and then from there all the writing was done kind of much more tactically based on what we were working on at the time but knowing where it was all going um with the conclusion oh this here is an example of the spreadsheet that we used um there's the column marked line which is the actual stuff that the actor records we're looking at thanatos here um there we've used this format basically with minor changes ever since bastion so it's not fancy but it's worked for us there's the line number uh we include context information and we also include uh subtext information uh in that sentiment column that's really useful sometimes of saying like what's really behind this line what what does the character really mean uh and darren is recording without me the vast majority of the time so it helps uh to know kind of what what's supposed to be behind each each line like that and then uh it is time to record yes so we're gonna show you a clip from the documentary by noclip called developing hell hades developing hell and it's uh it's on youtube you can find it yourself but this is an example of what it's like when i'm recording lines uh for zagreus in the booth we're good to go here let's see hmm check hey i hear my voice okay let me just get a little bit down a little bit i don't even remember what the last thing that was recorded in here was i have no idea death area so this is when i arrived back in the house of hades after being killed by the bull by the minotaur that's one bad bull that's one bad bull look well it's one bad bowl first take age 24 that was 823 824 oh i got the horns i got the horns i got the horns blasted ghost minotaur that's probably the one as you could probably tell things got a little weird when i was in the booth for myself by myself for too long uh so so the process illustrated there you know is that that for each line we would do a minimum of two takes uh we would pre-slate the line saying the number of the line recording the number line into the microphone and then i would live sort of decide what the winning take was and then have the actor repeat that into the microphone second take third take etc and that is for the benefit of brad hagman who was the editor of all the voice over in the game who so i would send him these sessions and he would chop up the lines and edit them clean them up and name them and send it back to me for processing so i'm going to show you one more video here which is uh sort of an example of how i applied processing for in this case chaos so this is the effects chain for chaos who i would say is probably the most heavily processed character in all of hades so i'm just going to go through really quickly all of the effects in the chain so first we got a compressor then we got an eq standard stuff then we've got two instances of ercam tracks uh it's by flux so it's er chemtrax version three it's a really crazy vo processing software and both of them have about a 50 mix in this first one and then a 60 mix in the other one and they have a lot of funky controls um but though that's what is the uh principle thing that you're hearing on chaos's voice and then after that we've got just a basic limiter and then we've got a reverse reverb and then we've got a regular old reverb at the end so i'm going to play it back and the way we have it here is this is the track that i use for recording with no effects on it and then all the selects will get chopped out and moved on to this track down below here and this is the one with all the effects on it so i'm going to play that back now and you can you can see what that's like 234 perhaps this perhaps this perhaps this second take and so you can see you can hear peter called out the number he did to take he did another take and another taken at the end he called out second take and so that is in fact the one that gets chopped out and cleaned up by brad and then it gets named and you can see all of these are named similar file names 235 236 and so on chaos underscore and that is to mirror the name in the spreadsheet in the script spreadsheet and that's it yeah i'll just have the actor record a single giant file usually this one in this case was recorded in the studio and uh and then it all gets chopped up and named by brad and then once brad does all the editing he sends it back to me and i apply the processing and render it all out one thing i want to give a shout out to is batch rendering in logic which i discovered after transistor uh it really helps when you put a whole bunch of lines on a track select a ball and can render them all at once uh with baked in processing that that really saved a bunch of time so so once once the lines are rendered then there you know are many many technical considerations to consider uh we want to consider how we name the files we're going to have thousands of files to organize so we tried to optimize them for search ability uh we have the character name underscore zero zero zero two was our naming convention uh we had a hunch we were gonna need a thousands place for this game uh hence the three zeros in front of the two one limitation obviously is that we can't have over 10 000 lines in a single spreadsheet but that proved not to be an issue we got kind of close with zag but uh but not not not too close it was okay and then in terms of file management you know we have thousands of wav files to manage and our solution for that was just to throw them all in a vo folder so we have thousands of the files in one particular folder uh each character has their own sort of actor template queue in fmod and that single queue is used to play all of that characters vo files and each actor template has its own settings uh you know spatial spatialization settings uh sound size distance fall off all that stuff and uh bussing and reverb and whatnot so uh and f mod for those of you unfamiliar is the audio middleware that we use to integrate the audio into the game and then of course when