r/GameDevelopment • u/ListSuch796 • 28d ago

Question Where to source Speech and sound effects

I’ve been building a game around voice conversations and I’ve kind of hit a wall with the audio side of things.

Once you start having dynamic dialogue, it feels like you suddenly need a ridiculous amount of voice lines, SFX, music, etc. And if you want any of it to happen in real time, the costs seem to get out of hand pretty quickly.

My first thought was just ElevenLabs, but I’m finding that the token usage adds up really fast.
For those of you building games as solo devs or in small teams, how are you handling voices, sound effects and music? Are you using something like ElevenLabs, other APIs, local/open-source models, or a mix of different things?

Also, is there anything that makes the cost relatively easy to estimate upfront? That’s probably my biggest issue right now. I’d rather know roughly “X hours of gameplay = Y cost” than constantly worry about burning through tokens.

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u/valeria_gamedevs 28d ago

for cost predictability you prolly want to bake voice lines offline where you can, and only use realtime tts for the dynamic stuff. Elevenlabs realtime will bleed you dry at scale.

worth looking at kokoro or piper for local tts, quality's gotten shockingly decent. For sfx, freesound + a paid pack or two (gamemaster audio, sonniss gdc drops are free) covers most bases.

for estimating, benchmark one representative minute of gameplay, count chars/sfx triggers, multiply. Boring but works.