Hey hey! Sorry to make a post on this >.< It's just a bit of a weird situation and I thought I should ask about it rather than make any assumptions :3 And sorry the post is quite long! It's a bit of a hard situation to explain, haha.

Basically, I started a cosy yandere game for Winter VN Jam in December 2023, but I couldn't manage to fully finish it by the end of the jam. I just managed to finish it properly last night, but I'm unsure if I'm allowed to submit it to this jam or not because of the way I used a form of AI in it >.<

It's related to voice acting.

I cast 2 human voice actors. 1 plays the protagonist, and the other plays the masculine voice option for the yandere. No AI was involved here, and I paid them what I could afford for their work.

The problem is, I wanted to have the lines for the narrator fully voiced as well because there are 400+ lines of narration, and myself + some of the people I know are dyslexic and find it easier to listen to long lines being read out loud than to read them just in your head.

Because there are 400+ lines for the narrator though, it wouldn't have been fair to ask a voice actor to take on so much work when I wouldn't be able to afford to pay them properly for their time >.< So I recorded myself reading all the lines, and then I used speech-to-speech dubbing to change my voice (because my voice is horrible and my mic isn't great!)

I also wanted to try out voice acting myself, but I have crippling anxiety >.< so I decided to try and voice the feminine voice option of the yandere the same way by recording myself performing all the lines and using speech-to-speech to dub over them. It meant I could have a go at voice acting without actually having my horrible voice in the game, haha. Because the speech-to-speech kept my delivery of the lines, all my intonation,  pauses, breaths, etc. intact.

I'm not a fan of AI, and this is the first time I've ever used it in a project. It was more as a last resort sort of thing because if I hadn't, then the narration lines and the feminine voice version of the yandere character would all be silent/unvoiced since I wouldn't have had the time or money to get proper voice actors to fill those roles on this particular project >.<

I have been open about it in a dev post as well so that people are aware.

No worries if you would prefer I didn't submit the game still! I can just about justify my reasons for using it to myself, but I totally understand if it's not acceptable for this jam :3

I'm going to try my best to make a completely different & brand new mini-project from scratch specifically for this jam sometime anyhow <3 It will be short because I won't have much time to work on it while the jam is running, but I'm still gonna try and make something ^-^

Thanks and have a great day :D (and also thank you for making the jam :3)