Making Games

This is a niche side topic for most purposes, but composing (although not specifically for games) happens to be the closest thing I have to a field of expertise here, so I may as well drop the resources here.

Note that I am ass at mixing/mastering, which is a big part of sound; I'll try to dig up some resources on this, but it's a Thing. (Among other things, psychoacoustics and the peculiarities of how humans process sound, e.g. "cocktail effect" and acclimation to "loudness," mean that this is not a linear proposition.)

sound design
books
- Robin Beauchamp. Sound Design for Animation.

MUSIC THEORY & COMPOSITION
Note: for purposes of music production, I have not discussed mixing/mastering, mainly because I'm ass at it and it's still on the list of Things to Find Out 101 About.

music theory/prerequisites
Note that this is geared toward Western music theory/notation not because that's the be-all and end-all, but because most Western (classical-derived) texts will assume these as prerequisites. Ethnomusicology is a whole 'nother thing. ( Read more... )

introductory composition
By "introductory" I mean you are at "I have no idea where even to start with composing music." Some of the texts I've listed under "intermediate/advanced" (below) are "introductory" from a conservatory standpoint but not the best starting point if you are starting from zero. ( Read more... )

intermediate/advanced composition ( Read more... )

orchestration/arranging ( Read more... )

game scoring specifically
- Winifred Phillips, A Composer's Guide to Game Music is the gold standard here, discussing specific techniques for game scoring as well as industry workflows, but assumes you already have a handle on "composing, what do."

SOFTWARE
middleware
If you get serious into sound design/music for video games, you're going to come up against middleware for e.g. Unity. My vague understanding is that the two dominant players here are WWISE and FMOD, but if you're at this point, you know more than I do and I hope you drop us some wisdom. :)

DAWs (digital audio workstations for music/sound) ( Read more... )

Instrument VSTs for music
Note: I suspect most of these will run in Windows and Mac for sure. I'm not a Linux user but I also suspect there's much less support for that. Decent Samples has a free VST host that does claim to run on Linux, although I have not verified this. ( Read more... )

software: sound effects/Foley
Forthcoming. I picked up some software from Krotos Audio but haven't had a chance to play with it yet.