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What are your experiences working on video games?

merlinhimself

Senior Member
I wanted to start a discussion on a composers experience and process of writing for video games. I work on the film side and understand the aspects of game music such as action, dialogue, mood specific cues as well as writing to a cut scene like you would score in film, but outside of that, how do the challenges differ from film? What do you enjoy about it more versus film?

I've been an avid gamer all my life and always decided game music was my end goal, but my experience led me down a purely film route so in a way it all seems somewhat foreign to me as I haven't touched the process of working on a game.
 
I'm not the most prolific or best game composer. But I think I can share some helpful information.

I think writing music for games is still a relatively new art form. I think the main challenge is REALLY getting the music to fit correctly. Since most the time in games the music loops, it really has to hit several emotions at once. Meaning that unless you do a super elaborate interactive music style (which usually has to compromise on tunes and themes), the music is going to play through various events in the game. So that's the hardest and most fun thing I find about it. You have to write the hell out of some music.

I also really think that the music that we write for games stands on the backs of game audio from the 80s and 90s. So there is that expectation to write good tunes, melodies, active ideas, and in general pieces of music vs underscore. I think that's what interests me the most. I'm writing pieces of music instead of simply underscore based cues that lie in the background. Although that's definitely a part of it as well.

Plus, almost everyone I've worked with in games is awesome. Video games are also dominating the industry so that means more people to be affected by our music and the games they take a part in. That's one of my driving forces. I think there is more room for experimentation as well. Just listen to anything by Austin Wintory, Dale North, Nobuo Uematsu, Yasunori Mitsuda, or Yasunori Nishiki. There is nothing else that sounds like them. I haven't heard anything that sounds close.

That is just my TOTALLY biased opinion though. I'm super biased as a game composer myself and an avid gamer since I was about 4 years old. That's the entire basis of my career, so feel free to take everything I say with a grain of salt. :)
 
I'm about to have my first video game release and I wrote like how games used to have music, which means the song has an intro then it loops. I think a big area for growth is in dynamic music, and I don't mean that in a musical sense but where the music responds to gameplay. So you end up having to be a little bit of a programmer I suppose. I'm planning on learning wwise.
 
Agreed - you need to at least understand how things like wwise and fmod work, if not be able to use them to plan and sculpt the soundtrack. I'm working on Narcos at the moment, and we're deep in the phase of 'what can we do technically, and what is worth the effort'. There's a balance between concept and resources, between flowing, musical score and reactive score. In a film, you know the big reveal happens on that frame, and always will, so you can spend a whole minute building up to it.
In a game, it's much more dynamic.
Can the score handle transitioning between lots of different states quickly without feeling jagged or glitchy or repetitive?
What in-game factors influence how the music changes? Should the music change depending on where you are? If you're in danger/combat? How do you define combat? How do you transition from 'normal' to 'combat' and vice-versa? If you have a super high-intensity music state, how do you guarantee it doesn't stay there for ages and ages and fatigue the player? And if you ramp down from that state, is it done with a transition, or a high-intensity stem volume reduction, or a filter, etc etc

There's a whole extra element of video game composition which doesn't exist in linear mediums, and it's a massive pain in the arse. It's also amazingly satisfying and enriching if/when it works.
 
So much this. I've only scratched the surface and luckily we're having a dedicated coder in our team who I work closely with, but the pain in the arse in the composing process is definitely real even in a smaller scale (as we're not doing AAA games). :D Especially when working with different layers and stems.
Right now I'm still taking a bit baby steps and treating music stems only as horizontal and vertical layers only, but at some point I most likely start trying to to start mixing together "horizontal layer 3 with vertical layer 8" etc....which I already have nightmares about, haha!
 
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