Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 50 Recording Site
Time comes the next day.

The "Micro Era" project still needs time to be perfected. At the very least, the artists need to create a few decent original drawings, since humans are visual creatures after all.

Discussions about "Final Front" continue, with Liu Cixin's Weibo posts, game cutscenes, and a new base mode, even though it's been several days since the game's release.

But players always seem to have endless topics to discuss.

However, no matter how popular the game is.

For Chu Chen, and for all the participants in the "Final Front" project, the work still needs to continue.

Take, for example, the recording studio for "The Final Front" at this moment.

Normally, the audio portion of most games is outsourced.

Because game audio is a self-contained and complex system, involving highly specialized fields such as music composition, sound effect design, and voice acting.

Outsourcing companies specializing in this field can leverage their highly concentrated talent pool to offer lower prices and higher efficiency.

Therefore, there are many companies in the game industry that outsource sound effects and motion capture. The audio part of "Final Front" was also outsourced, and it was connected with Yufei Music, a top domestic game audio integrator.

This company is quite well-known in the industry. They have produced the audio for many games in China in recent years, including "Three Kingdoms Kill" and "Warship Girls".

They are professional, at a level where it's difficult to get them to achieve 100%, but they definitely won't hold us back.

They are responsible for the current background music, gun sound effects, UI sound effects, and so on in "Final Front".

However, there was one thing Chu Chen didn't outsource: character voice acting.

There are two main reasons why this wasn't outsourced.

Firstly, voice acting is actually a very important aspect of anime-style games.

Because anime-style games, compared to regular games, are cultural products with relatively high emotional value, their business logic, in addition to their inherent game attributes, also possesses certain characteristics of the animation industry.

Previous works include "Genshin Impact," "Honkai Impact 3," and "The Sound of the Rising Sun."
The voice actors in these popular games can all leverage their roles to develop their own IP.

Some voice actors for popular characters can easily gain hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of fans just by playing those roles.

This is something that players in later generations are already familiar with.

But upon closer examination, this is actually quite remarkable, because the fact that these voice actors can incubate IPs is not actually part of the logic chain of the game industry, but rather the logic of the animation industry.

It's because players like the characters, and then, by extension, they like the voice actors.

This is why Chu Chen has always emphasized making payments based on emotions rather than intensity, because the game is a game, but it is not entirely a game.

Regular gamers don't care about the quality of a character's voice actor, but repeat gamers do. Regular gamers don't care who the voice actor is or whether there are any issues, but repeat gamers do.

That's why Chu Chen attaches great importance to voice actors and is unwilling to outsource them. After all, outsourcing means losing control, and if a voice actor for a popular character has a problem, the game will also be subject to public opinion.

Secondly, Chu Chen also attaches great importance to the overall voice acting quality of the game. In his previous life, Mingchao had neglected this aspect.

As a result, during the entire 1.0 major version, the characters' lines had a noticeable "wooden reading" feel, and the voice acting of many characters, such as Ji Yan and Yang Yang, was questioned by players for lacking emotional tension.

These problems, mixed in with the pace of the server launch, unexpectedly became the straw that broke the camel's back.

Therefore, while others in the world may not yet understand this, Chu Chen is well aware of the importance of voice actors, especially in the current era when the quality of voice actors in China is mixed.

Japanese voice acting can be outsourced because Japan's entire voice actor system is so well-established, with no issues with the basic quality of voice directors and actors.

Moreover, there are a large number of voice actors in Japan.

Chu Chen can choose a role like selecting a concubine, auditioning multiple voice actors for each character before finally settling on one.

But in the country.

At this point in time, the voice actor system in the industry is far from sound, and most voice actors do not have agencies; they are simply affiliated with audio outsourcing companies to take on projects.

Therefore, Chu Chen could only match the characters to the voice directors he had poached from the voice-over outsourcing company, just like in a job interview, relying on names he remembered that were somewhat familiar.

Although it was a bit troublesome, the revenue from "Final Front" over the past two months has been quite good, and Chu Chen has been able to use money to establish a basic framework. Now, Xingchen not only has a five-person voice acting and directing team, but has also built a professional-grade recording studio in the industrial park for nearly a million yuan.

At this moment, dubbing work is in progress in this recording studio.

A girl in her early twenties stood in front of the standing microphone and slightly adjusted the angle of her headphones.

Her name is Jiang Yue. She was originally a freelance voice actress, but she has now joined Starry Sky.

Today is her first time participating in the recording of "The Final Front".

Like many people starting work at a new company for the first time, the girl on her first day of "work" took her work very seriously and even put on light makeup.

When I arrived at the company, I felt inexplicably nervous.

Fortunately, after a morning of recording, she quickly got into the swing of things, and her nervousness disappeared.

The red voice-over light in the room lit up again.

The extremely simple stick figure reappeared on the screen in front of her. An ordinary person might just want to laugh at this, but Jiang Yue's temperament instantly underwent a subtle change.

"Commander! Enemies!"

"Cover the commander's retreat! Retreat! Retreat!"

"hurry up!!"

Jiang Yue's speech quickened, her voice tightened, and after a few more lines, her voice slowed down slightly, and she let out a long sigh.

"Well done, we're safe for now..."

[The commander was found clutching his chest.]

"Commander?! Why are you bleeding?!"

"What? When did this happen?!"

[The Soviet android girl named Mosingana anxiously examined the commander's chest. Her snow-white hands were stained with the commander's blood. Without a doubt, the commander had been shot.]

"Commander! Are you alright?!"

The girl knelt down in front of the commander, looking at the blood on his chest with a somewhat bewildered expression.

"Commander!! I'm sorry, I didn't realize I shouldn't have done that."

[The commander patted the girl's head: This isn't your fault; I took on this mission myself.]

"commander!"

Her voice was tinged with sobs.

"Don't cry, I'm fine," the wounded commander said, smiling as he stood up. He opened his clothes, revealing a metal amulet damaged by a bullet; this amulet had just managed to stop the fatal wound.

"Commander!!! What time is it?! How can you still be playing tricks on people?"

This time, Jiang Yue's tears were tinged with a smile.

The girl gently punched the commander's chest with her fist, and the commander coughed lightly twice.

"Commander!"

It's alright...it's just a pity about the amulet you gave me.

"Commander, I...I'll make you an even better one."

Several commanders spoke in succession, but each time their tone was different, and the changes were quite natural.

(End of this chapter)