When You Need Adaptive Bespoke Music But Don’t Have The Budget For A Video Game Composer
I’ve been talking to a lot of Indie Game Developers lately and something I’ve heard a few times now is that during the development process, sacrifices have to be made.
And when funding is an issue, yet more sacrifice is required.
Budget versus creative vision can end up being a process of deciding between what you want to make and what you actually can make with the funding available to you.
Too often giving up bespoke assets in favour of stock assets seems like a no-brainer. And it can be. But often what you save on tailored design, you pay for in hours spent trying to make the stock assets work for you and fit into your creative vision.
Or worse, you pay for it in time spent curtailing disappointment when the best you can do with stock assets is nowhere close to what you hoped you could create.
And this is especially the case when your vision for the game requires a high level of interactivity and adaption to the player’s input.
But the question remains, what resource do you have enough of to invest in audio? Time or money? If you have an excess of time, wrangling stock assets into a coherent art style or gameplay flow is more doable. But if you’re strapped for time, hiring a specialist video game composer so you can free up your mental RAM for other tasks is the wise choice
Manging Expectations When Bespoke Music from a Video Game Composer Doesn’t Seem Like An Option
Here’s the thing: Bespoke music is the way studios tend to go when their game needs adaptive music.
As a video game composer, obviously that’s music to my ears. And I’m always ready to jump on a new project.
But I also know that for indie studios working on their first game – or first few games – funding is often a struggle.
And that can mean sacrificing key aspects of your creative vision to actually end up creating a game that will ever get published. And not just end up stuck in the endless loop of doom, bounding between creative revisions at the behest of perfectionism and brainwaves for how the game could be even better.
→ Sometimes it’s about using the resources available to you, within your restrictions, and making something that is both finish-able *and* something you’re proud of ←
Often what you save on tailored design, you pay for in hours spent trying to make the stock assets work for you and fit into your creative vision.
With that in mind, I’ve started work on some music packs for indie devs who haven’t quite got the budget for a full soundtrack of bespoke music from a video game composer but still want something that’s as dynamic and modular as possible.
You know, music that makes the game better, more memorable. Music that brings out the best in the game. Not just something that *kind of* works pulled from a library somewhere.
I’ve created two so far – one for ‘adventure’ and one for ‘magic and mischief’. They’re ideal for light-hearted fantasy games, as you can hear in the video below.
I’ve created the video below to introduce the adventure pack. I hope it excites you as much as it excites me.
If you want to grab the pack for your game, click here.
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