What makes a good bark
- Short. Most barks are under two seconds. Players hear them in the middle of something else.
- Clear about what happened. "Reloading!" tells the player something; "Hmm!" doesn't.
- In character. A grizzled guard and a nervous recruit shouldn't spot an enemy the same way.
- Varied. Hearing the same line twenty times in a fight is what makes barks annoying. Variations, and a little randomness in the game, fix it.
Plan by trigger
List the moments that make a character speak, then write variations for each:
| Trigger | Variations |
|---|---|
| Enemy spotted | There! / Contact, left side! / I see one! / Over there, move! |
| Taking damage | I'm hit! / Agh, that one hurt. / Still standing! |
| Reloading | Reloading! / Cover me, I'm empty! / Changing mags! |
| Low health | I need help here! / Can't take much more! / Fall back, fall back! |
| Idle | Quiet tonight. / Wish I was home. / Did you hear that? |
| Greeting the player | Morning. / Back again? / Need something mended? |
Add common triggers first and rare ones later. Combat barks are heard most and deserve the most variations; a once-per-game reaction needs just one.
Organize them in abcVoiceover
- One script per character's barks, such as
Guard barks, or per character and trigger group for big sets. Every script in the project shares the same cast. - One bark per line. Each line keeps one take and becomes one numbered file in the download.
- Keep your IDs in your own spreadsheet, in the same order as the script. The download's
Lines.csvnumbers every line and names its file, so line 14 is014 Guard.wav, and your sheet maps line numbers to your bark IDs. - Paste from the sheet. A column of
Guard: There!lines pastes as a whole script at once. See formatting dialogue.
The same words, delivered twice
A line keeps one take. If you want two different deliveries of the same text, for example a calm "Reloading." and a shouted "Reloading!", add the line twice and keep a different take on each. Changing the punctuation helps the two readings come out different.
Shouting and effort
- Record a shouting sample. A calm sample can't shout convincingly. Record the character calling out, add it as a second voice (
Guard shouting), and give combat barks to it. - Use the Expressive style and raise emotion intensity for combat voices.
- Exclamation marks, not capitals. The voice reads in lower case, so capitals add nothing.
- Grunts, screams and breaths are hard for any text-to-speech model. Record them yourself or take them from a sound library.
Generate in bulk
A big bark set is exactly what Generate all new lines is for: every new line joins the queue and is made in the background. Listen through, re-take the ones that land wrong, and save the keepers. Then download the project and bring the files into your engine; see importing voice lines into a game engine.