[sovietmudkipz]

Hobbyist game dev here. Getting into audio and music effects has been fun but I constantly feel overwhelmed. I chose Ardour as my DAW (digital audio workstation) and have been excitedly working on learning. I also bought the book “ Writing Interactive Music for Video Games: A Composer's Guide” which has been very helpful at understanding high level vocabulary.

It’s a lot of work. I slightly enjoy it but boooooy is getting into audio and music pretty challenging. It’ll be good if I ever need to know what I’m talking about when working with others… in the future where I can dedicate myself full time to game dev… One day one day…

I don’t really have a point here. If anyone has any resources, tips, or recommendations on this subject let me know.

Edit: Congrats on the new 9.0 release!

[iainctduncan]

At the risk of sending you down a giant rabbit hole, the book Designing Sound is all about making programmatic sounds with Pure Data, and open source low-code programming environment available for all platforms. From what I've read, the book is considered a classic in the video game sound world. It's really good. Combine that with the Cipriani book on PD and learning Ardour would give you a very good learning path.

[sovietmudkipz]

Investigating…

[washadjeffmad]

I recently dated someone in her 30s with a DMA, and she she told me how proud she was to know me because I was the first non-musician friend she's ever had. It's a very deep and insular world.

Pablo Casals famously replied when asked why he was still practicing in his 70s that he "felt like we was making progress", so don't let yourself feel inadequate.

[mrblampo]

DMA in what sub-field?

[bityard]

Stuff like that sends me down rabbit holes and when I finally come up for air, I say, "Gee, now I see how people can build their entire career around this!"

[marai2]

A light weight journaling of your learnings as you go along would probably be real beneficial to many (such as myself who has zero knowledge on the subject of DAWs and creating music effects for games). And since you said it’s very challenging maybe writing about it in small bite-sized learnings might make the process easier? Going from “I must learn all this stuff!!” to “let’s see what audio gems we pick up in our adventure today”.

[sovietmudkipz]

Good point w/ journaling and maybe even preparing stuff to share. Right now it feels like trying to eat a whale whole. …That’s the beauty of doing something in a new (to me) domain though. Even if I don’t share, the practice of formulating how I would explain to someone is beneficial.

[rtpg]

In the Axiom Verge noclip documentary, the dev talks about how everyone is surprised about how he really made the whole game himself (except localization + marketing (and I imagine final testing but...)).

And he was like "people say 'even the music?' The music was the easiest part!!!'

It does make me feel like once you get into the right headspace and figure out how most of the tooling works all of this becomes quite smooth.

[TyrunDemeg101]

Alex Rome has really really amazing easy to follow videos about some patterns in music development: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh1MtJ4rx4n4PQGYNYK_UXA

I've been making music now for 8 months and have absolutely fallen in love with it. I'd love to write music for a game, what kind of game are you creating?

Here's my stuff if you're interested: https://aaronholbrookmusic.com

Feel free to reach out!

[sovietmudkipz]

Perfect…! I’ll check out Alex Rome.

Sounds like you’re ahead of me then! The game I’m working on off & on is a 32v32 moba. I want the gameplay of Heroes of the Storm but with the match size of a battlefield server.

I wish I could dedicate myself full time to the effort (and in fact I’m working with my financial planner to figure out a plan) but this is a side project that is prioritized behind a few things. I wouldn’t feel too comfortable collaborating right now since I would be unpredictable. I’ll keep you in mind for when that changes though!

[dmbche]

You might like SuperCollider! It's free and a programming language made for sound design. Just writing code - but quite far from a DAW.