Banjo-Kazooie Voice Mod

[Benjamoose]

EDIT: DOWNLOAD NOW AVAILABLE

The first version has been released!
https://youtu.be/UVlzXGDKRAk
The download link is in the description.

Current Status (as of posting):

I've been working on this on and off for hours at a time over the last week. I'm finally at a point where it's kind of worth looking at, so I'm sharing my current status in the video below!
https://youtu.be/_Ylc2NXRZOM

"What is this?"

This is a voice mod that replaces all of Yooka and Laylee's voice clips with their counterparts from Banjo-Kazooie.

"But I like their current voices!"

That's cool! I have no problems with the current voices (apart from Trowzer, but that's a whole other story). This is just something I've been experimenting with to see how it would sound. I'm sure even if you're not interested in downloading it, it's still interesting to see what the results are.

A Brief Background

So without mincing words, this project is a massive pain in the backside. I wont go into the tediously long method of unpacking and repacking the .bnk files, but the end result of which isn't much help.

For starters, both Yooka and Laylee have their own voice banks, but they also have tons of sounds in large quantities strewn across other irrelevant sound banks.

Here is an example of just one bank:
http://i.imgur.com/Xx78tt2.jpg

There are roughly 200 sounds in this bank alone. Some are Yooka's, some are Laylee's, the rest are sound effects.

The sounds have no information in their filenames or elsewhere as to what they are, so the only way to figure them out is to go through them one by one. To make matters worse, even if you find all of their files in one bank, many of them sound either the same or extremely similar, due to their simplistic manner of speaking.

To rectify this, I would play the game without music on one monitor, while playing their sounds in a looped playlist. I would let the looping playlist burn itself into my head as I was testing to help me identify which specific sounds were which.

Then, for the few that I couldn't detect, I would record my voice over them saying random words or phrases.

Here is an example of some of that experimentation:
https://youtu.be/y5q8k0eHsa4?t=14s

There were also some other hurdles to overcome such as timing or splicing.

For timing, I would record animations in-game, then fit audio to said animations in a video editor. Then I would copy that timing into the sound files. The reason this had to be done was that some animations use multiple sound files in sequence, and getting the timing right with empty space had to be done to make sure the sounds (for the most part) matched what the characters were doing.

As for splicing, some of Banjo-Kazooie's sound files were separate files played in sequence on the Nintendo 64, whereas on Yooka-Laylee, mirrored sounds would be just one file. In those cases I would edit the files together to match the Nintendo 64 timing, then implement them into Yooka-Laylee.

Has this whole process been overly hard? Not really. Just incredibly tedious and long-winded. But I'll press on!

"Enough chit-chat goggle-face! Where's the download link!"

Soon I promise! For the time-being I just want to show my progress and to do a write-up where I can post links to the GameBanana upload when it's done.

If this submissions leaves the front couple of pages, please don't bug the mods by bumping it if possible. I'll bump the submission myself when a download link has been added, so don't fret!

Progress

All but about two of Yooka's sounds are completed. These final sounds are currently my voice saying "Apples" and "Vegetables". I've yet to trigger them in-game. I have a funny feeling they are rare-chance taunt sounds, but until I can confirm this, I can't replace them properly.

All of Laylee's taunt sounds are done (apart from two that use her movement sounds from a different bank), but I've yet to fully invest in replacing all of hers. It's the next thing I'm doing the moment I finish up Yooka's final sounds mentioned above.

"Are you planning on doing all of the characters?"

Probably not. I'm looking at this from the point of view of "what if this was a Banjo-Kazooie sequel". If that were the case only the protagonists would need to return. In theory they could easily have a new antogonist, items to collect and characters to interact with. Really all you would need is a model replacement and it'd technically be a sequel.

That said, I might do some optional replacements in the future, such as Pagie voice to Jiggy voice, collectable sounds and upgrades, and then if I have any time for just messing around, might experiment with replacing some more characters into Banjo voices (Capital B to Gruntilda for example, but this would just be for fun at that point).


One sound I forgot to show in the video at the top of the post is Kazooie's egg spit:
https://youtu.be/iob-r9UpAPk?t=48s

[Benjamoose]

I'm also chatting with some folk on the Yooka-Laylee Discord server and among other things being figured out, subtitles can also now be edited relatively easily.

https://youtu.be/qqFiP3m4ziM

[TheForestSpirit]

Haha that's not bad at all

Good job man good job :D

[Lenny McLennington]

i love u no ♥♥♥♥

[Jack Sparrow's Vindication]

Looks so cool. I'll DL as soon as it's released.

[Benjamoose]

The first version has been released!
https://youtu.be/UVlzXGDKRAk

The download link is in the description.

[Jack Sparrow's Vindication]

Grabbed it! So glad you got it out before the wrong people noticed.