Dev Feedback: Character Voices and Personality

[Squ'ith Shapeshifter]

After clocking up my first few hours of play, I suddenly became aware of the idea that each of the androids has a unique "voice". This is an incredibly subtle nuance, and I only found it to be detectable after playing as a series of different androids in quick succession.

Now, I just wanted to put my two cents in and say that this feature seems woefully underdeveloped, and I would like to urge the developers to expand upon this feature if/when such a thing becomes feasible. You've already shown that you're capable of injecting a concentrated dose of personality into your little android creations, but unfortunately, this personality does not extend to the character voice-overs.

Each of the voice-over lines seem to be identical across all androids. Personally, I would like hear some variation. Some stuttered and fearful lines from Holly. Some inane comments from Starch. Some cutesy-fied Robocop/Judge Dredd references from Cactus. In particular, the VO lines that play when the user reaches 100-enemy-long-kill-chains are prime targets for drawing upon the abundant sense of personality that the androids have shown thus far.

If you do ultimately choose to alter the voice-over features in such a way, it may be beneficial to have some character-specific speech play whenever someone selects a new character. Something that translates to a character-specific version of "I'm ready to kick butt and take names." (Except for Holly. I doubt she'd ever claim to be ready for anything other than light filing duty) This would immediately make the player aware that the robotic voices they are hearing henceforth belong to the android they selected, and aren't just coming from an omnipresent game-narration robot.

Finally, I would make a suggestion to use actual voice-samples for the androids instead of artificial text-to-speech generators, but I haven't the slightest clue about how much it costs to hire professional voice-actors, and whether this option would be reasonable considering your budget for Assault Android Cactus. If it were feasible, however, I suspect you'd get a stronger sense of genuine emotion and character out of a real actor (and then altering the sound clips to sound more robotic) than you would by using any conventional text-to-speech application.

Anyway, I do hope this helps. Wishing you guys at Witch Beam success in this and any future endeavours. :)

[Sycle]

First of all, I appreciate that you noticed and were willing to share your thoughts!

This is an area we're keen to develop, so I'm glad to see our thoughts are pretty much aligned. The current speech is synth is there for testing - it was to figure out what would be informative vs annoying, and if different voices could be identifiable in multiplayer without overwhelming the mix.

I'm inclined to keep the ingame android chatter largely functional, but find a way to have fun with it and show some character. The most expressive lines are in multiplayer where one character takes or retakes the score lead, and as you mention, the 100 chain hits. We started by brainstorming a bunch of different things they could say and started putting them in game, just to see what felt right and what felt jarring, and we'll be continuing this and looking for more specific 'in character' comments when we start doing voice recording. (it's not really possible to get an emotional read out of a synth)

Barks on the character select screen are also a great idea! Really it's just the stage of development we're at - voice acting can get expensive quite quickly, and so we've been prototyping what we can so that when we do start recording, we can minimise rework. (also by leaving it later, we'll hopefully have raised some funds from pre-sales)

There are a lot of areas we will be improving as we go (you might have noticed that Lemon and Coral don't have stage enter / stage clear animations yet) and character dialogue is definitely part of that! Thanks for your feedback!

[The Grand Mugwump]

I'd love it if the characters each have their own voices and lines for various events in game, especially for local co-op. It would really add some auditory flavor.

My only concern is keeping their lines varied enough or having a delay between them so two (or more) players who are neck and neck with each other on the score aren't spamming dialogue every time they take turns killing something.

[Sycle]

If you get a chance to try out local co-op, let me know what you think of the current mix! Obviously the voices will change, but that's the system and frequency of the ingame voice we're going for.

[Squ'ith Shapeshifter]

Thanks for your reply, Sycle. If nothing else, I suppose my comments may help reinforce the idea that your aforementioned plans for the game are perfectly sound. :P

Oh, there are more voice samples specifically for co-op? As a socially isolated shut-in, I must admit I was unaware of this. xD

Also, Lemon and Coral will eventually be getting their own intro/victory animations? Nice! I actually kinda assumed that they shared Cactus' animations intentionally, to demonstrate that they were every bit as capable of acrobatics/combat as the Constable herself, or just to demonstrate that these androids were the "norm" in terms of both mechanical design and personality-programming... Which is to say, unlike the clearly-overwhelmed Holly, or the sanity-deprived Starch. Either way, I'll be interested to see what you end up doing for Lemon and Coral for this. Keep up the good work!