Game developer Michael Klamerus, whose birthday it was on 19 August (happy belated birthday by the way!), issued a challenge on that day to game devs and followers of with blogs to write about an obscure game.

Now, not many games whose soundtracks I enjoyed long ago get to be called “obscure.” Once upon a time game series like Nier and the Mana series may have staked that claim, but that claim was since lost when Nier: Automata became a runaway success, and when many Mana games were being ported to newer systems or, in some cases, remade. But at the time of writing, one series (and by no means the only one), released only on PlayStation 2 and 3, which saw only limited sales globally, still gets to stake the claim of being obscure. Its soundtrack has had a strong bearing on my musicianship and my ability to express emotions through the medium of music.

That series is Ar tonelico. (It has since had two prequel games called Ciel nosurge and Ar nosurge, but those games are equally obscure, and for the purposes of this blog post, I'd like to focus on the Ar tonelico games exclusively.) Let's talk about it.

To begin, when the games' developer Akira Tsuchiya developed those games, he also developed an entirely workable constructed language that served as the primary language for the sung music in the games. That language is Hymmnos. It is so workable, in fact, that Standard Hymmnos is easy to parse and translate into English and Japanese, and that fact alone has caused there to be a decent number of fanmade originals that are written in the Hymmnos language. I'll cover those later.

Hymmnos helped me articulate my emotions well at a time when I otherwise suppressed my emotions due to C-PTSD. I don't say this lightly. In Standard Hymmnos, most sentences begin with what are known as Emotion Sounds. I'll let the Conlang Wiki page explain this for me. Clicking on the image leads directly to the part of that page that describes Emotion Sounds.

And as you can imagine, there are many Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 Emotion Sounds to describe a fairly wide array of emotions, intensity, and context. It helped me centre what I was singing and why – a principle that I slowly began to apply to everything else I did musically.

My beginnings as a musician were in both the folk tradition and the liturgical music tradition. I beat the bodhrán for the former, and played pipe organ for the latter. So you can imagine my absolute delight when Ar tonelico, like many JRPGs, channelled both of these influences in its OSTs.

Every game in the series began with a recitative that had a lot of emotion woven into it, describing the setting of the game to some extent, called Singing Hill. Below is a video of my favourite of these, and the sheer amount of lines being sung in this intro should give you an idea of just how much gets expressed with each Hymmnos song.

Ultimately, after all three games were released, a soundtrack album, Ar=Ciel Ar=Dor, was released to tie some narrative loose ends within the games' plot. That album's Singing Hill is a magnificent piece of work, and I have taken many cues from it over the years.

The games may follow the smaller perspectives of characters and their immediate circles of friends, but the events that the games cover are earth-shattering and Biblical in scope.

Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia, the first game, introduces the world of Ar Ciel, where the entire series takes place. It is technically a futuristic, dystopian scenario as the game's intro describes how people now cling to towers high above the clouds, because the earth's surface has been destroyed beyond human repair due to war. It introduces the players to the continent of Sol Ciel, and then it introduces the race of Reyvateils, artificially constructed humanoid people who wield the power of Song Magic. Song Magic itself can do anything from causing a flame to flicker in the darkness, to materially changing or destroying the world and everything in it, depending on the emotional state and will of the singer (or the person controlling her). In specific, the game focuses on a single vanguard, Lyner Barsett, tasked with protecting a few Reyvateils (Aurica Nestmile and Misha Arsellec Lune come to mind) as they all race against time to stop one of the most powerful Reyvateils in existence, Mir, from breaking free from her prison and destroying the world.

The second game, Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica, takes place in a different continent within Ar Ciel, called Sol Marta, which is crumbling. Given that the surface is uninhabitable, any continent that falls from the clouds spells certain death for all who live in them. Two Reyvateils, Luca and Cloche, who hail from different factions but turn out to be sisters by adoption, follow their factions' paths and eventually work together to sing the long anticipated hymn, EXEC_with_METHOD_METAFALICA/., a hymn previously unsuccessful. If they succeed, they would be able to create a self-sustaining landmass in the clouds, a new utopia for the people of Sol Marta.

