O hai again, super fans!
Another month down, and we continue to plug away at our continuation of the Laura Bow series! It's slow and steady, for sure... but we are still making some really good strides. For a more thorough development progress report, take a look back at our previous newsletter.
Our topic this month is all about bringing our characters to life via voiceovers! Yes, that's right... if you didn't know already, we are including full professional voice acting from the get go - even for the free prologue chapter that we will be releasing next year. So let's get on with it and introduce you to our cast!
Remember, to view any of the images in their full size, just click on them (Gmail) or right click and select Save Image As or Download Image to copy it to your computer. If you are on a mobile device, you can touch and hold to save the image to your device. And, as always, visit the website if you'd like to view some of our previously released images:
www.ninezyme.com
Eh? What's That I Hear?
We have recently completed our voiceover casting for the prologue chapter of Laura Bow and the Mechanical Codex! We even decided to extend our script a bit further than we intended because we were so inspired by some of the auditions that we received while casting the primary roles! It has really been great to hear some of the characters played out just as we imagined.
The role which everyone is probably most interested in knowing about is Laura Bow herself, and we think we've found the perfect actor to play her. Maya Tuttle is one of the hardest working women in voiceovers, and she has offered to take on this momentous task! We worked with Maya last year to do some preliminary lines for testing and animation samples, and we enjoyed it so much that we decided to continue on with her as our lead heroine.
Our other familiar faces will be Frank Guida as Sam Augustini and Zane Schacht as Crodfoller T Rhubarb (aka. Rube). Then we have one of our mysterious new characters, Nasir Al-Rahim, who will be played by Vince Melamed. They will be joined by some other amazing voices by Tricia Brioux, Tim Giebel, Marcus Anderson, Amanda Willett, Graham Vick, and Travis Carey. We are very excited to be working with these super talented actors, and we hope to include some of them in more roles later down the road - within future chapters of the game.
Get Out Of My Head!
One of the things we decided to change from the previous titles in the Laura Bow series is to no longer have a separate narrator in the game. In The Dagger of Amon Ra, for instance... when you interacted or examined something, a mysterious disembodied voice would ring out from the heavens and tell you what you are doing or looking at.
One of our goals with The Mechanical Codex is to make Laura a more relatable character and give a deeper insight into her thoughts and personality. So we decided to have Laura provide her own commentary on the situations she is in, and the things around her - via an inner monologue style dialog. So as you are interacting with the world, you will hear Maya Tuttle's rendition of Laura's own thoughts, instead of an unknown 3rd person voice.
In many other classic adventure games, this inner monologue is actually more of an outer monologue that is just conveniently ignored by other characters most of the time - except in rare moments when it turns into a back and forth dialog. While we actually enjoy this mechanic in some of those other games, we don't feel it's right for the Laura Bow series, which is based more around history and a real-world setting. So we intend to have a clear distinction between what Laura says out loud (ie. what other characters can hear) and what she thinks to herself within her own head. We believe this fits better into the world and story we are creating.
Agree? Disagree? Let us know what you think... we'd love to hear from you!
I'll shut up now...
