Sound in the game works for engagement and fun as well as art and visual effects, but it is talked about much less often. We hasten to correct this injustice and talk more about music specialties in the context of game development.

Sound Designer and Composer
Let’s dot the i’s and cross the t’s between a sound designer and a composer.

A gamdev sound designer is a specialist who accompanies the game events with the corresponding sound sample. He should be well versed in non-melodic sound features (noise, texture, and so on). He should know game engines and audio middleware, be able to implement and adjust the sound within the game build. Such a specialist picks up the sounds of non-existent textures. He knows how magic, monsters, lasers and space sound. At the same time he may not be able to write music and think melodically.

Then there is the music sound designer – the person who creates new timbres on synthesizers (read: turns knobs all over the place), but can’t necessarily write music.

A composer is actually someone who writes music using musical instruments and their skills. Must have melodic and harmonic thinking, know musical forms, but may not understand anything about sound in terms of noise.

A sound designer is like a font designer. He draws curves, adjusts kerning, he can easily distinguish Helvetica from Arial by the tip of the letter “R”, he immediately notices understretched lines, and different optical density of letters can give him indigestion. But all he has to write is “Eat more of those French rolls, and drink some tea,” or “Lorem ipsum. Such a specialist operates with forms.

The composer in this case would be a writer, poet, or copywriter. Such a specialist operates with meanings. He has the right not to distinguish between an Impact and a Colibri and not to understand anything in visual art, as long as he writes a good text (or, on some holidays, a rhyming text).

These are quite different professions in AAA games, yet they are often combined in one person on mobile and casual projects. You’d think it was out of economy (and it used to be, too), but in fact the relationship between sound and music is much stronger in cajoling:

And the sounds are often musical, where there’s some sort of melody in addition to the noise stuff. For example, the sounds of matching chips in match-3, getting items, winning a round, and so on. The most unpleasant mistake here is to make sounds that conflict melodically with the music and don’t sound good.

And the music could use a sound design approach. It’s a set of activities to make the music sound so neat, cozy, sweet by manipulating and matching the timbres.

What gamedev to get into.
It is more difficult for a sound designer to get into a Game-Design studio, than for a 2D-artist, 3D-artist or animator who get snatched away. The problem is simple: there is very little demand for full-time professionals.

A composer also has non-standard requirements to his workplace: where a desk, computer, graphic tablet and a calibrated display are enough for a painter, a composer needs a MIDI keyboard, couple of studio audio monitors (and in advanced cases 5.1-7.1 sets), a room at least with good acoustic preparation, microphones and acoustic instruments, an advanced audio interface, synthesizers, processing devices, etc. All this is money and time, so not everyone wants to bother. After all, you can buy music and sounds on audio stores.

You have much more chances to get a job in an outsourcing studio, which fulfills the orders of game companies. Or – freelancing with its traditional pros and cons.

To get into the industry, you need to make yourself known, as in any other specialty. Various gamemaking groups and pubs, as well as free work on small projects to get experience and build up a portfolio (we will talk about that below).

The team that makes music in gamedev can be very different. Again, it all depends on the scale of the project. If we talk about where you can go to work for a sound designer who wants to work in gamedev, the options are roughly as follows:

  • A staff at a game company;
  • an outsourced studio;
  • freelance;
  • audio-stocks;
  • Asset Stores.