A Room to Scream In

The difference in quality of voice work vastly depends on your setup. So, how do you get a studio-quality recording on a tiny budget?

For our game, we achieved the voice work with a mid-range Yeti mic, the Audacity recording program, and a walk-in closet.

Echoes and noise are your two biggest factors in muddying up the quality of the voice files. To combat this, we need a soundproof room. This can be a space that takes tens of thousands of dollars to prepare or you can rent studio space for a few hundred dollars a session. Both of these were out of our price range and the rental would have needed to be planned out times to reserve the space. Fixing problems on the go and re-recording lines isn’t possible.

So we constructed our own space within our walk in closet. The clothes in the closet acted as sound dampeners, and some strategically hung suit jackets along the door and exposed wall were perfect for stopping a lot of reverberations and echoes in the recording. This also took out the static noise from all but the loudest sounds outside the room.

Next, Audacity was used to filter out the noise. The program has a nifty feature where you can record a baseline empty room, subtract that sound from any new files, and what you’re left with is a clean voice with no extra noises or buzzing. Each line is an individual file. We recorded the lines three times in a row, cut our favorite take, and applied the filters. This process saved us a tremendous amount of time, though it did take much more time than other options.

Part of being an independent game developer is finding ways to get big budget results with a fraction of the resources. I’m very proud of how well our soundwork turned out!

Tomorrow is the big day of our launch! Keep an eye on the Steam Store for the full release of Necromance!