How far would you go to fully immerse gamers in an otherworldly adventure? 

For our friends at Yamo Studios, no stretch of the imagination was too daunting for transporting players into the surreal, decaying realm of their dark fantasy debut, “Rot in a Porcelain Dream.” They even constructed a new language and entrusted Unlock Audio with translating their dreamed-up script into real, spoken dialogue.

We’re excited to share with you an early dive into the game’s bold decision for voice and a behind-the-scenes peek into our process of bringing its imaginary linguistic vision to life through vocal performance and voice design.

Why Create a New Language?

Dialogue plays a vital role in how people experience our stories and dive deeper into our original worldbuilding. Most games engage players perfectly well by localizing speech in standard, everyday languages. Some take a more universal approach to voiceover by using nonsense sounds (i.e., gibberish) in place of recorded speech, allowing games to adaptably convey energy and emotion or even differentiate characters through signature tones. Others still opt for a more pensive experience by ditching speech altogether and leaning solely on text. 

Vision is the most important factor in deciding which approach to dialogue is best for any game, but factors like timing, budget, and access to talent can all steer the course of your voice and audio direction. By inventing a new language for ROT, Yamo set its own universal baseline akin to a “gibberish” approach, but elevates the player experience with consistent patterning and purposeful performance. 

Think of some of the most popular and iconic entertainment franchises of our age: Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and Game of Thrones. Each of these introduces an original, constructed language that deepens the fantasy and otherworldly experience for fans. (J.R.R. Tolkien famously created his functional elvish dialects before any of his iconic journeys across Middle-earth even took shape.)

Constructing a new language is a bold, creative decision that is rooted in immersion — how deeply we want players to engage with the worlds we envision, and how intensely we want them to be overcome with the fantasy. Doing so requires a lot of intensive preparation, but the believability and depth that a unique language adds to a game’s worldbuilding and lore help create the potential for even more staying power when done right. 

Voice Direction – Shaping Scripts Into Speech

The language for ROT wasn’t created in a day. The crew at Yamo Studios spent years building its vocabulary, accent, and rules before a translated script was ready for a cast. 

For auditions, we asked voice actors to perform actual lines from ROT’s made-up script using Greek as a close reference. We weren’t looking for fluency in actual Greek, but it helped provide a vocal essence for testing actors’ abilities to tackle ROT’s imaginary words with confidence and flexibility.

Before we booked our incredible cast for full recording sessions, we worked with Yamo to gather and produce the necessary materials for our actors to work from. These included everything from standard character sheets and in-depth worldbuilding documents to extra glossaries of new terms with clear pronunciation guidance. It was especially important that our characters, being from the same world, all shared an understanding of how common words like names and locations were pronounced while still providing expressive freedom. All this extra preparation helped us create stronger consistency across all character performances.

Voice Cast – Power Through Presence

Players command a small entourage and meet many other strange characters on their journey through ROT. The primary travelling trio consists of Red (actor Nazeeh Tarsha), Akardo (Paul Warren), and Ela (Maia Harlap). Additional characters were performed by actors Craig Lee Thomas, Erin Lillis, Heidi Tabing, Keith Houson, Nikolas Yuen, Tom Schalk, and Whitney Holland. Together, this incredible cast brought their A-game to make the otherworldly language of ROT feel real.

Not every line of dialogue in ROT is acted out loud, but it was essential that we still provided our actors with a full English script to understand their story beats and the events leading up to and after their line reads. Each performer needed to understand the emotions and motivations of their characters at every twist and turn to strike the perfect tone.

In our recording sessions, we’d start by reading through each scene and rehearsing key lines in English before switching to the fictional language of ROT. By the second or third read of each line, our cast would fall into a natural tone and rhythm that delivered precisely the recording and performance we envisioned.

Voice Design – Bridging Sight and Sound

Once all our dialogue was tracked, all that remained was to layer on some additional production value to meld the performances with the look and feel of the game. Our cast did an incredible job of conveying the emotions and narrative weight of their scripts, but their clean readings from a recording booth could not organically reflect the decrepit, decaying environments and parnormally formed characters of ROT. 

While voice design can be implemented across groups of audio in-engine, we opted to dress up the dialogue assets directly before importing them into the game. This decision, which considered timing and scale, ultimately gave us more freedom to consistently tailor each character’s sound to suit their unique image while sparing the engine more processing power for peak action.

While all character performances received a dreamlike filter, we also sought to capture subtle traits that would help each voice feel more grounded in exactly what players see. Subtle reverb for the main hero who wears a helmet (Red), animal gruffness for more beastly characters (Kameni), and even some eerie voice doubling for a character said to consume souls (Burdened).

Even though ROT’s dialogue is already in an imaginary tongue, our additional voice design serves to craft an overall sonic experience that fulfills each scene’s emotional and narrative intentions so players can fully immerse themselves in the game’s fraught fantasy. 

Experience the World of ROT

We’re super excited for gamers to enter the world of ROT and get swept away in the fantastical and daring performances of our incredible voice cast when “Rot in a Porcelain Dream” releases soon! Wishlist the game now on Steam and follow our partners at Yamo Studios for exciting announcements on the horizon.