Many of you reading this post will likely be coming from Bluesky or Discord, and many of you might be aware that I straddle two industries at once with my work: the games industry and the music industry.
My work as a singer-songwriter, composer, drummer, and general session musician has led me to make friends and contacts, and it has opened up opportunities for me to go to the odd industry events. I want to write about my takeaways from both industries, as there are many similarities between the two, and there is some degree of overlap with my field of work.
In this Part 1 post, I will be talking about my experiences as a game audio person, doing game jams, attending the odd Game Audio Liverpool meetup, and two Develop: Brighton conferences (2022 and 2023).
Actually: let's work backwards.
My experiences with Develop: Brighton
In the two years that I've attended Develop, I've noticed how it tries to cater to game professionals of all stripes. It doesn't do so perfectly, however, and it at least acknowledges that.
My Expo Only tickets allowed me to not only network at the game company showcase, but also to attend various roundtables. One such roundtable, which I remember attending in 2023, was about levelling the playing field in the games industry.
For those of us not in the UK, here we have a North-South divide with regards to wealth and infrastructure distribution. It is a long-running, deeply historical injustice. And that's not getting into things like classism, where working class or the very poor are inhibited almost entirely from getting into games. Or racism, or xenophobia, or queerphobia, or transphobia. We shouldn't have to be the product of several lotteries in order to access, and contribute to, an industry we love.
I fall into an intersection of many of these: non-binary woman, South Asian, former asylum seeker, bisexual. I had a period of eight years where I was trapped in the asylum process, and thus prohibited from working, but I was born middle class, which afforded me the opportunity to be bundled out of my birth country in the first place. The asylum process robbed me of my 20s. From these experiences, I was able to tell of my journey into game audio, and I mentioned that I was lucky to even be there, part of a demographic with missing data. (Though not for long.) Given that I went straight into work as soon as my asylum seeker days drew to a close, I couldn't, and still can't, afford to go to university or conservatory. But all I did was be present and give my account.
Which leads me to my next section.
Game development in Northwest England
The situation in the North, especially the Northwest, with regards to games, is not great. Thing is, there are a number of dead spots across the country, not just England. I can't account for the situation in Wales, for example. But I do know from experience that much of Northwest England is a dead spot for game development and game audio, and I said as much.
This only just came at a time when events were beginning to be held in different parts of the country. Game Audio Liverpool had been going on for a year by the time I gave my account in that roundtable in 2013. Game Dev London was becoming Game Dev Local, with long-term plans to actively host events for game devs in various different counties and cities. I also have recently been made aware of the existence of GaMaYo, another organisation hosting games industry related events in the North of England.
Liverpool and Manchester are the two bigger cities in the Northwest. There are others, of course — I happen to live in one, Preston — but there's little, if nothing at all, going on for games outside of Liverpool and Manchester. This then brings up the question of commuting costs, fiscal or otherwise. Can we afford to take that day off to attend a meetup? Or is our work too vital to our survival for us to do this? The lack of spending power and the general hardship we all are going through right now, these make going to events that much harder, even if they're in our general region.
To that end, I only ever attended one(?) Game Audio Liverpool meetup. Most of them clash with my Saturday evening organist duties. Liverpool is only accessible to me by train; driving into the city costs me an arm and a leg with parking charges.
Online, and freelancing in general
Freelancing has been a very accessible experience for me from the get-go because of the amount of support I received for it, especially starting out, and I hope to pay it forward.
I was introduced to game audio as a profession by other indie game composers, chief of them Chel Wong, during the first lockdown in 2020. She came across the audio that I had posted on the late lamented Twitter during the penultimate 21 Days of VGM, and introduced me to the server, Beats To Play Games To, a dedicated server for game audio people across the world. From the folks there, I learned the ropes regarding freelancing as a game audio person, and I stored all of this knowledge for when the time would come.
For context, I was an asylum seeker from 2013 to late 2021, and therefore forbidden from taking employment. I couldn't use that knowledge in 2020, but when I was given the right to remain (and therefore, to work etc.) in 2021, all that I had been taught could finally be put to good use. I had joined multiple game jams and put together a body of work, most of it on my itch.io page.
Doing game jams is a surefire way to build material and understand what kinds of devs gel with us. Game jams are short events, lasting anywhere from a few days to a week to a month or sometimes more. You band together with a programmer and an artist, and together you make a functional, playable game based on the constraints given to you. Given that I write my songs on piano, and I plug my piano directly into the PC for this, coming up with music for these short games is a very quick affair, sometimes lasting as long as the full track itself (if it's a piano improvisation).
For those of you looking to get into game jams as a starting point to build material, you will want to build an itch.io account. You will also want to take a look at this calendar, indiegamejams.com. This thing is chock full of events and it can be overwhelming to look at, I'm aware – the key is to pick jams at times of the year when you have time to spare, and then go from there. Many of these jams are titled by mechanics, engine, genre of game, or a feature expected to be seen in these games.
Once you have built enough material for yourself, you gather it together into a reel, put it up, and hope that it gets picked up by a developer. Or, you respond to a dev's call for music for their game. Or, they contact you by e-mail or on Bluesky or on Discord or on Mastodon or wherever. There's an element of luck involved in all of this, but a lot of freelance work is about maximising our chances, and giving a leg up to people interested in pursuing this field.
I've been contacted for game audio commissions on Bluesky, on Newgrounds, and via e-mail so far. At this stage of my career, I multiclass: game audio isn't my only means of income, and that's necessary because I need to live. Many of us who do game audio also pursue teaching and session work, and play live with bands. I play live with bands, I have a pipe organ residency in two parishes, I am a junior choir director in another parish, and I also occasionally take art and voice acting commissions. I have also done sheet music consultation for drums, just the once so far.
The general attitude
Report after report shows how the games industry here in the UK is shedding workers in the thousands despite some companies posting record profits. Some friends and connections of mine were directly affected by layoffs, notably at Riot Games.
Bigger games companies may be more “fun” than other companies we could think of, but they do have a corporate culture and a corporate ladder associated with them. When layoffs happen like this, en masse, it is immediately identifiable as a huge problem that needs addressing – where's all this talent going to go?
As such, there is much more solidarity on the ground. Anyone at all is not indispensable, and yet, our stories and our craft are indispensable. Making games, and making innovations in games, is now the purview of the indie dev space, which is full of people on the ground from various walks of life – some beginners, some seasoned devs who have never been in a company in their life, some who have been affected by layoffs and who were once AAA devs. In many places where they gather, they share their information and resources, conscious that the costs of living are incredibly high and that it takes a lot of energy to even survive at times. I observe that they truly believe that we're all in this together. If we don't help each other in these streets, we risk losing a beloved industry that has touched the hearts of millions around the world. Many games that have been successfully crowdfunded have been funded by fans and developers alike. And even when money is not involved, there is a general staunch support for each other in this space.
While it is luck of the draw which games make bigger numbers and which don't, the general takeaway is the same: make that game anyway, put that idea out anyway. Stories deserve telling with spins and reframing and new settings even if they are fundamentally the same premise as other stories before it. They are all based on individual and collective human experiences, and they deserve to see the light of day.
And it keeps me going, as a game audio person. It gives me real hope. Even if I have no plans to ever join a company, the support shown by developers of all stripes keeps me going in this field. That, and my love of music.
