Wednesday, April 1, 2009

April Fools: Technology Prevails

An important and delightful announcement: Katawa Shoujo will be fully voiced, including all characters with sprites and the protagonist Hisao himself.

I know that this is probably a surprise to anyone who has been reading the blog even cursorily. Well, what can I say? It's not the first and probably not the last time we do an about-face with a fundamental design decision, but there you have it. Perhaps some clarification would be appropriate? As previously stated, organizing the voice acting has been the impregnable wall that prevented us from pursuing a voiced game (not to mention the time it takes to do all the recording, sheesh). However, with the advance of voice synthetisation technology, new avenues have opened. We recently found out that with relatively little effort, it's possible to attain results that are almost on par with your average amateur voice acting. This immediately struck us as a potential gold mine: no organizing human resources, easy re-recording in case of script changes, fast and efficient all around. Sounds good to me. There is still work involved, after all everything has to be recorded and cued into the game, but delta agreed to go the extra mile to deliver voicing. This means he now takes on the mantle of Voice Engineer in the KS project.

With the biggest hurdles thus conquered, there is pretty much nothing to stop us now, apart maybe the yet again bloating game size (I wouldn't be surprised if the full, final game were to chase the 1 Gb limit). Anyway, it makes me very happy to think that KS will now truly have full, commercial-scale and if you don't mind me saying, commercial-quality assets in every department.

Here are short voiced script samples, please enjoy!

(click name links for the samples)










In other news, we are also looking for a music person who is also very competent with the Vocaloid software to compose an OP song for the game. Please contact us at the IRC channel, by e-mail or at the forums if you are interested.