Greetings to everyone reading this message!
First, let us introduce ourselves, as well as the essence of the matter.
We are a small but extremely ambitious development team, Mikola Zaporozhsky Games.
For almost a year now we have been working on a project called Highly Likely. Is a surreal 2D Adventure about a funny and somewhat naive character called Mikola who is trying to do all he can to save his homestead. This is the first part of the trilogy, the release of which is scheduled for the end of 2019.
With the upcoming release we are very seriously confronted with the problem of localizing the game into English, and specifically choosing the narrator’s voiceover.
Why did we decide to ask your advice?
The reason is that our game has a fascinating, rich storyline, it features a storyteller who throughout the game narrates all the events behind the scenes, conveys the thoughts of the characters, and conducts dialogs on behalf of the characters so that players can fully enjoy the game, get into its spirit, and also could emotionally empathize with the main character.
By the way, there is a lot of text in the game, for example, in the Russian version of the game, the total time of the voiceover was 1 hour and 53 minutes (56933 characters or 10613 words). This time is calculated based on the assumption that all the text goes as a stream, without pauses. In the game itself, the text will be natural, with pauses, somewhere more, somewhere fever.
We work on the project putting a lot of ourselves into it and approach every decision with great responsibility. We really want you, the players, to enjoy the game and appreciate it. That is why we decided not to make this decision before consulting with the players, so we ask you: Whose voice would you like to hear as the narrator?
Now we have a video backstory in which we used the voice of an actor we found on a freelance website. But we would like to offer you the best possible experience!
This is the long version, you might call it a director's cut.
For example, for the role of the Russian narrator we invited the master of the Russian voice-acting Andrei Yaroslavtsev. He is very famous in the Russian-speaking community, he is the voice of Optimus Prime (Transformers), Zoltan Chivay (The Witcher 3), Gimli (The Lord of the Rings), the narrator in Valiant Hearts, etc. In our opinion, the participation of Andrei Yaroslavtsev certainly enriched the game and gave it a peculiar style and fairy tale charm.
Here is a video of the backstory of the game narrated by him.
We would like to achieve exactly the same effect for the English version, so that the narration would fascinate the player from the first seconds and make the story feel like a good fairy tale.
If you have any ideas, please write in the comments which actors (maybe not among the most famous ones) would you recommend us to invite to the project for the role of the narrator.
More about the game: https://highly-likely.itch.io/highly-likely
Thank you for being with us!
Sincirely,
Mikola Zaporozhsky Games team