PBH Technical Post - Voice Acting?! (Patreon)

Hello everyone, it's PBH technical post day! (Well, it's a bit later than that, sorry! But there will be another one this month!) As you can tell from the title, I'm really excited to talk about voice acting today!

First and foremost - the voice acting is handled by Studio Coattails. If you want some voice acting for a visual novel, or if you want to voice one of our characters one day, take a look at their site! Our casting call docs get sent to their casting pool.

I don't know the nitty-gritty details that go into voice acting, so I'm just going to mainly talk about the process from how I experienced it, and I hope that gives some insight!

When PBH was initially concepted, it was meant to be a short, small scope game with either no or partial voice acting. We deliberated quite a bit on the question, and decided to go with partial voice acting! I thought it could give a lot of energy and identity to the characters, and I was playing games like Etrian Odyssey Untold at the time where I really enjoyed the partial VA.

This was from the doc. November... 2020... We're... doing our best...!!!! So from the get-go, we wanted to keep the door open for a fully voiced game, maybe with a Kickstarter like how Heart of the Woods did.

We made this doc and sent it out in July 2020, and got such an overwhelming, wonderful response! I honestly did not expect so many auditions, but I'm very grateful and I thought that I wanted to keep making more games and more characters to work with more people.

Redacted text for mild spoilers! We tried to do a range of emotions for the audition lines.

Actually, on that topic! On the topic of accents!!! I'm sure you all noticed Aspen & Juliet's British accents. We got mentions of that in the feedback too! They're British accents, not kiwi to clarify. It was a bit of a struggle, actually, trying to balance accents and the type of character voice we wanted. Kiwi accents are a bit of a niche! In the end we landed here mostly because we were in love with the character acting, but my experience living in New Zealand did mean I heard a lot more UK accents than American ones. One time on the radio, I heard a guest speaker and immediately went 'wow, that sounds very American' - just a small reaction to something that was a bit outside of the norm for me.

Small details like where characters grew up and all aren't all that difficult to adjust, so we were happy to hear all sorts of accents. Aspen moved to NZ around grade 6-8 from the UK! Juliet has been around for longer than New Zealand and the modern kiwi accent has. Miho picked up her English in America!

(Please add 'Fantasy' as a prefix to any location name I write!)

A couple more character docs! Representation is very important to us, so we specifically asked for BIPOC voice actors / Korean VA for Juliet and Miho.

I'm still going back and forth on this but Miho encounters another Korean person in the events of PBH, and they can bond over Korean culture together. Both of the people we cast are fluent in Korean, so I'm trying to figure out if I want Korean voices for those scenes or English. We shall see!

We closed auditions at the end of August, and picked our VAs in September! We (as in me, Josh, Theo and Syon) each made a shortlist of 2-3 voices for each role and then did a vote + discussion to finalize our choices.

After that, we confirmed the roles with the cast and then they were on standby until we finalized episode one!

That took a little while... but we got there in the end! We started officially recording in January. Around that time I also played Collar x Malice (and Unlimited, the fandisk), and Unlimited in particular had voice lines for menu stuff so I asked for that to be added in pretty impromptu there and then. I'm so glad everyone seems to like it!!!

I managed to be there for a couple of the sessions and it really is so much fun... I didn't have too much input but it was really nice to watch! We try and make sure at least one of us (me, Josh, Theo) is there for each of the sessions.

This post was a little rambly, but I hope you enjoyed it nevertheless. Be sure to reply with any other aspects of PBH development that you're curious about for future technical posts! I read each and every comment!

- adi