Ariane here! I’m a voice actor and casting director working with Illusory World. Unbearable Crush has been my first time in the casting director and voice director chair. I was so excited to bring my experiences, training, and processes into these positions.

While I might be biased, voice acting in games I love is precisely why I think a lot of games would benefit from voice acting. Voice acting can elevate any indie project. By having talented performers give voice to your stories, you can:

Improve Accessibility

For those that have difficulty reading texts on screen, voice acting helps players keep up with your stories in a conversational matter. This is especially helpful for lore-heavy games. Voice acting can also help indicate intentions for certain statements: such as sarcastic remarks, passive aggressive remarks, and lies. For a comedic and character focused game like Unbearable Crush, voice acting helps players keep up with dialogue heavy scenes and catch jokes.

Add Dimension to Your Character

The sound of a voice and even the manner of speaking can give players auditory cues about character, such as: their moods, their backgrounds, their age, their personality, and more. Even with a simple pink-haired anime girl design, telling your voice actor to give her a whispery high pitched voice vs. a projecting voice mid tone voice will force the players to have two different assumptions about the character. For Unbearable Crush, we are helping Kanna be with her crush and beat her love rivals: Maya and Charlotte. When casting, our choices help further cement some key differences between the three. Maya’s methods are manipulative and quiet, Charlotte’s are performative and bombastic, and Kanna’s are conversational and sincere. The voices we establish for these characters helps cement the differences through volumes, acting intentions, and textures.

Make Your Game More Immersive

Unless playing on mute, sound is part of the player experience. As a kid, I remember skipping a lot of video game tutorials and scenes because they were unvoiced and couldn’t keep my attention. Illusory World’s VNs are very dialogue heavy, and Unbearable Crush is no different. While playing from the perspective of Ringo, you are constantly listening and conversing with other characters. Voices add a layer of empathy and engagement, that players can have reactions and personal responses to add to their experience. One of the most satisfying points in voice directing was playing the demo and getting to see a narrative come to life. Since the story follows Ringo, reading and preparing for scenes felt like I was reading Ringo’s diary. But, hearing Matthew Kreta’s final takes in the game, I was mentally interacting with the characters more. It’s an otherworldly place when a scene visually and audibly captures you.

Voice acting is a fun and useful asset for a lot of genres and types of games! If you are even slightly considering implementing it in your own projects, I would highly encourage you to go for it!

I always love hearing how voice acting has affected different players, both for my voice acting and directing work. If you have a great memory or example of video game voice acting, please share in the comments.

Otherwise, I’d be happy to talk with you more about video game voice acting at arianekmarchese@gmail.com