Managing voiceover production and localization for interactive narratives can be tough – even the most dedicated and organized of audio engineers and producers can find themselves lost in the chaos of trying to coordinate multiple tasks:
- Scriptwriting
- Talent sourcing
- Recording sessions
- Post-production editing
And all this has to be done while keeping the final product consistent and culturally/linguistically appropriate for audiences.
The challenge often begins when it's time to break down the script and proceed with the actual recording. Producers have to dissect the script into manageable parts, allocate these sections to the right voice talents, and schedule recording sessions.
This complicated process requires coordinating with talent so that each recording fits into the broader narrative context at hits the mark for consistent quality. Then there's the added challenge of making sure that the recording environment is acoustically sound, that the equipment works, and that each take captures the right emotion and tone.
All these elements must come together in a balanced way to create a final product that meets both artistic and technical standards.
When working with exceptionally long scripts—often reaching up to 300,000 lines for games—or script that feature multiple story paths, choices, consequences, or even sports commentary with thousands of permutations, the complexity multiplies exponentially.
Traditional methods like using spreadsheets to manage these intricate projects usually fall short. Spreadsheets are static by nature, making it difficult to adapt to changes or updates in real time. They also don't scale well and are prone to errors as the project grows in scope. Spreadsheets, despite being a beloved multitool, lack the depth of view for projects with no good way to capture the nuances of different story paths or the specific intonations required for various actions. So while being familiar and easy to start with, spreadsheets can lead to bottlenecks in production and make it even more challenging to produce a high-quality voiceover project. Related reading: Gem Vs. Spreadsheets
We created Gem to do it better.
How Gem Fortifies the Structure of Your VO Processes
There was a real need for an alternative way to manage complex narratives for interactive storytelling. Very few solutions effectively address the problems of scale, complexity, and complex voice-over production. When creating Gem, we, first and foremost, wanted to make a way for game writers to do away with strict and rigid spreadsheets.
Gem replaces the columns and cells with a familiar, writer-friendly screen-writing interface. As writers create their world, Gem uses element-based screenplay style formatting that makes it easy to identify different components like dialogue, characters, and narrative structure to create an on-the-fly data model. That means that as scripts evolve, Gem uses them to develop an underlying taxonomy for things like:
- Assets
- Dialogue
- Cinematics
The beauty of this is that these things can then be taken directly into production and used to drive motion capture, cinematography, and voice recording sessions!
Taking this further, we created Dialogue Reports. These take the mass of the script and transform it into a manageable and editorially meaningful breakdown, clearly displaying every line along with recording status, IDs, which character speaks it, and more.
For even more granularity and control for your reports, you can use Custom Dialogue Fields, which can really be whatever you want. In Gem, these are customizable metadata fields that can be displayed in your report.
Examples of How to Use Custom Dialigue Fields
Picture it: You’re a game developer, and you’re working with your team on a role-playing game – a genre notorious for its verbosity. You’ve ratcheted the complexity up by deciding to use branching dialogue trees. And to make things even more complex, the game is being published in seven different languages.
In a conventional game voice-over setup, you might rely on a spreadsheet to manage lines and cues. Gem's Dialogue Report offers a more comprehensive view. It not only displays localized lines alongside the original text but also provides additional details that can be invaluable during recording. This includes information on, for example, whether the line has already been recorded, if it needs modification for specific markets, and the emotional tone it should be delivered with.
Gem also offers contextual insights, making it easier to understand where a particular line fits into the game’s broader narrative. You can either refer back to the script view or explore Gem’s branching Storymap to see how it fits into the overall branching structure. What line of dialogue might they be responding to? In a branching structure, that can be challenging to tell using a spreadsheet. Not so in the context-rich nature of Gem.
Managing the Ever-changing Nature of Game Design
Scope adjustments, iterative reviews, and downstream costs constantly shift in game dev and interactive media as a whole. A massive pain in the past has been the inability for writers to see how the words they deliver drive project requirements and downstream costs. Adding new characters or assets will have a lot of impact. Factor in a web of tools used in game development today, and you can see how the problem magnifies.
To address this, we designed Gem to export data as a comprehensive, structured JSON file with metadata taxonomy intact when narrative data is taken further into production pipelines.
But that’s not enough. Systems need to pass data back and forth. Gem does it with a REST API. Every component of a Gem script comes with a dedicated endpoint, giving developers full control over what they extract and where it goes.
If you’re in the production phase recording voiceovers and last-minute changes or ad-libs occur, using a narrative management system like Gem will allow you to instantly update the foundational document via the API. All subsequent exports, such as to your localization tool, will reflect these changes accurately.
The main takeaway here is that Gem creates a layer of representative logic that the developers can parse, understand, and build into something functional that benefits VO pipelines. It effectively replaced disconnected and time-consuming data management with integrated and automated workflows that tie narrative even tighter into the game development process.
Narrative Management Meets Narrative Design
By combining tools that writers already use with integrated management capabilities, you can take the headache out of bringing densely written scripts through the voice-over pipeline.
Forget about using spreadsheets; you can customize metadata fields to include essential VO and dialogue data. And by centralizing the management of all localized assets, from text and voice-over to in-game visuals, you won’t have to wait until two months before launch to dump 250k lines of dialogue on your localization team! As soon as your writer starts writing, you could have Gem preparing everyone to get behind their vision, both in the VO booth and beyond.
So, whether writing branching RPG games, first-person shooters, or sports games, creating complex dialogue wheels, commentators, or contextual barks, there are new possibilities for how you work when using Gem to align everyone for a smooth and enjoyable voiceover project.