Kareem

This is how I do it:

How do you know you're in a fancy mall? There are signs...

It's incredible!! Did you know he composed most of it based on the books and script? He didn't wait for cinematography to start coming in.

Ghost of Yotei

Two months after firing over Charlie Kirk comments, Ghost of Yotei dev blames harassment campaign, not 'bad joke'
aftermath.site/sucker-punch-c...

a man is holding a sword in his hand and saying `` william ! '' ALT: a man is holding a sword in his hand and saying `` william ! ''

A Knight’s Tale is a sports anime

Excellent take!

All the Roberts working on Fortnite:

I think that's a valid choice for sound design, a little harder for music, and kind of impossible for dialogue.

Maybe if a dialogue team only used human scratch recorded professionally and some of the actors were really good? That could work but it would be much slower than most temp VO systems.

SILENCE... The ultimate solution to all game audio problems!

I feel like that's more upsetting than shipping temp content tbh, just nothing there.

Until a non-audio director comes over and says "Why did you start taking out the walkie-talkie effect on all of the voice lines? I thought it was very creative and gave our world a really cool, grungy quality. Can you bring it back?"

It's a great solution, and can still backfire!

"These voice actors are good, but I'm missing a nice satisfying SNAP at the start to grab my attention."

Gosh we as humans can get attached to the wildest things.

Yeah, I would say text-to-speech (aka robo) is the industry standard solution right now for temp dialogue.

Still, it's not unusual to be in a situation where folks want to hear temp dialogue, but like BETTER. And that's a slippery slope.

Gotta get the audio designer SAG certified if you wanna keep it next time!

Was he doing it all in his natural voice or was he doing an impression of each of the iconic characters?

I didn't really talk about how it can be useful, both as a proof of functionality and to create awareness outside of the audio team of what we're working on.

I'm not opposed to implementing temp audio, I just think it can easily cause a surprising amount of issues.

You just have to make sure nobody's TOO GOOD at their mouth noises or an asset or two might creep into the final product!

As a dialogue developer I am jealous of this solution that doesn't translate over to my team!

I did the thing.

bsky.app/profile/shad...

Repeated Listening Increases the Liking for Music Regardless of Its Complexity: Implications for the Appreciation and Aesthetics of Music Psychological and aesthetic theories predict that music is appreciated at optimal, peak levels of familiarity and complexity, and that appreciation of music exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship with familiarity as well as complexity. Because ...

I've said no to temp dialogue requests in favor of just leaving something silent until we get the final assets recorded and in place. And I hate saying no to people.

Game development is hard, and temp audio is a trap.

SOURCES:
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

www.bbc.com/future/artic...

So yeah, in conclusion navigating temp audio can really trip you up in ways that are surprising and confounding.

I've found myself arguing with audio directors on behalf of making temp assets sound worse to ensure that no one ends up falling in love with them.

- RECORD AND IMPLEMENT SCRATCH VO

"Ok great! We're ready to start casting the actual voice actor for this role now. Wait, how come no one sounds as good to me as the person we used for the scratch VO?"

- RE-RECORD THE VO WITH THE SAME SCRATCH VOICE ACTOR BUT THIS TIME BETTER BECAUSE IT'S FINAL

"This temp VO doesn't sound great, it's just a text-to-speech system. Can we upgrade to a more expensive synthetic voice tool?"

- NEW TEMP VOICE TOOL

"The voices are very realistic but it's lacking emotional tone and rhythm. Let's replace it with scratch VO where we cheaply record real voices."

Dialogue suffers from these problems a lot. And it can quickly turn into a work spiral that causes us to spend way more energy on temp than we should.

"We're seeing subtitles but no audio, can we get some temp VO in here? It'll help with player comprehension in our UX testing?"

- INSERT TEMP VO

Congratulations, you've just made the build unplayable without the audio fully muted! And now many of your coworkers are very mad at you for hurting their ears.

It's very hard to tiptoe a line with temp audio that creates a solution which is:

- Clearly temp
- Unappealing
- Not annoying

Problem #3: Grating audio upsets people more easily than grating visuals.

Ok, so the second problem means we can't use temp assets that are even a tiny bit appealing. Let's use our worst sounding, nails-on-a-chalkboard sound effect as temp then. No one can get attached to that!

YouTube video by Every Frame a Painting The Marvel Symphonic Universe

Check out this youtube clip of famous music composers talking about how much they hate it when directors and editors start using temp music in projects:

youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs?...

This means in games there's a real danger to making temp audio assets with EVEN THE TINIEST amount of appeal to them.

Coworkers, including directors and people who sign your checks will listen to these temp assets over and over and can end up VERY ATTACHED to the audio equivalent of lorem ipsum.