The third and final game in the series, Ar tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel, deals with considerably more apocalyptic events. The game's events take place in an absolute tyrannical hellhole called Sol Cluster, which was once at war with Sol Ciel and is still seen as a rival and enemy of Sol Ciel's. There are a few people in there who have considerably loftier and nobler ambitions, however: to restore the surface of Ar Ciel so that it can become habitable again, as living in the clouds is not sustainable. Reyvateils Saki, Finnel, and Tyria, and their vanguard Aoto, and the friends they gather around them, race to communicate with entities known as the Wills of the Planet, hoping to convince them of the goodness that humanity has despite its history of war, conflict, hatred, and destruction. The surface of Ar Ciel continues to be uninhabitable due to the rage that it, and the Wills of the Planet, have had for humanity over the millennia. The future of humanity and Reyvateil-kind rests on the protagonists' shoulders.

Having said all this, I like to think that when a language talks about basic concepts, it talks about the passing of the day and the seasons, about activities like farming, hunting or fishing, about myth and legend, and crucially, about spirituality, ritual and religion. Hymmnos does that to a T.

From songs pleading for forgiveness…

to songs talking about the judgment of the Earth…

to exorcism songs that sound quintessentially Japanese…

to legends of in-game heroes Harvestasha and Rhaplanca…

to songs raining down sheer emotionless destruction,

the games have it all. And the games cause global fans of the games to specifically hone in on the games' music, over everything else. While the games themselves receive average scores and reviews (and, true to much Japanese media of the time, are a bit too heavy on the gooner type of suggestive content), we can connect with the characters in many ways, but the aspect of the games whose praises we sing the most is still going to be the music. As I say a lot of the time, Ar tonelico did Nier long before Nier ever did Nier. The first game, Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia was released in 2006, a whole year before Nier Gestalt and Nier Replicant were, and its soundtrack went to those places which many listeners describe as “sounding like Nier.”

On a small scale, fans of the games' music engage in ludomusicology and linguistic study: we think about these songs in the same way folk songs are written about battles and tragedies and almost any other event imaginable. We think about their implications for listeners and players at large. Some of us who are involved in doujin circles like Stellatram or Aetherhythm write entire histories or alternate universes around the lore of the Ar tonelico games, often communicating these by means of music. It is no surprise to me that one of the people who engaged in making and performing Ar tonelico-inspired fan originals is developer and fellow folk musician and artist Katy Coope (yes, the same one who wrote the book How to Draw Manga). The potential that Hymmnos has to describe entire worlds or images in single songs is immense, and those of us who cross multiple artistic and technical fields understand that well. We don't even need to play the games to imagine what could be, or what could have been. We just need to listen to the music and let the magic happen.

I didn't pursue much Hymmnos writing or composition in the last few years. Most of my input in the language was written before 2021. Other projects took my time and energy. But one particular song I composed still sticks out to me the most, i.e. the intro that I wrote back in 2019 to Aetherhythm's second Hymmnos album, whose title I shorten to Cosmocrystal II Side Red:

Listening back to this feels quaint. In fact, listening even to Stellatram feels quaint. I've grown significantly as a musician, as a composer, as a performer, ever since. My mixing and mastering have improved to the point that I can now reliably mix most things without needing a second opinion. And yet…

I remember the joy that these stories gave me. I remember being so thrilled that I got to beat my favourite drum (of the ones in my possession) for one of the Hymmnos tracks in Cosmocrystal II Side Red. I remember, most of all, the joy that came with expressing my emotions more fully, even if that started in Hymmnos first before finally progressing to English. It's quite staggering to think about it, but the fact of the matter is that part of my ability to express myself both linguistically and musically came from the soundtrack of an obscure game series from the PlayStation 2 days.

And even to this day, regardless of genre, I sing and play my instruments with a very perceptible spiritual bent, which I can partly attribute to being a holdover from my days of listening to the games' OSTs. The soundtrack of the Ar tonelico games has held a sway over me that I can say of no other soundtrack in existence.

*may or may not encompass months' worth of happenings

Speaking at the SoundGirls conference

On the evening GMT of 13 December 2025, I joined some friends – Rachel Garett Steele, Bonnie Bogovich, and Kelsey Mira – in delivering a talk about getting our vocals into games. It was called Studio to Score: Vocal Arranging Demystified. (The poster mentions two more friends, Laura Intravia and Jillian Aversa; sadly, they couldn't make the talk due to emergencies.)

(Yeah, there's a cheeky image of me behind the drums at Oyston Mill. The drums are not in shot lol)

It was a thorough talk, from what I remember; we covered various aspects of the process. How we got our vocals in games, how we were picked up by developers, what gear we use, what our recording and mixing process is, how we spoke with developers and what kind of direction we received from them with regards to the way we were to perform our vocals, contracts, licensing, the list goes on.

