Ever wondered what the beloved folk of Pelican Town would sound like if they could speak? Well, Shannon, a.k.a Shpoobie, is working on a mod just for that!
Introducing Stardew Voices! This fully-voiced Stardew Valley mod is currently in the works, featuring talented voice actors for each character. As a proof of concept, Abigail is the first character to be fully voiced in the mod.
I had the chance to chat with Shannon, who gave me an exclusive sneak peek behind the scenes. So if you’re a Stardew fan, interested in voice acting for mods, or curious about the technical process of creating a project like this, keep reading!
Thank you so much for agreeing to an interview! Would you be able to tell me a little about yourself?
Thank you so much for having me as a guest! I’m so thrilled that people are excited about this mod!
A little about me: I’m a 24-year-old software engineer based out of New Jersey. I’ve been voice acting since 2015 and specialise in animation and video game character work. Some fun examples are projects like The Powerpuff Girls Reboot Spectacular (voicing Blossom and Bubbles) by Piemations, and Satina (voicing Satina) by Hannah Daigle/Scum House Studios.
Funnily enough, I got my start on Nexus Mods! I marketed myself to the Skyrim/Fallout modding community in the forums and gained valuable experience voicing in mods like Caesia, The Brotherhood of Old, and Beyond Skyrim: Bruma.
How did the idea to create a fully-voiced Stardew Valley mod come about?
I was actually encouraged by my friend Tasch! She is a fellow voice actor who I met around 2016. We were on a call catching up and at that point I had really given up on voice acting and it felt that that part of my life was coming to a close as I settled down in my role as a full-time software engineer.
It was my dream to make a Stardew Valley voice-over mod. I really felt that with the mix of my technical background and voice acting background I could pull it off. I offhandedly mentioned to Tasch about how I wished I could do something like that, but I just couldn’t justify dropping that kind of time and money on something that would make no profit and people might not even want.
Tasch was so lovely and spoke to me for hours about why I should absolutely go for it. She showed me a ton of examples of people pouring their heart and soul into creative endeavours that were guaranteed to make them no money.
I got started the next day.
She patiently relit the fire in my heart that I had snuffed out, and whatever comes from this mod, I owe it all to her.
Can you tell me a little about the technical side of things? How did your experience with software engineering come in handy when starting this project? Were there any hurdles?
The first step in this project was investigating if it was even possible, which meant dipping into the code and checking out how the dialogue engine worked under the hood. Within 5 minutes my initial answer was “no, not possible”.
Without getting too into the weeds the dialog in the game is housed in files called JSON files. They look like this:
The blue text is the dialogue line ID (a unique name that vaguely describes what’s going on in the dialogue), and the red-ish text is the actual dialogue line that appears in the game.
When I saw this I was immediately like “score!” because I figured I could just name all of the audio files according to their corresponding line id and have the code play the matching audio when the dialogue is being displayed. Unfortunately, the code doesn’t actually use this line ID anywhere; it’s just for storage purposes. There would be no way for me to easily figure out which dialogue line was being displayed and map that to an audio file name.
Thankfully, I didn’t throw in the towel quite yet and started listing all of the potential pain points in a doc to start brainstorming solutions. Here’s an example of the absolute brain mush of my thought process with this specific problem at the bottom:
My master plan was to create a Python script that would exist outside of the mod to parse all of the dialogue lines and invert it so that the dialogue line itself was the key, and the name of the audio file was the value. That way, I could directly pull the audio file based on the text being shown on the screen!
Now, this does make things complicated when it comes to having audio play in other languages, as well as when two lines have exactly the same text. Most of the problems for the latter are mitigated by just keeping track of who is saying what, but I’m sure this will bite me in the ass sooner or later… haha! At least it works! This was the final straw that made me realise it was possible, and the rest was history!
Abigail must have a lot of lines! How come you chose her to begin with?
There’s actually a couple different reasons I chose Abigail! I really do connect with her as a character and find a lot of similarities between us, but my answer is actually more about logistics than personal connection though.
