Project Voice v0.01: Late Night Debut

The first release for my new experimental side project is now available to Power Player level supporters, rolling out to Fan level in a couple weeks, and going public in a month!

It blows my mind that this release has taken this long. I’ve been telling myself Project Voice is just a small side project, something to drum out quickly to try out a few things, but it turned into such an endless procession of problems, challenges, and ever more editing that now I’m finally coming up for air, it seems at once ridiculous and only too real that it’s eaten this much of my time. Probably the biggest problem was that I really wanted to offer “a complete path” with a sex scene and everything in the first version, along with all the heavy work of building the game from scratch and learning how to produce new kinds of content. It was far too greedy a goal for a v0.01, I’m sorry to say.

But we’re finally here, and the game is ready, so let’s talk about it.

Project Voice is my big push to experiment with voice acting, for several reasons. I want to push myself to see what I’m capable of in this field, I want to get more comfortable working with audio in Unity, and I want to contribute some to the ideas of what voice acting can and should be in adult media. A lot of this was about learning, and goodness knows I learned a lot. I didn’t anticipate the sheer volume of work the editing would be, and that was a big element in what makes this… a weird release.

I did the best I could to make v0.01 a playable experience you can “complete,” at least going down one path, but I finally decided I had to set a deadline and just get the game out there so I can move on to other things (Project Wild One) for a while. And while there were still a hundred things to add and fix before the game could really be ready for release, there was one thing I very clearly couldn’t do in time.

I’m sorry to say that the actual voice lines for this project are only partway filled in, and cut off rather abruptly before it gets to “the good stuff” as of this release. You’ll still be able to play all the way through to the end, and I have all the lines recorded, but picking out takes, re-recording as needed and editing them all into a usable state just could never be done in time. Honestly, the last two weeks have been a mad dash to get the game ready as it is since I made the resolution to stop where I was in editing audio. A few other touches are missing as well, but I’ve tried to polish it up as well as I could to get the game out before the end of the month.

So. What actually is Project Voice?

Along with my above goals, I wanted it to be a very small game, as an experiment to see how lightweight and small an experience I could put together. The entire story is set during a single night, following two characters through their personal troubles in a slightly unusual situation. You play one of them, a smaller character interacting with a larger male named David. A cuddly dork of a wolf. For various reasons, you’re determined to “get somewhere” with him tonight, but it’s an uphill battle dealing with your own anxiety, and he seems to have his own strange things going on… Can you find a way to make things work when everything keeps going wrong, or will you give in to nerves?

This game embraces shortness in a lot of ways, and I took a short-form text approach more similar to visual novels. There aren’t a ton of variants, but you get some basic customization, and there’s currently a main path and a more hidden path to “succeeding.” Right now the only sex scene available is playing the submissive, but I hope to write up and add an option for taking the more dominant role before the game is complete. The save system is pretty minimalist, but it autosaves every step of the way so you can close the game and resume it anytime without issue. I experimented some with how to weave voice lines and narrative together and it may feel a touch awkward at times, but you can adjust the delay for your comfortable reading speed in the options. It’s a short experience overall, but I’m told the sex sequence does feel quite extensive, so don’t be afraid to save or rely on the autosave to come back later as needed. I’m also planning to do more with the art to make it a little more customized, visually striking and tied into the scenes, but that was running into some issues in implementation and got shelved for next version.

In some ways, Project Voice ties in pretty clearly with other projects, especially MVOL. One piece of feedback I’ve heard a fair bit about MVOL is “haha, you should have let us play as Lith!” Well, in a way, this project offers an experience similar to that: the shyer, more effeminate character, potentially a cat, struggling with sexual inhibitions and desires, alone with an attractive potential partner. It’s also turned into a very personal project for me, using my own voice for David, and it’s certainly a strange feeling trying to put myself out there for everyone in this way. It’s really hard for me to appraise the audio in terms of if it’s actually charming or sexy, but I’ve tried to provide a pleasant experience as best I can while learning how all of this really works. I do have a lot of newfound respect for voice actors and audio editors.

Now that I can finally put this project down for a time, I’m looking forward to returning to Project Wild One. It’s my sincere hope that with the basics in place for the game to function I can get releases out with a lot less time in between; starting up these new projects has had a significant cost in man-hours each time. I’ve learned a lot and it’s forced me to refine my skills in some important ways, but the cost has still been much too high for my tastes. There’s still a lot to build with PWO, but hopefully I can ship it out in digestible chunks from here so you guys can enjoy my work more steadily and give me feedback along the way on what works and what doesn’t.

I’ve been brewing a lot of thoughts, ideas, and refinements for the project in the intervening time, so hopefully that’ll help give us a jump start there. I have an interesting idea for a new visual element I think could be pretty compelling when the time comes for it, too, so here’s hoping that comes together as well as I might dream.

But for now, I’m exhausted pushing to get this ready before Halloween, so I’m going to go collapse for a while. Happy spooky season, folks. You can follow this blog with a wordpress account if you check the widget in the footer below, and you can keep up with events on the Twitter or the Discord as well. If you’re at all interested in helping make these games happen and can’t support my work directly (or would like to do even more) then please consider being a proofer! I could always use more help testing and proofreading!

Thanks for reading!