FiniteBanjoThe Star Fox-style roguelite whose dev refused to use AI voices to cut costs is adding an entire "anti-capitalist revenge" campaign about a cat-girl destroying AI
Whisker Squadron: Survivor
Thanks just had a look at the game on steam it looks interesting. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2140100/Whisker_Squadron_Survivor/
Whisker Squadron: Survivor on Steam
A smooth roguelite shooter from the creators of RACE THE SUN, featuring a voiced cast of feline pilots in a dramatic showdown against corporate-powered robots called The Swarm. Features a 3-act campaign with branching paths, epic bosses, and a wide arsenal of pilots, ships, and weapons.
Man I played way to much star fox. This looks very nostalgic
It’s honestly giving big Starlight Brigade vibes.
TWRP - Starlight Brigade (feat. Dan Avidan) [Official video]
Woah my favorite band, mentioned in the wild
Wow Starlight Brigade has great animation I wonder if that was the inspiration.
awesome! gonna buy this game later!
MHLoppyFYI if you're one of the people who just sees an image, the original includes a link to this:
I was wondering what was up with that
Strange, the link is working on my post for me.
Probably a quirk of having different software. I'm on Fedia which runs on mbin, as does kbin.run which MBM is on. You're on lemmy, so I guess something was just handled differently for you (and most users!) vs kbin/mbin users.
That’s how you land on my wishlist !
Hey, they did Race the Sun, that was fun. Interesting.
I am going to wait till it’s finished though.
I like the idea and gameplay, but man am I tired of that color palette
NakedmoleRace the Sun was beautiful and I enjoy roguelites, wishlisted!
Maybe a good balance could be a human voice actor for main dialogue, supported by ai trained on their main dialogue to voice sidequest and deep lore dialogue. It could enable fully voiced dialogue-heavy games that would otherwise be too expensive to produce, something like generative RPGs or Morrowind, if all the books could be voiced, and more easily translated while remaining fully voiced. But keeping humans to fill the main campaign contributions, emotional beats and determine character personality. I’m just comparing Morrowind to Oblivion, which was voiced, but the dialogue and conversation trees were heavily reduced in volume as a result.
Maybe a good balance would be hiring a person to speak lines into a microphone. It could employ a person and create art with an acceptable bare minimum quality standard. If you can’t afford that and would rather push the costs onto government subsidies for power and emissions, maybe just do text dialogue or pull a classic Banjo and Kazooie single dialogue line randomly jumbled up and pitch shifted for every interaction.
I assume you also only buy hand crafted porcelain items, only buy hand picked produce and generally avoid all automation amd modern convenience. Take your clothes to a local hand-wash rather than using a washing machine too do you? I agree that the energy cost should be taken into account before we declare it to be cheaper to use “AI” generated content.
If vases at the store were Handcrafted by LLMs, as if that made any fucking sense, then I’d rather go without, yeah.
Like LLMs just spontaneously create lines of audio? They need a human operator to direct them to generate audio just like machines that make most vases are human operated but allow the person to make far more and more quickly than they would by hand. An LLM is still just a tool that needs a person to wield it, it doesn’t replace them it just changes their role and makes them more efficient.
The machines that are currently used to shape and paint ceramics are not Machine Learning models. They’re simple and precise automations. Like a program that packages audio to .mp3 format. The equivalent to that would be a machine that designs the vase, designs the packaging, and designs the machinery that prepares it. It’s going to do a shit job that negatively impacts consumers but in the process it displaced thousands of workers in one go, so enjoy the profits.
You missed the point of what I said. Machines that manufacture goods put many people out of the job and yet you now very few people think that is an issue. At the time however the same kind of arguments I see made against LLMs putting people out of work were being made about these machines making soulless products that missed the human touch. LLMs are just a new tool we’ve invented to make life easier for ourselves. In time the same thing will happen with LLMs once the hype dies down and they just become part of the tool sets we all use without thinking about it.
I didn’t miss shit, your points are just ass.
If you understood my point why didn’t you address it rather than meandering around it asserting that somehow this particular invention is totally different to previous disruptive technologies that we accept as having been beneficial and no on opposes amymore? How exactly is it different this time in history where it never really has been previously? It may well be of course, but history is against it being so.
Using a robotic voice could make the game more accessible to blind, partially sighted, and dyslexic individuals. I’m not sure how an AI voice is inherently different than the voice that comes out of a screen reader, especially if it’s trained on the voice of employees or volunteers.
I don’t think the vast majority of games which could make use of AI Voice have the sort of accessibility features to be played by those individuals even if they could hear the dialogue. It’s such a rare occurrence for a blind person to beat halo or an RPG that news articles get written about the examples.
What about partially sighted or dyslexic individuals? Sure, a game like halo would need a lot of modification to be fully blind accessible, but a visual novel, for instance, might not. In my experience most visual novels are built as passion projects on shoestring budgets.
Lots of existing games have robotic narrators already (e.g minecraft), they just speak with a monotone voice. By incorporating more advance machine learning capabilities the same narrator could be capable of outputting a more nuanced and pleasant delivery for those that need it.
So wait, the AI is destroying cat-girls?
The robots took our jobs
Yes, support your local cat girl VAs or they will disappear forever.
JackbyDevNyaaa~ OwO
I’ve never been more am enemy of AI than this moment.
released August 2023
By the time AI voices were a thing, he had already paid for all of his voice lines. He didn’t chose anything.
This is manipulation to sell more copies and nothing more.
In any case, AI voices are empowering to the Indie scene. Fully voiced games used to be exclusive to triple A gaming, indie gevs just simply can’t afford it.
I feel for the voice actors just like I feel for the translators that all had to change domaine ten years ago, but progress is progress and it’s dumb to stifle innovation to save a few jobs.
This is manipulation to sell more copies and nothing more.
…yes? People who make games do things to make their game appeal to people. Framing that as a negative or unusual is kind of weird. Literally everything any game developer does to make the game entertaining or appealing is “a manipulation to sell more copies”.
chickenI think framing this as “refusing” to use AI is kind of weird. They believe in doing things the traditional way, great, I think games that use all hand-drawn nondigital art are also cool for going against the grain like that, but it isn’t like anyone is trying to force them not to.
AI Voices are just worse or require more work for less pay, and they actually seem less common in the (well made) indie scene than in the Triple A scene.
catalystNice. I had this on my list already, this just makes me want it more. I’ll probably wait for a full release though.
XNXHopefully they do well and can make a version that’s like the GameCube starfox game
Sounds pretty lame honestly.
Why did you unlike your own comment?
I didn’t
Because liking your own comment is lame.
To obtain respect from others often requires respect for ones self.
And with that Huike was enlightened.
stop caring what others think
If you didn’t care about what others thought, you would not have sent me that reply.
Not caring what others think doesn’t mean being antisocial lol
refused to use ai voices
Are gonna hand out awards every time AI isn’t used now?
At this rate we are in fact going to need to have separate awards shows for non-LLM artistry.
To answer your question, though, it’s more than just the refusal but the addition of an anti-AI story campaign.
It’s an amazingly click-baity headline.