you have thousands of voice over lines memory can be a consideration and and can you do stream them or load them into memory uh basically we were instructed by our engineers however to just sort of go nuts and they would figure it out uh at the end and and we did and they did um that's we went yes so once um once darren would you render out a batch from one of our voiceover sessions then it's it's off to me and i always felt like a kid in a candy store i had the i think i have a fairly uh unique privilege in being able to integrate uh the voice over myself i think a lot of writers working in the game industry don't necessarily have as hands-on of a role in making sure everything is kind of playing the way it's supposed to all the all the timings are just so um and all that kind of stuff um and this video will show you a little bit about what that process is like greg here to give you a quick tour of how we script the voice over in hades uh using my friend thanatos here as an example here's thanatos he exists in data in this file called npcdata.lua we're looking at the data through a utility called sublime text which you can download uh thanatos has uh all of his story events uh in this kind of format it's a script-like format uh developed by gavin simon one of our engineers and uh co-founders uh so you know line by line thanatos talks then zagrius talks then thanatos again i could put an arbitrary amount of presentation um you know through uh character animations or alternate portraits and things like that and i just plug in the voice lines plug in the text and that's all there is to it at the simplest level uh events can have various requirements um and that is how we determine the sequencing of events along with some good old-fashioned randomness for example this requirement just says you know you have to have interacted with thanatos at least one time for this event to be eligible um and you know over time we just added lots and lots of events uh to thanatos i'm actually going to hit page down instead of mouse wheel as you can see he's got a lot these are just um events with thanatos at the house of hades he actually has a separate entry for the version of him you encounter you know out in the field um these events are ordered in a way that makes sense to me um with kind of the more generic more repeatable events down at the bottom and you get the picture the other half of this is a function called is game state eligible which started off very simple letting us do things like determine um the chance to play for an event say a 50 50 chance or something like that or required text lines is a requirement i use very frequently that just says you know has this story event already occurred but as we went on in development um things got more and more specific for instance we added a phishing system in early access because of course um and so that introduced things like required has fish you know required men caught fish this run has no fish men held fish men total catfish any caught fish types any caught fish types of each any caught fish types this run max total caught fish um so that gives you some impression you know we couldn't have imagined we would need all this stuff at the very beginning or even when we first had the fishing system uh but as i ran into more examples of story events where the specificity was needed i could add these or in some cases get engineering support to add them and that's how we did it so if you take anything away from this talk fish i guess um the part the video didn't get into uh kind of the other half of voice over integration is uh all of the barks the the kind of contextual lines that play out in the world uh zagreus's quips and stuff like that uh those are integrated much the same way that just kind of line by line um they could have all the same requirements uh either uh on the entire batch or on an individual line so and again we just try to have lots and lots of them um we have a playback system where all of them will play randomly until the whole table is depleted and then we kind of reload the whole table just to get at the maximum amount of variety and reduce chances of anything playing back to back that sort of thing i'm really really grateful to our qa team uh for uh for making sure all this stuff worked because yeah the the narrative the amount of narrative content in this game kind of spun out of control to a certain extent and between our early access players and our qa team they they kept it um they kept it going and making sure everything was sounding good yeah for sure i mean and and one of so once once everything is integrated after greg has done that that you know process that is mystical to me somewhat of integrating all the everything into script uh and we play test internally a bunch to make sure everything is working before we send it out into the world especially before early access we rely more heavily on the internal play test where the whole team plays everything early access of course was an incredible source of feedback and we read every piece of it between our discord and reddit and all the other places that feedback was delivered to us we made sure to read it and respond to it the best we could uh one other thing that was interesting about the early access feedback is that it sort of protected the characters like once they were out in the world we we did you know we didn't want to cut a character that we'd already sort of released into the game uh for example so so i think greg was was grateful for that that that none of his the hard work that we'd done to to make these characters could be undone uh by our waffling on it or something uh early access feedback also helped shore up our confidence in the tone because the response had been so positive uh to a lot of the characters and and the voice over that that it gave us motivation to really keep pushing as hard as we could and it was really helpful for iterating on small