Hey guys, I'm new to the forum. Treat me gently :)

So I'm one of thousands of bright-eyed music producers hoping to get involved in the game industry with virtually no experience of implementing audio into games beyond modding hl2 engine games and map making for l4d, purely for fun.

I enjoy doing a bit of foley/sfx for my music but otherwise it's all about the music for me. So as above, should I be learning these programs or should I just continue trying to create some great music?

tia

Knowing how to implement can give you a big 'leg up' over competition, so I'd say that it's worth getting at least a bit fluent in Wwise and FMOD.

Now if you told me that you're a composer, and you can (truthfully) say that in a room of 1000 top composers in LA you're in the top 5 (literally comparing yourself to people like Bear McCreary,Michael Giacchino, James Horner, etc. then don't bother with FMOD, Wwise, etc. Just focus on creating excellent music.

Knowning FMOD/Wwise will not only give you a leg up (a lot of studios require or strongly recommend it), but it will also let you put out a better product and help make the game better

I studied Wwise thoroughly last winter and I noticed that implementing in Wwise was about a half of the actual sound design process.

What I mean is that of course I designed nice sounds and processed those in Reaper as good as I could but afterwards there was so much I could do in Wwise to make them blend in the game. Timing, pitch variation, saturation/distortion, different game modes (low health, bullet time, wet feet, weather system etc.), reverbs & other time based fx, mixing the levels. And you can easily create certain sounds in Wwise, like wind.

I believe the results would've been a lot worse if I had just created the sounds and handed them over to implementation without any control over them. And that's only SFX/foley we're talking about. If you're getting into interactive music then a middleware is a must IMHO.

Wwise is a bit tricky compared to FMOD. You can most likely start a project now and do it with FMOD while learning it at the same time as it's closer to a traditional DAW. But you shouldn't take a Wwise based project if you don't know at least the basics and preferably more.

Have a nice time learning, it's fun :)

The demand for composers is tiny relative to the supply. So if that's all you can offer, you need to be really good. The more you can bring to the table - whether that means being able to deliver music in different ways (eg. layers/dynamic/etc), being able to do additional audio work (sfx/foley/voiceover/trailers and promo/etc), or being able to help implement the audio directly (Wwise, FMOD, Unity, etc) - the more likely you are to get hired.

It never hurts to increase your skill set! All of the other posts have made some great points. You wont regret learning how to implement audio.

Thanks guys, I still have a long way to go it seems. My composition is ok but there's no way I can compare myself to those guys!

I'll get to it then :)