A Composer's Guide to Game Music by Phillips Winifred

Author:Phillips, Winifred [Phillips, Winifred]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780262321341
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2014-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

8

The Development Team

As game composers, our creative output has a strong influence on the rest of the team, whether we know it or not. Even after the project is complete, we’ll often have no idea how deep our creative impact might have been. Our music might have serenaded the team through headphones while they were creating textures, refining animations, and testing gameplay designs. Over the course of development, our music might have inspired the team to make changes in their own work ranging from subtle tweaks to the visual style of a single location to complete redesigns of entire levels. In my own projects, I have encountered circumstances in which team members have quietly let me know that my music had a significant impact on design decisions. This is a rare and generous gift to the game composer, as a development team may not always tell us that these sorts of things have occurred. On those rare occasions when they do share this information with us, it is one way in which we can perceive our own significance as members of the team.

A game composer’s goal is to provide the team with music that will both enhance their game and inspire their work. In order to do this, we depend greatly on having access to open lines of communication. Whether we’re hired by the development team that will create the game or the publisher that will fund it, oversee its progress, and distribute it, we should make every effort to familiarize ourselves with the key personnel who will be making music decisions. Ideally, we would prefer to communicate directly with all the decision makers, but this is rarely the case. More often, our communications with the team are limited to specific designated supervisors who serve as liaisons. As we go from one game project to another, we’ll find that the people assigned the task of coordinating our efforts do not always hold the same job positions within the team, and we may encounter a wide variety of job titles. In addition, the definition of a particular job title may not always be the same from one company to the next. Until there is standardization in job titles at development studios and publishing companies, we will have to refrain from making any assumptions about job responsibilities when we are communicating with team members and discussing their music needs.

The Structure of the Team

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