stuff and fleshing out the characters a ton because it really uh exposed areas where oh we could do some more here we could we could push on this here with this character uh and it also led to some some silly stuff that we ended up doing uh so so you know lava when it is under the ground technically is called magma and there was a point in development where we had recorded maybe two dozen lines across five characters where they are saying the word lava uh referring to magma and somebody on reddit pointed this out uh and we greg scott was like you know what we should probably go and fix that so here's an example how was the lava temperature lately lenny was the magma temperature lately learning we went back in and picked up every single one of those uh two dozen or so lines across all those characters yeah and the this wasn't like meanly delivered no one was like roasting us for for for getting you know third grade uh geology or whatever the difference between lava and magma but it was one of those things where like i think if left to our own devices we just would have shipped this you know maybe insignificant error but an error nonetheless and uh yeah it's just an example of how our community was able to help us identify all these like little opportunities to just try and try and improve little aspects of the game they kept dishonest yes um so you know we were just kind of hurdling the the early access nature meant that the next milestone was kind of always around the corner so we were just in the thick of it making it happen and didn't have a ton of ability to kind of reflect back um on the process but uh so i think that really worked for us looking back on it was knowing that hades was going to be an early access game we approached the story like like a serial almost like a tv show with the early access launch being like a pilot um and knowing that the 1.0 launch would be like the finale so with the with the early access launch we introduced some of the characters set the stakes uh but the story doesn't end there and we just kind of built it out uh update by update until we finally uh introduced the ending um in in our in our final update before launch um having that outline was really really valuable um it let us we still could veer off course every which way and introduce characters we didn't anticipate but we knew what the through line was going to be darren and i you know were not a big team between the two of us so it was incredibly valuable that darren could just like solo record not just himself but with uh basically our entire cast i usually wouldn't be there uh because i would often be still writing while darren was recording so that was really helped uh save a ton of time um and yeah we would just keep like playing playing ourselves uh watching streams listening to feedback and it just kept spawning new ideas uh for for content and we'd always try to make time for the small kind of so-called unimportant moments unimportant in quotation marks because they're actually some of the most you know i think delightful moments in the game that you can experience even though they're not strictly needed um if you're interested in all the stuff we did with dialogue there's this video uh from the youtube channel people make games that delves into it uh really deeply uh that i recommend now the uh yeah the production of the game was not without its challenges uh uh not least of which were the the growing scope of the game uh as as we added more and more to the game there were more contexts that seemed like they needed bo that was highly specific to that context and so as the game expanded so did the vo scope and it just kind of snowballed and the more positive feedback we got on characters it made us want to push on those characters more and give them more to talk about more to do more to say and of course localization as you can see from that terrified emoji you know this was an involved process localizing the 300 000 or so words uh in the game uh early access development uh also provided its own sort of challenges uh the next big update was sort of always around the corner uh greg i'll let you i'll let you speak to this a little bit more directly yeah the the pressure to get it right the first time as it were so even though we're an early access game and you know technically nothing's finished and technically everything can still be iterated on uh as soon as we would put new story stuff into the game it was as though it was you know came from classical mythology itself and was instantly canonical so um it was like unthinkable the idea of like oh we're gonna cut this character or we're gonna completely rewrite this character um we we felt that that pressure but it was a it was a good pressure because uh players are really enjoying the the characters on the whole and yeah we were just you know inundated with feedback um players were really enjoying the game but they wanted more of it as as is often the case um and we we were just busy recording right like um sometimes up to three or four uh sessions per week uh but there was there was another uh significant challenge um last year that that is worth worth mentioning is this this little guy oh yeah there was a global pandemic in two thirds of the way through production uh that that was the thing that happened uh it certainly threw wrench into our plans a little bit uh we had to do all of our vo recording remotely a lot of it previously was being done in the actual office we had a vocal booth in the office um that you saw in that no clip documentary that's where that was happening and so we just had to improvise we had almost a third of the game's content left to record i would say at that point so we just sent all the actors snowballs uh blue snowballs here which is you know good little soldier mike that that did the job logan used this mic for all of pyre so i had confidence that it would just at least work uh you know it didn't