Behind the scenes: Bionic Heart and voices in games (Patreon)

When I finished the first Bionic Heart game, I got a lot of positive reception all around internet. I wrote that game all by myself not even using an editor. Of course the final result, all things considered, wasn't bad, even if not as good as a native English speaker of course.

In any case, the story was good and people really liked it. I remember when I showed the game to Hanako, and she asked me for the full game (yeah being friend with other indies can sometimes get you free games ! ;P). Or when my friends at Moacube bought it to "study" it (and they could have picked many other games instead).

That was one of the rare cases in which indie friends were so eager to play the game to either ask me or buy it. So I knew that somehow, I did a good story.

The voices are a different story: don't get me wrong, the voice actors did a great job but I hired a mix of pro/amateur voice artists, in some cases the audio wasn't of good quality simply because of cheap equipment and so on. I couldn't afford to pay much, but I still wanted the game fully voiced, so I had to make compromises.

I am not sure if making the game fully voiced was a good idea or not: I really liked Tanya/Helen voice and especially in... "some scenes" I think they add something more than just reading plain text on the screen.

In future I didn't do it again because I realized that I was incredibly lucky with that game. Indeed for Heileen 2, I had planned to voice it all, I even had more money available, but still many voice artists were late, and in the end I had to leave Heileen unvoiced (even if apparently in many japanese VNs the main character is often left voiceless so it wasn't even too bad).

In summary, voices is yet another extra layer that gets added to writing, music and art (for pure VNs I don't even consider coding since is very simple). And each extra layer can lead to delays or extra costs so that's why I never attempted to make a fully voiced game.

I might be changing this though - the secret yuri game I'm working on in these months might be fully voiced also because it has a lot of inner thinking and descriptive parts and very few dialogues... :)