Dine N Bash: Bark Sheet and Vocal Direction
I am currently working as the Narrative Designer and Producer on an academic team project, where a team of designers and programmers work together to create a game in a custom engine. The game is called Dine N Bash, and features typical Diner Dash-style pickup and drop-off of dishes to customers in a tavern. In Dine N Bash, however, customers are quick to throw things (fire projectiles) at the player if they wait too long, forcing the player to balance dish delivery with dodging axes and fireballs. Some of the characters are named NPCs, with detailed personalities and behaviors.
As the team's Narrative Designer, my goal was to insert setting and character into a very fast-paced, almost arcade-style sort of game. Players are often hyper-focused on gameplay, so I needed to work around that. I needed to find a way to develop character and setting in a way that was unobtrusive to gameplay, but still perceivable and understandable with only minimal player attention; the player is too focused on gameplay to read dialogue or study character models.
My solution to this was to add voice acting into the game. It requires no visual attention from the player, and has the potential to do wonders for character personality. So, I wrote a sheet of barks and grunts to be recorded by talented performers.
While writing barks and grunts, my primary goal was for each line to both communicate something about the character and/or setting, AND for each line to double as gameplay feedback. Each character is a customer that the player serves in the tavern, and I thought that the quality (speed) of the player's service should be reflected in the bark that the NPC provides in response. As seen above, Qlunk's speech patterns portray him as a quick-tempered, blunt individual with limited talent for language. However, the words and tone used to characterize Qlunk change depending on how the player performs. In this way, the voice acting helps the player understand how well they performed, in addition to characterizing the NPC.
I also wrote 3 variations of each kind of bark for each character. This creates a player experience where the player does not hear the same line more than once, which adds to the immersion of the game.
After casting a few vocally-talented people that I knew personally, I used my school's sound lab to record the voice acting. I provided vocal direction during the session. Dine N Bash is a fast-paced, chaotic game with a busy soundscape. Therefore, my direction emphasized diction and over-the-top excitement, so that the barks and grunts could cut through the busy soundscape of the game and be clearly perceived by the player as both gameplay feedback, and character development. I led recording for 5 different characters, all with 12-13 barks/grunts.
This was an extremely exciting project for me to work on. I got experience with writing barks and grunts for games, as well as experience providing vocal direction to talent in a dedicated sound lab. I think that the recordings turned out great, and I cannot wait for this content to make it into the final version of the game. The full Excel sheet is available below for download, if you'd like the take a look at the complete document!
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