Adventure Gamers - Forums

Never heard of this before. Who’s actually making it? And to me voice acting is essential in any new game, old style graphics or not.

FESTER MUDD was designed primarily by Paavo Harkonen, a Finnish designer/composer, with an assist by myself. It is a WONDERFUL little adventure with a lot of wit and charm.

There’s $0 in the budget for voice acting, so no, the game won’t be voiced. But it also won’t be *priced* like a voiced game.

Josh Mandel

Josh, wouldn’t it be worth it to try and reach out to voice acting communities such as Newgrounds.com? You can get very cheap voice actors there that still has quality to them. Several indie games contains artists from there, and if you could cover those costs by say raising the price of the game by a dollar, then wouldn’t it be worth it?

It’d also be a great way to get some free promotion for the game as Newgrounds usually proudly showcase stuff where their prominent members has been involved - and that could generate sales

Just a suggestion though, not trying to nag or anything!

Kasper,

I’m not familiar with Newgrounds, but I’ll take a look, and I’ll be more than happy to suggest it to the folks at Prank (who are porting the game from AGS to Unity) and to Paul at Replay.

But even paying very cheap voice actors (boy, doesn’t THAT sound good!) is more money than we have in the budget for this, and then the voices have to be edited and programmed in, which is not an inconsiderable or inexpensive task. And of course it would completely blow the schedule out of the water; I doubt we’d even make Q1 2013, let alone January.

That’s not to say it’s a bad idea at all, just that this was never envisioned as a voiced product, and we’re just a few weeks away from shipping. So at this late date, it seems an improbable thing to suddenly try to add. :-/

Josh

Yeah, I can see how it can complicate matters further - maybe this is the first case ever where DLC would fit in with an adventure?

A recent game I know that used 30+ voice actors from Newgrounds is the popular Xbox Live Arcade game Dust: An Elysian Tail, and I know there are other games too, I just can’t remember which right this second.

Even if it won’t be right for this project it might be worth keeping in mind for the future. A lot of great voice actors, artists and programmers originates from Newgrounds. One very popular developer that comes to mind is Team Meat which debuted the original Meat Boy game at Newgrounds and were very much a part of the sites community in general.

So if you are in need of anything major, you should get in contact with the site-owner Tom, who regularly plugs things in the sites news updates. Oh, and he’s also the creator of Castle Crashers and Alien Hominid

Thank you, Kasper! I’ll *definitely* keep it in mind for other projects (in fact, I have one in mind that it might be very useful for).

Thanks again!

Josh

HAH! Yeah, the first time I played through the game, I thought, “Where have I seen that before?”

But I’m sure it was intentional. The game is definitely influenced by FREDDY here and there (there’s even a pharmacy—BUT NO PRESCRIPTIONS!), and also by a number of other classic adventure games.

(And besides, it’s not like we didn’t rip off the chandelier sequence ourselves…)

Josh

Yes! The chandelier scene is most definitely a nod towards Freddy Pharkas. Fester has a lot of other references too, but I’ve tried to keep most of them subtle, because I feel that shooting out references in a machine gun-like fashion can get tiresome. Instead of cluttering the game with references, I’ve focused more on trying to capture the overall feeling of classic adventure games.

Paavo Härkönen (Designer of Fester Mudd)