How to Add Voice Acting to Your Indie Game Without Hiring Actors

Voice acting used to be the one thing solo developers couldn’t fake. You could make your own art, compose your own music, write your own code. But voices? That meant auditioning actors, booking studio time, directing sessions, and paying per line. For a game with hundreds of dialogue lines, the cost alone killed the idea.

That changed when AI voice synthesis got good enough to ship.

The Voice Problem for Indie Devs

Most indie games solve the voice problem by avoiding it entirely. Text boxes work. Undertale proved that. But fully voiced games create a different kind of immersion. When the shopkeeper grumbles about the weather or the villain delivers a monologue, voice adds a layer of personality that text alone can’t match.

The traditional approach has three barriers for small teams. Cost is the first. Hiring voice actors for even a modest RPG with 20 characters costs thousands of dollars. Time is the second. Coordinating recording sessions, reviewing takes, requesting pickups, and editing audio stretches the timeline by weeks or months. Iteration is the third. If you rewrite a quest line, you need to re-record everything.

AI voice tools remove all three barriers. You type the line, adjust the voice settings, generate the audio, and drop it into your engine. If you rewrite the quest, you regenerate in seconds.

Why ElevenLabs Specifically

Several AI voice platforms exist. ElevenLabs has emerged as the go-to for game developers because of three things.

Voice quality. The output sounds natural. Not robotic, not uncanny. The emotional range covers everything from casual NPC chatter to dramatic boss encounters. Side-by-side with human voice actors, the gap has narrowed to the point where most players cannot tell the difference in short dialogue lines.

Voice variety. The voice library has thousands of pre-made voices across accents, ages, and styles. You can filter by “video games” to find voices designed for game characters. Grizzled warriors, cheerful merchants, menacing villains, nervous townspeople. If you need something specific, you can clone a voice from a 30-second sample or design one from scratch with the voice maker.

Engine integration. ElevenLabs has direct plugins for Unity and Unreal Engine. You can generate and preview voices without leaving your editor. The API also works with Godot and custom engines through simple HTTP calls.

Practical Workflow: Voicing an Indie RPG

Here is how a solo developer would actually use this in production.

Step 1: Write Your Dialogue Script

Start with your dialogue in a spreadsheet or a tool like Yarn Spinner. Each row should have the character name, the line, and any emotional direction (angry, whispering, excited). This structured format makes batch generation much faster.

Step 2: Assign Voices to Characters

Browse the ElevenLabs voice library and pick a voice for each character. Save them to your workspace. Consistency matters here. If your blacksmith sounds different in every scene, players will notice. Assigning a fixed voice ID per character prevents that.

Step 3: Generate in Batches

Use the Projects feature or the API to generate all lines for a character in one batch. The API approach is better for large games because you can script it. A simple Python loop that reads your spreadsheet, calls the API, and saves each audio file with a naming convention like blacksmith_quest01_line03.mp3 will save hours of manual work.

Step 4: Import to Engine

Drop the audio files into your engine’s asset folder. In Unity, assign them to your dialogue system. In Godot, load them as AudioStreamMP3 resources. Most dialogue frameworks support mapping audio files to text lines by filename or ID.

Step 5: Iterate

This is where AI voice shines. When you rewrite a line during playtesting, regenerate just that file. No need to email an actor, wait for availability, or pay for a new session. The turnaround is seconds, not days.

Beyond Dialogue: Sound Effects and Narration

Voice acting is the obvious use case, but ElevenLabs handles two other needs that game developers hit regularly.

Sound effects. The sound effects generator creates custom audio from text descriptions. Type “heavy wooden door creaking open in a stone dungeon” and you get a usable sound effect. It is not a replacement for a full sound design library, but it fills gaps fast. Need a specific ambient sound for one room? Generate it in 10 seconds instead of searching through 50,000 files on Freesound.

Narration. If your game has cutscenes, intro sequences, or lore entries read aloud, the long-form text-to-speech handles it well. The output maintains consistent pacing and emotion across paragraphs, which matters for narration more than for short dialogue lines.

What It Costs

The free tier gives you 20,000 credits per month. That is enough to voice a small demo or prototype. For a full game in production, the Starter plan at $5/month or Creator plan at $22/month covers most indie projects. The Creator plan gives you 100,000 credits monthly, which translates to roughly 200,000 characters of dialogue. That is more than enough for a mid-sized RPG.

Commercial usage rights are included on all paid plans. The audio you generate is yours to ship.

Multilingual Voice Acting

One advantage that AI voice has over traditional recording is localization. ElevenLabs supports 32+ languages. The same voice can speak English, Japanese, French, or Portuguese without hiring separate actors for each language. For indie developers targeting a global audience, this turns localization from a $10,000+ expense into a marginal cost increase.

The quality varies by language. English, Spanish, and Japanese are the strongest. Less common languages are improving but may still sound slightly synthetic in longer passages.

Games Already Using AI Voice

You might think this is purely theoretical. It is not. Several shipped indie titles already use AI-generated voice acting.

Studios have used ElevenLabs to voice NPCs in survival games, RPGs, and visual novels. The games that pull it off best are the ones that treat AI voice as a tool, not a shortcut. They still write good dialogue. They still direct the emotional delivery by adjusting voice settings. They still edit and polish the audio files. The AI handles the performance. The developer handles the direction.

Limitations to Know

AI voice is not perfect for every situation.

Long emotional speeches can sound flat if you don’t break them into smaller segments and adjust the delivery for each part. A three-paragraph villain monologue generated as a single block will lack the dynamic range a human actor brings.

Singing is a separate challenge. ElevenLabs handles speech, not music. If your game needs a bard who sings, you will still need a human performer or a different tool like Suno.

Player recognition is growing. Some players can identify AI voice and may react negatively. The best approach is to focus on quality over volume. A hundred well-directed AI voice lines beat a thousand generic ones.

Getting Started

If you want to try this for your next game, here is the quickest path.

Sign up for a free account at ElevenLabs
Browse the voice library and pick 3 voices for your main characters
Write 10 test lines per character with emotional direction
Generate them using the web interface
Import into your engine and playtest

You will know within an hour whether AI voice works for your game. For most indie projects, the answer is yes.

ElevenLabs offers a free tier with 20,000 monthly credits. Paid plans start at $5/month with commercial usage rights.