Hi all,

I'm Callum, I'm 23 from the UK. I'm a newbie music composer and sound designer. I just finished studying Music Production at BIMM London and have been recently looking in to getting in to the video game industry.

I made a showreel of games that I have reworked to feature my own music and sound as a reference to my capabilities, which I will link at the bottom of this post.

At university I worked with wwise, fmod and unity, and so have some experience integrating music in to games on a basic but functioning level. I was kind of hoping that someone would be able to help me understand how it usually works for the indie game composers.
For example, if I were to agree to do sound for a game tomorrow, what would generally be expected of me? Just the audio side of things and a basic understanding of audio integration or an in depth programming or coding knowledge? Are there any particular programs I would be fully expected to own, or does it completely vary from one project to another?

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Thanks, Would love to hear your thoughts.

My Showreel:

Working with audio middleware tools (Wwise/FMOD) and in-engine experience (Unity/UE4) yeah. Programming, no.

I think it's good to have had experience with Wwise and FMOD while at Uni as these are very popular audio middleware solution for games.

Thanks for the reply! Pretty much what I had hoped for so that's good to know :) Guess I just need to find some games to improve my Wwise/fmod knowledge with.

There is no standard for how indie companies work; they are understaffed (pretty much by definition) and sometimes they will have someone who is completely proficient with audio integration and sometimes they will not. Sometimes they will be using well-known middleware like FMOD or Wwise, and sometimes they will not. All bets are off.

However, in general:

• you will almost never be expected to code
• it's likely, but not guaranteed, that you would be familiar with getting your assets imported into game engines like Unity and Unreal and testing them
• this means that they will expect you to have Unity installed if you want to work on a Unity project, and UE4 if you want to work on a UE4 project
• it's possible that they might also want you to hook up your assets to in-game events, depending on how they have implemented them (which is mostly just about you being confident with the editor)
• it's possible that they are happy to just receive a .wav or .mp3 from you and that is all you'll need to do.
• it's possible that they will want you to use their source control system for submitting assets (e.g. Perforce, Git, Mercurial, Subversion)

For example, if I were to agree to do sound for a game tomorrow, what would generally be expected of me? Just the audio side of things and a basic understanding of audio integration or an in depth programming or coding knowledge? Are there any particular programs I would be fully expected to own, or does it completely vary from one project to another?

Moving thread to the Music And Sound forum.

hi there tom I wonder if you are programing a game now? 

Hi Pedro - please don't post off-topic comments into existing topics, especially when the topic is months old. If you need to ask an off-topic question you can send a private message to users via their profiles, but generally speaking if you just want to chat you'd be better off over at the Gamedev.net Discord channel - https://www.gamedev.net/community/chat/

On 2/21/2017 at 5:15 AM, w00ds said:

Thanks for the reply! Pretty much what I had hoped for so that's good to know Guess I just need to find some games to improve my Wwise/fmod knowledge with.

Audiokinetic have some great, free Wwise tutorials available online (you only have to pay if you want the certificate), you can check them out here.

It's definitely worth running through them - as a sound designer the more you know about Wwise the better. You won't have to touch any code, but you'll need to understand how audio works in games.