a resource website for voice and dialogue specialists working in game development and interactive media
Videos
Presentations
Adam Ritchie
Senior Voice Designer, Adam Ritchie offers gain insight into the effort that goes into making NPCs talk and the pipeline and tools behind it, as well as challenges faced and overcome.
This is probably the most comprehensive video about Voice Design available at this time.
Elan Ruskin
In this classic GDC 2012 session, programmer Elan Ruskin shows a simple, uniform mechanism made for the Left 4 Dead series for tracking thousands of facts and possibilities, allowing intelligent characters to remember history, cascade from special to general cases, and select the optimal dialog, script, behavior, or animation for every situation.
Cassie Phillipps
In this 2016 GDC talk, Pocket Gems' Cassie Phillipps offers a crash course on how to create meaningful story branches without making narratives that are convoluted, confusing or shallow.
Anna Kipnis
In this 2015 GDC session Anna Kipnis, senior gameplay programmer at Double Fine, gives a broad overview of how dialog gets into a Double Fine game, from the moment a line is written to hearing and seeing the line in the engine, even in a foreign tongue.
William Armstrong & Patrick Ewing
In this 2017 GDC session, Unity's William Armstrong and Campo Santo's Patrick Ewing discuss the logic, tools, and workflow behind the dialog system used on Firewatch.
Jason Gregory
For Naughty Dog's The Last of Us, the game's sound team wanted to create an AI system that allowed NPCs to converse with each other in a more realistic fashion. In this 2014 talk, Jason Gregory explains the challenges they encountered in simulating these conversations, and the systems they used to overcome them.
Michael Csurics
In this 2017 GDC session, Brightskull Entertainment Group's Michael Csurics showcases the experimental and extensive lengths that were taken to create the voiceover performances in Tacoma, the followup to indie sensation Gone Home from the team at Fullbright.
Ariel Gross
There were over 80,000 lines of dialogue in Saints Row: The Third. Managing that many lines can be a daunting task for any audio team. In this 2012 talk, Ariel Gross, senior audio designer at Volition, imparts three valuable lessons learned throughout his adventures with voice so that you can sidestep some costly traps and save yourself from needless heartburn.
Jon Newman & David Osternacher
While principally about mixing and authoring for scale in general, this talk covers a great deal about recording, authoring, implementation and mixing for crowd systems.
Shreyas Nivas
In this 2021 GDC Summit talk, Replica Studios CEO Shreyas Nivas shares the latest developments in voice AI technology for video game characters.
Richie Nieto
In this 2014 GDC talk, Ubisoft Toronto's Richie Nieto showcases a step-by-step walkthrough of the pipeline for producing dialogue for the cinematics in Ubisoft's AAA title Splinter Cell: Blacklist, using state-of-the-art performance capture technology and a film-style dialogue recording and editing workflow.
Tomas Neumann
A section from a longer presentation on the audio of Overwatch, "The Elusive Goal: Play by Sound".
In this section Tomas Neumann discusses the goals and challenges of designing systems and treatments for competitive multiplayer.
David Peterson
David Peterson, linguist and inventor of languages for many TV shows and movies (including "Game of Thrones", "Dominion" and "The 100") will talk about his new book: "The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words Behind World-Building"
David Peterson
M'athchomaroon! David Peterson is the linguist behind Dothraki, as used in HBO's "Game of Thrones." He speaks to Googlers about the process behind inventing languages. Athdavrazar!
Michael Csurics
In this 2015 GDC Audio Bootcamp talk, Michael Csurics breaks down the basics of dialogue editing for video game sound designers in the sound editing process.
Piotr Tomsinski
In this 2016 GDC session, CD Projekt Red's Piotr Tomsinski explains the process for creating the dialogue animation system of The Witcher 3.
Remy Boicherot
In this 2017 GDC talk, Hangar 13's Remy Boicherot dives into "Sit Downs," the semi-interactive cinematics with high-tension procedural dialogue sequences putting the player into tough choice situations in Mafia III.
Ryan M. James
In this 2017 GDC session, Naughty Dog's Ryan M. James shares some of the methods used to create realistic performances for animated characters in the studio's games.
DB Cooper
In this 2014 GDC session, voice and casting director DB Cooper explores some playful techniques for developing characters, and tricks to help keep your voice actor on track while recording video game dialogue.
Nadège Josa
In this 2017 GDC session, Sony Interactive Entertainment's Nadège Josa showcases LAMS, Sony's in-house software for enabling effective localization for globally released games.
Tom Slattery
In this 2015 GDC talk, Bungie's Tom Slattery explains why Bungie assembled its own internal localization team, and how this--along with adherence to a strict set of guiding principles for crafting a localization-friendly shared world--allowed it to overcome localization challenges efficiently while holding the quality of this nascent global brand to an uncompromisingly high bar.
Peter Zinda
In this 2014 GDC session, Formosa Group's Peter Zinda offer a nitty-gritty breakdown on how to use signal processing to improve your game's sound design.
Interviews & Panels
Kareem Shuman
Bungie's Technical Dialogue Designer, Kareem Shuman, discusses his role and career as part of the IGDA's Game Audio Leadership panel.
Leilani Ramirez
Sony PlayStation's Manager of Dialogue Leilani Ramirez talks about her journey through the entertainment industry.
Kareem Shuman
An Audio/Sound Design panel featuring Technical Dialogue Designer Kareem Shuman of Bungie.
Victoria Prentice
A Game Audio panel featuring Dialogue Supervisor Victoria Prentice from Playground Games.
Khris Brown
Voice Director Khris Brown discusses her career in dialogue for games.
Victoria Prentice
A Women In Games interview with Playground Games' Dialogue Supervisor Victoria Prentice discussing her career so far and working with voice and dialogue in games.
Behind The Scenes
Anthony Beau Jimenez
This video from Gamer Forecast is compiled from a series of posts from Anthony Beau Jimenez on Twiter, describing how the breathing system was created for The Last Of Us Part 2.
Greg Kasavin
This video from People Make Games explains the dialogue system and treatment developed for Hades. Includes interview excerpts with Supergiant's Greg Kasavin.
Chris Landreth
Cyberpunk 2077 Speech Animation Workflow: An audio performance and tagged animation transcript from Canada's JALI Inc. is used to generate expressive high fidelity multi-lingual speech at unprecedented scale in a highly anticipated massive open world video game from CD PROJEKT RED with complex branching narrative.
Game Designer Plays
Game Designer Discusses Innovative Dialogue Systems within games. Highlighting why they are unique and how they innovate dialogue.
Razzy
"I really need a haircut... Welcome to part 2 of my highly subjective Oxenfree discussion, in which I talk mostly about its dialogue. Feel free to contribute to the conversation in the comments, though I'd recommend watching both parts if possible before doing so."
Game Audio Analysis
"DISCLAIMER: I did not work on this game nor do I have any affiliation with it. Through research and some guesswork I tried to demystify how some of the audio systems work. There are definitely some inaccuracies in this video but my main goal is to explain some of the ways dialogue in games work as a whole. Big shoutout to the incredible audio team at Naughty Dog who created this masterpiece!"
Tutorials
John Purcell
John Purcell, Film Dialogue Editor & Author of "Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures: A Guide to the Invisible Art", has recorded a series of videos for The Sela Yaniv School.
John Purcell
An older series of videos by John Purcell on the art of dialogue editing.