The studio couldn't voice all NPCs due to a limited budget so the AI solution was perfect.
Neon Giant, the developer of the recent cyberpunk RPG The Ascent, revealed they teamed up with sound design house Sweet Justice Sound and Altered, developers of Altered Studio, to use a new AI-powered tool that allows creating a range of custom voices for new lines of dialogue. The team states 800 lines of dialogue for 40 different NPC characters were created using the Altered Studio tool for side missions that were previously subtitled. The additional voice-over content was to the game as a part of the latest update.
The team also shared some details on the workflow. Sound design house Sweet Justice Sound used Altered Studio to augment recordings captured by actor Sam Hughes – they got a multitude of diverse high-quality voice performances that was used for a range NPCs. They couldn't voice them all due to a limited budget so the AI solution was perfect.
"We are always striving to make The Ascent the best game it can be, and adding more voice-over dialogue was always on our list of things to do," said Co-founder and Creative Director of the studio Arcade Berg. "We are delighted to have been able to partner with the team at Altered who were able to provide an awesome solution to make this happen that aligned with our small studio mentality of working smarter and more efficiently whilst only having a small team of people."
"As a small development team, we always want to find and support people and companies with new and efficient cutting edge technology solutions and Altered Studio certainly fits into that category. They have been wonderful to work with and we hope that other developers will be able to benefit from Altered Studio to scale up the voice-over needs just as we did."
In case you missed the news about the update, all subtitled dialogue will now be voiced, plus players can get a free Winter Pack with the snowball grenade and three new fashion items.
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