I'm sorry to announce this, but we decided not to feature voice acting in the game.
Even though the actor we hired for the job did a decent work, having voices just didn't fit the game at all. I've spent several hours mastering the voice lines he recorded (which was around a quarter of the entire script), but it was hopeless.
I was warned before that voice acting and the more retro looking games rarely go well together and I got the proof.
In addition, even though I thought the work of the actor was pretty decent, it would be hard to please everyone and most of the time bad voice acting can be much more immersion-breaking than bad graphics. To really add something to game, I think the voice acting should be truly great. As it was, it wasn't bad, but didn't fit the game at all and didn't really add anything.
Another of the issues we ran into was the huge file size. The around 20 minutes long voice clip we recorded was already over 200 Mb and that was only about 25% of the entire script. With some compression the size was reduced to 45 Mb, but the differences were noticeable.
Summing up, I finally realized why so very few indie games feature voice acting.
But there are good news too: the game can now be played with gamepads and joysticks. I haven't tested the game with a Xbox360 controller yet, but in theory it should work.
As I was playing the game with my PS2 controller, a huge grin appeared in my face. I'm pretty sure everybody dreamt of making a console game at some point, and the fact that AMWAM is being developed using C++ makes it possible to port to virtually any console, so while the dream is still far away, it has never been closer.
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