This is my first speaking credit. I may be mistaken, but I believe the others have spoken at a good few other conferences. Nonetheless, I'm happy to have been able to join these seasoned professionals in delivering insight into the world of game audio, and specifically from the perspective of a vocalist.

Choir directorship

Some of you may have known that in mid-2024 I started directing a kids' church choir in Longridge. I have since moved on from that position to direct a well-established church choir in Penwortham, starting 1 February 2026. I feel like I've stumbled onto them, because they are wonderful singers and they're eager for a challenge. I hope that I can give it to them and that they can feel real satisfaction from it. I'm truly blessed to be with them.

I introduced one of my own songs to the choir and the congregation a week and a bit back (this song is still in the process of being recorded, so I'm not dropping any hints from now). I was not expecting the amount of effusive praise I would get from the people around me for it. This has gotten the gears in my head turning.

These next couple weeks are going to be among the busiest for me: Holy Week and Easter are coming, and there is a LOT of preparation to do. Let's shine.

Harris Open exhibition

My local museum, the Harris Museum, relaunched its open art exhibition, the Harris Open, in February 2026. I am one of 500+ artists to feature there, and I submitted this moleskine journal entry.

If you happen to be able to visit the Harris Museum, my work is number 83, in one of the side rooms! The exhibition lasts until May 2026.

There was a lot of processing that went into this work. I've been mentally abysmal these last several months. At the time I penned the words that would become this art piece, I was struggling to find a way forward with my craft. Various industries have gone to shit, and there seemed (and still seems) to be less appetite for beautiful things in a world of poverty, austerity, hatred, and war. Many creatives I know feel like we're on the front lines of passive resistance, as do I. And I want to stress, that is a good thing in the face of this constant evil and darkness… and yet, we can't help but dream about what came before.

I didn't win any prizes (now why the fuck would I, lol). But I managed to inspire a child who loved comics and wanted to get into them, on the opening day of the exhibition. I've not been back since, at least not yet, and I hope to be back. I don't know what kind of reach this piece will have had since opening day.

Discoveries regarding games I'd scored

For the purposes of this paragraph and all discourse on the games I'd written music for, I use the phrase “shipped titles” to describe games that 1) are NOT jam games, and 2) have made it to storefronts, notably Steam and Google Play. Anything else is a bonus.

I discovered only yesterday that Glue Globs, the second ever shipped title I'd scored, has had 50,000 downloads. For an indie mobile game, this is not bad whatsoever. Honestly, I didn't know what kind of reach the game would have; it looks like it has gone far further than I had imagined.

Today, I found out that the opening trailer of yuri visual novel Bittersweet Blossoms, for which I laid down vocals, is now out. There's still no word on the game's release, at least not yet.

New material and older material

New material is being recorded in Soundskills at the minute. In an earlier paragraph I spoke about a song I demonstrated to the folks in Penwortham; more instrumentation is being added to it at the time of writing.

My spouse and I and another friend talked about the possibility of me either 1) revisiting older material by posting it on YouTube with visualisers, or 2) rerecording and remixing older songs.

I'm taking a hybrid approach. There are songs that I'm not about to touch again, like the OSTs I'd scored (Ley Lines, Glue Globs), and for those, I'd like to slowly release them on YouTube with visualisers. The same applies for jam OSTs that I'm especially proud of. As for lyrical songs, it's worth mentioning that before 2020, I mouse-clicked everything, INCLUDING piano parts, into the piano roll in FL Studio, and so while it is playable, it feels lacking in movement and it doesn't reflect my ability. There are a number of lyrical songs I've written that I'd like to rerecord and release music videos or lyrics videos for, down the line. Let's see where this all leads.

Could you tell that I'm terrible at updating my website, let alone this blog?

Lately I've taken to doing weekly releases on YouTube, mostly of video game covers and sometimes the odd original. Really, I only release (or re-release) originals on YouTube whenever I can get a new song mixed and mastered and whenever I can make a music video or visualiser for it. For the most part, otherwise, it's easy for me to simply improvise piano over some themes that I cherished.

In the way of originals, over Christmas 2025 I released a music video for a song I'd written almost a year prior, called lonely, which dealt with the cultural loneliness I feel around Christmastide.

And some time before that, I released another original, in French this time, called autrefois j'avais une étoile (tr.: “once upon a time I had a star”). It's a song dealing with the loss of friendship. The video has English subtitles if you don't already understand French and would like to follow along.

In the way of improvised piano covers, I finished a Kirby's Adventure-themed series in early December, and then began a Kingdom Hearts-themed series in January. The lot can be listened to in the Video Game Covers playlist – though, bear in mind that said playlist also includes covers that I made before I began improvising almost weekly.