it wasn't gonna necessarily match the sound of the mic we were recording them on in the office and the sort of outboard gear that i had that flowing going through um but i just figured well we just gotta get them recorded and i'll sort it out and post uh the best i can so i did my best to match uh the characters to their previous recordings uh to the best of my ability yeah and there was uh obviously such a harrowing time um and just on the on the project the idea that our entire voice over production might uh grind well the whole game uh much less the voice over production might grind to a halt uh was was really scary um uh but darren through his ingenuity we like barely skipped a beat we just kept on trucking and um uh and recorded so much of the most kind of essential stuff because we're recording all the ending content at that time some of the most important stuff in the game yeah i think i think zag had like three 000 lines left to record just by yeah it was a it was a lot it was the most like concentrated recording and with a lot of actors um but but we did it and this was our team um at the tail end of the project uh all on a happy zoom call um and we you know the the voiceover was just a small part of of the puzzle um but a really really fun uh part to work on you know we were able to uh record a whole bunch of stuff that got a really good response darren and i i remember we were just frequently really blown away and moved by people's like positive response to the to the voice acting because we had so many questions about whether everybody would be able to live up to logan's standard and all that kind of thing early access was really uh really really useful and helping us just catch uh little details and i think our initial assumption that going fully voiced would help bring these characters to life i think uh proved proved to work out very well absolutely and you know in hindsight there are things that i would maybe do a little bit differently or if we were to do do you know on our next hit that we could take into our next project uh would be i'd like to achieve a little bit more sonic consistency perhaps across the different characters in terms of what microphones are being used the signal path and you know maybe next time we can not have a global pandemic in the middle of the project it would help help with that if somebody could get right on that um i'd like to streamline the casting process going forward probably or if i were to go backward i would streamline the casting process because you know when we've reached outside of our network of actors it became pretty stressful and time-consuming and it and we were just kind of always worried about whether or not we get the thing we were looking for so maybe i'd we'd try to outsource that to a professional uh assassin uh who can find fine actors easily you know better file organization is something you know maybe our giant single folder for all of the vo files is not the best system perhaps and maybe an improved priority system for some of the thornier story events uh would be would be good as well it would save a lot of qa headaches on the back end perhaps and and small bugs that way and in terms of some other lessons that i i'm taking forward to whatever we do next is you know regular recurring vo sessions really really worked well for us for a lot of reasons it avoided the crush of of stuff at the end you don't run out of time necessarily to if you have new ideas you can add them you can't throw anything onto the pile when you already have a mountain to record all at once so that's one benefit i i also think it really gave us time to know the characters and for me as a director and for me as an actor it really gave me a better understanding of every single character we were recording just living with them for so long throughout the project and recording them consistently so it really gave me a better sense of does this sound like it's in their voice and if you know and and how would this character say this uh it was really important for me and i think most importantly of all the one of the most valuable lessons we learned which was a question that we had when we started this project was can early access work for narrative games and you know i i feel like for our part it it's worked out as as well as we could have hoped um in the case of hades so so yeah it really it really was uh was a was an exciting way to prove that out yeah it really um you know we would have ended with a much uh smaller and worse game if we uh somehow in an alternate reality made hades without the early access process so thank you so much for listening we're so incredibly grateful for the ongoing support for this game um darren i know you share my feeling that uh we're incredibly grateful to our colleagues at supergiant who do so much inspiring work to where we just want to live up to what they're doing with with our our own uh corner of it um and and we've stuck together all this time trying to see how long we can keep going making games together we want to keep on trucking for a while longer and having had this experience on hades or excited for what's next absolutely yeah i mean you you can't take a look at this image that jen and joanne collab on here and and think you know what i'm just going to phone it in yeah you got to give it you got to match the caliber of this kind of stuff so so yeah for my part i i really i really um am grateful to the entire team uh for the privilege to be able to work on games with them and and uh and thank you to gdc for having us uh it was a delight to be able to to get to talk about this just a sliver of uh of all the work that went into hades yeah and thank you to our incredible voice cast for making all this possible see ya [Music]

Channel: GDC

Views: 33,233

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: m5KJSAj4afg

Length: 59min 29sec (3569 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2021