Working with union VO is extremely worth it
I've worked on, I think, 4 games with voice acting in the last 5 years, and I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing whenever I gotta do it.
VO records are a heightened time for writers. You can read your lines out loud to yourself as much as you want, but when you're making a game with tens of thousands of words in it, at least some of those sentences will not work in the recording booth the same way you thought they would. In a record, your work gets stress-tested on an eye-wateringly ambitious schedule. The talent will interpret, perhaps, hundreds of your painstakingly-written sentences in a single day. Many people are relying on you to deliver text that is easy to read, easy to perform, fit-for-purpose in the gameplay, and appropriately contextualized with casting sheets, jargon lists, pronunciation aids, and more. The record is where they start to learn whether you actually did any of that correctly. It's a lot to handle!!
The biggest recommendation I can give small teams in particular is that working with union talent really does make all of this so much easier. If you work with talent from the unions, you really do raise your chances of getting a performer for whom this work is absolutely no sweat.
You should desperately, desperately want to be on a VO team with people for whom this work is routine. If you are a game developer working on typical 3-5 year long projects, you probably record VO intermittently. You may go two or more years without recording a real actor - your team may use text-to-speech for temp audio, or you may record scratch VO with team member amateurs instead. VO records will be a very stressful time for you. Suddenly, you will find yourself in a mad rush to choose performers and book times, and your calendar will be swallowed up by VO sessions lasting possibly up to four hours long. You will need to keep yourself focused on work for much longer stretches of time than you might usually do. You may feel lost, and probably a little overwhelmed, and will feel a great pressure to live up to the expectations of a large number of friendly strangers you've only just met. If you want this experience to go by smoothly, it really is such a relief to work with people who do this all the time.
This means: finding an experienced director, casting talent who has done this a LOT, and leaning on every scrap of experience and expertise you can find in the world around you. I've spent a shitload of time in records in my life and I still get nervous about a lot of this stuff. I don't do it often enough to feel totally at ease. The people who make me feel at ease are the experts.
If you're working with VO for the first time in your life, this is the best advice I can give you: use a pro!! Work with the dang unions. They're great. The quality you get will be so much more reliable. A union game is a game where you, the writer, are completely surrounded by experts.
My second piece of advice is to record scratch VO with dev team members wherever possible. Recording scratch with the people who work on the game gives them a much deeper understanding of - and ownership over - the story. It is also a great dry-run experience for teams which have never worked with VO before. It takes time away from other dev tasks... but it's got far-reaching benefits.
It's very common for game devs to tunnel deeply into their own part of the project, and to lack the time, or the desire, to fully familiarize themselves with the game's story. I've never met a dev who actually felt good about not understanding their game's story... but I've met a lot who felt resigned to it. Getting them to participate in prototyping and implementing VO narrative content can shatter these interdepartmental walls, and to create an expectation that non-narrative team members know and understand the story. They don't necessarily have to record their own voices to get this benefit... sometimes, getting them to implement a friend's VO creates this same sense of personal connection, haha. But recording human rather than TTS or AI scratch VO means that your team members will be much more likely to, like, actually read the game's goddamn script. Or to actually pay attention to what the characters in the game are saying to one another.
That's all I've got for now!! I am so excited for folks to hear the VO in Skin Deep. Working with actors is a delight. I love the union. Recording VO is a privilege and there are so many people out there who can make it as easy for you as possible!!