As I mentioned when writing about how cool voice-dubbing mods are for Cheap Week, I love vocalized mods. Also called voice mods, these community-made projects add voice acting to otherwise-silent games, or redub games that have voice acting in a gibberish language (like Hollow Knight) with English. My favorite of these mods is Stardew Voices, which adds voice acting for 12 of Stardew Valley’s love interests: Abigail, Alex, Elliot, Emily, Haley, Harvey, Leah, Maru, Penny, Sam, Sebastian, and Shane. And as Stardew Voices creator Shannon Hobby tells me, a ton of work went into getting the mod to some semblance of a finish line (the mod is still in beta).
When she’s not building a mod, Hobby is a voice actor, software engineer, and Twitch streamer. She told me that casting actors for Stardew Voices was a delight, and that programming was fun. The audio editing, which Hobby handled with assistance from producer, sound designer, and voice actor Victoria Cheng, was a different story.
“There was so much audio,” Hobby said. “And I had to go through all of it and clean it and pick takes and split the files and then name all the files appropriately. It was tedious, music-less work that took up the majority of my time, and I am still working through errors made during this time.”
Although she enjoyed casting actors for the mod, Hobby also points to this part of the process taking a long time, likely more so than most other voice mods. “The casting process was abnormally long for this project because I wanted to be as financially responsible as possible,” she said. “I was making good money at the time but still had to ensure that this fit into my budget. Instead of casting everyone at the same time, I cast one character per month. This would help spread out the cost and give me time to catch up on audio editing and creating scripts in between each character.”
Hobby’s commitment to paying the Stardew Voices actors is a big part of why this is my favorite mod. It’s not completely unheard of for mod creators to pay those who are working for them, but it’s still not a practice that is followed 100% of the time. Hallownest Vocalized (a voice mod for Hollow Knight) does not feature paid actors, for example, and New Kunlun Vocalized (a still-in-progress voice mod for metroidvania Nine Sols that is, as of August 2026, in the midst of casting actors) doesn’t have paid roles either.
And, to be fair, these are passion projects. Most people go into them knowing they’re not making money, especially the creator who is going to pour a lot of time and effort into something that they then can’t go on to sell. But Stardew Voices is still largely the exception when it comes to whether or not anyone is getting paid.
“As much as I wanted to challenge the notion of ‘things aren’t worth putting effort towards unless they make you money,’ I probably flew a little too close to the sun here,” Hobby said. “I talked to a very business-savvy lady the other day and she was shocked at how much time and money I had spent on something that I would make no profit from. ‘But it’s good for my portfolio!’ I reasoned. ‘Four hours on a project is good for your portfolio; this is unreasonable. You didn’t even message the creator to see if he would buy it off of you?’ [she responded]. I’ve gotta start thinking like an entrepreneur if I’m going to start responsibly carving my own path, but that is a skill I will develop over time.”