I was SO excited about this mod, but didn’t want to get too far into the process without gauging if this would even be something people would want, so I needed a risk-free way to see how many people were excited about it. My plan was to get one character voiced to gauge interest and then continue from there if I got a good enough signal that people were excited (which I did!).
Not only did I want people to see the mod, I wanted them to download it. Having beta testers is crucial and actually pointed out a major bug that meant this mod didn't work on Mac or Linux devices! I made the assumption that people that married the character that was voiced (or were interested in marrying them) would be more likely to download the mod, and there are PLENTY of Abigail lovers out there.
Also, selfishly, her lines are just SO funny and are an absolute BLAST to record.
Abigail will ultimately be recast in the final dub. I picture a bit of a “grungier” voice for Abigail, for lack of a better term, and have heard some WONDERFUL auditions for other characters that have made me go "Oh!! Hi Abigail!" :)
How far through the project are you at the moment? What has been your favourite part of it?
Currently Shane, Haley, and Alex are fully recorded! Emily and Sam have just been cast and we start recording soon! The next audition is for Penny.
If someone wanted to venture into the voice acting world for the first time, what advice would you give?
This is such a hard question because the landscape is ALWAYS changing. How somebody got into voice acting in the 90s is going to be completely different from how I got into it in the 2010s, and I imagine going in with little to no experience now is going to look much different than how it did in 2015.
I highly recommend creating your own projects! Team up with other creatives trying to make a name for themselves! Dub something! Take a movie script and re-record it with your friends! Create a visual novel! Write an audio play! Read TikTok comments out loud in a funny voice!! Don’t wait for someone else to tell you you can start voice acting. You can do it now. Being a voice actor is not about getting paid, it’s not about getting cast in other people’s projects, it’s not about posting it on the internet, it’s about acting with your voice. That’s it. Figure out how you want to do that and do it!
Once you have some experience under your belt and know you enjoy it, start looking into some coaches! Eventually you will hit a plateau of how far you can improve without having someone critique your work. I truly believe that it is IMPOSSIBLE not to improve if you’re using effective practice methods and keeping an open mind to constructive criticism.
What has the response been like from the community so far?
The community is amazing! I posted on my Twitter and made a YouTube video announcing my intentions for the mod. I was absolutely floored by the response! My voice acting application form currently has almost 800 submissions and the comments on the video and mod are so supportive and encouraging! It seems like people are really excited to see something like this and really appreciate the amount of work that it’s going to take.
Do you have any advice for anyone looking to create their first Stardew Valley mod?
Yes! Thankfully there are a ton of great resources for modders that helped me out! A great place to start is the Stardew Valley Wiki. It provides starting off points for both Content Mods (only requiring JSON file manipulation and no C# code; mods that only change textures is a good example of this) as well as for mods that require SMAPI (Stardew Modding API) and C# coding (mods that change the way Stardew Valley functions).
Then you become a detective and try to figure out how to get the game to do what you want with the existing tools. This is where digging into the weeds of documentation and other examples is important. The fun thing about Nexus Mods is most of the code is open source! You can even look directly at the source code of SMAPI. This was incredibly useful when trying to figure out how to structure my own mod code.
It’s been a delight to speak to you Shannon, is there anything else you’d like to share or any shoutouts you’d like to make?
Thank you so much for having me!! I have been driving my friends and family CRAZY yapping about this, so it was really nice to talk through a lot of this process! I really hope people enjoy it, and I’m going to keep working hard to get out a well-functioning, high-quality mod, as quickly as possible.
Thank you to everyone who has supported this project <3
Thank you so much Shannon for today’s interview, be sure to keep an eye on this mod as development continues! And as always if you have any recommendations for future mod author interviews, send SlugGirl a message or drop them in the comments below!
13 comments
That changed in Stardew Valley 1.6; I just added some docs on the wiki if you're interested.
Now I'm strongly feeling the need to play Stardew now, after this.
What you want to do Shannon is absolutely wonderful. I love it. Huge thumbs up.
Shannon did such an AMAZING job as Caesia. I enjoyed that mod so much.