How do voices and sprites work?

[Silvz]

Hey guys and girls, besides some japanese bots, recently we didn't have anything new around here. So, during my boredom, I started reading Gahktun and then a question mark appeared in my head.

How do VN developers put voices and the correct sprites/animation in the game?

I mean, are voices recorded line per line and someone has to match them to ALL voiced lines? And the sprites: does someone read the whole game and changes the sprites during it? Or do developers use some easier feature, like maybe marking all lines with some code that reads into the sprites gallery and does the trick?

Games like Dracu-Riot! have facial changes even during lines, right? Imagine if someone does all of them manually O:

If anyone knows how it works, I'd be very pleased to read about it

[Fred the Barber]

Think of the majority of a VN as being pretty similar to a play. Just like with a play, there is a script. For a VN, the script includes:

• lines of text. Contrary to what you're thinking, this sometimes include metadata about things like timings (so you can insert a delay between two sequences of text in one line for instance) or font sizes, emphases, etc., (so you can make that line that's just a bunch of exclamation points into really big exclamation points for more impact!)
• sprites, sprite positions, animations of sprites, changes of sprites at timings in the line, etc.,
• Background art
• Transitions from line to line (e.g., fade to black, fade to white, that other fade to white that looks a little different, oh and for how long, and...)
• Likely sometimes decorations for times of day (since you'd rather just declare that it's night, rather than explicitly say to pull the night background and to shade the sprites for night)
• Instructions to display a CG, instead of sprite/background/etc.
• voice acting cues
• music cues
• instructions to jump to another part of the script (e.g., notably, when a choice is made)
• More minor things, like cues to jump out into a video and then back in at a certain point in the script, or additional animations like screen shaking
• Probably even some major things I'm forgetting entirely

And, yes, somebody cobbles that whole script together "by hand", although almost certainly using some sort of tool made for the purpose, not in a text file; the VN engine isn't going to decide to switch to a smiling sprite halfway through a line on its own

Separate from the script, there is the VN engine. The engine just executes the directions in the script. I expect they're often (maybe even usually) tweaked for each release to do certain things, but engines get reused heavily. Engines are like Ren'py - you pretty much need one to do anything complicated, and it's nice to have one with a lot of features, nice performance, etc. But a VN isn't in the engine. A VN is in a script.

[Deep Blue]

yes everything is put together manually, if you look at old vns you can even see the voice acting folder filled with hundreds and hundres of small audio files and each one of those is a little dialogue said by some character, 

 

this a little part from narcissu for example using nscripter

^``Eh? But, I just finished eating...''\ <---------------the script

!sd

dwavestop 1

dwave 1,"w2\1\hime2_0036.ogg" <----------- inserts the dialogue of the previus line

^``Ice cream, ice cream. It's this hot after all.''\

!sd

dwavestop 1

dwave 4,"w2\4\onnanoko_0020.ogg"
^``But...''\

bg "en\shokudou.jpg",3 <---------change the background image
                                        

and so on, this doesnt have any sprites or many voice acting, but you get the idea xD

sometimes you have all the code in one file and the raw script in another too, but yeah it's a shitty job no doubts about it.