Hello,
first of all: I absolutely love your game! It’s fantastically mysterious and athmospheric. I always loved exploration games, and yours is the tip of the Lifeberg (pun indeed intended). Now I was wondering if there was any possibility for the community to mod the game in a way that one could implement speaker recordings into the game so one can actually listen to the text as well. I find that the game would definitely benefit from a little button right next to a headline which activates a soundfile of a speaker reading the text for you. Could work very well. I mean I’d do it in a heartbeat, but i fear my recording setup is somewhat sub-par…
What do you think? Would you be interested in something like that?
In a text heavy games that have a voiced narration it is often the case that the narrator speaks slower than I’d like to read the text. And Sunless Sea especially has a periods of low activity (sailing) interrupted with interesting text. I would probably end up skipping the voice-over a lot to read at my own pace. But that’s just my opinion. It may be the case that most people would enjoy it.
As to whether it’s possible to mod in, I have no idea. The game supports modding to some extend so chances are somebody with the required knowledge will stop by.
To my knowledge, the current modding support only really extends to adding and modifying events and things. Tweaking ship and equipment stats is somewhat possible but requires direct editing of the base files besides the usual adding of mod files. Something as complex as adding an entirely new mechanic wouldn’t work without modifying the game executable itself, and though doing that is theoretically possible it would be both difficult and certainly against the terms of use to distribute.
This of course only applies to the current version and not any changes coming with Zubmariner! So who knows, if you send in a suggestion they might add a text-to-speech option alongside the readability changes.