A chapter in my life as a musician is soon to close. In late February, I will no longer be junior choir director. However, another chapter has also simultaneously opened: in early February, I begin my position as an adult choir director, my first such position.

Of course I'm going to feel all manner of bittersweetness around this thing, but also, I must press on.

If Inkfinity Festival has unlocked something in me, it's the desire to share music and visuals with you on a somewhat regular basis. After I'd shared three separate behind-the-scenes videos, there was a void that needed to be filled.

This isn't explicitly a Friday night release – this one was done for the OST Composing Jam, which I'll get to in a bit – but this one is the first video for which I drew and put together a visualiser that moves, lives, breathes. Not just moving peak effects, but moving water, lights that grow and shrink.

I'd neglected my YouTube channel for years for the simple reason that I couldn't figure out what made videos look nice and catch people's attention. Now it's different: I have a release every Friday at 21:00 BST (or GMT, when the clocks eventually go back). That I have a regular release schedule suggests that I've gotten to the point where I'm happy, visually, with what I'm outputting. And I guess I am. Watch this space.

Recently, fellow game audio person SnugglyBun and I tag-teamed for the OST Composing Jam 8. The text theme given to us participants as a prompt was the phrase “one summer night.” An image prompt was also supplied, too: an image by xin.cere depicting a girl waiting on a jetty as dusk fell (hence my visualiser above, which was intended to be a direct reference to this).

One look at the image and text prompt and both Snuggly and I immediately thought, visual novel. The result, as posted on our submission page, is an OST that is both airy and bright, and mellow and emotional.

At the time of writing, we're waiting for the results of the jam (it is ranked). But we're also not holding our breaths. More than 260 people submitted to this jam, which I can only imagine is an ordeal to sift through. After we've dedicated time and energy to a project that we can be proud of, we feel like it's time to move on to the next project, whatever that may be.

If anything, I'm glad I participated with Snuggly, and I'm glad we finished. I improvise piano in a matter of minutes; Snuggly is an exceptional arranger and composer. We've borrowed each other's leitmotifs. For one of these tracks, she took what I had drafted and turned it into a fully-fledged, airy, 2000s instrumental rock track. We've looked upon our finished soundtrack rather fondly, with hearts wide open and bursting with emotion, and no results screen is really ever gonna take that from us.

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If you love what you see and hear, head over to the Contact page!

A lot has happened in the last two weeks, and I've been taking a while to process them all. I think I'll write about them all here in this one post.

Rebellion Festival

First of all, the punk band in which I play drums, Those Fucking Snowflakes, opened Rebellion Festival in Blackpool!

For those of you unaware, Rebellion Festival is the punk festival in Britain. A selection of acts across various stages of their career, from the new and undiscovered to the absolute stalwarts, perform in different stages at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool, and it typically spans four days in the start of August, from a Thursday to a Sunday. (Just before that, you have Rebellion Fringe, where various venues across Blackpool host punk bands and people party through the night.)

This was us when we were done with our set. We were on a high of emotions and we felt this was our best gig yet.

As we were the opening band altogether and we were playing on the Introducing Stage at the Pavilion, we were surrounded by merch shops on the outer perimeter. We were expecting to have numbers not far different to what we were used to playing to by this point. What we weren't expecting was a 200-, 300-strong crowd and people from outside looking in. This was our biggest audience yet.

The audience was wonderful. Some were singing our lyrics, people who previously weren't familiar with us even. Some were dancing. The atmosphere was very electric. The crew – the crew were absolutely wonderful. The help they gave us was invaluable, and a number of them rooted for us individually and as a band. They kept a well-oiled machine from start to finish, with so many bands performing and so many moving parts to worry about, and they gave us a great sound. I have nothing but massive respect for them and just how tight they were.

The food was great, too. We had a selection of vegan meals: nachos, butter “chicken,” a burrito whose fillings I don't remember… I don't even remember the full extent of the menu but I went for the burrito. There was also a cake on the side, with the lightest whipped cream I'd ever tasted. Once we'd eaten and hauled gear away, we could enjoy the rest of the festival, hopping from stage to stage to enjoy the music of a good few other bands.

I can only speak for myself in these situations; I will cherish this experience forever.

Inkfinity Festival / SATUR-8

For the last several months, a bunch of us creatives banded together to make a modded Splatfest (for the uninitiated: a Splatfest is an event in the Splatoon games, typically structured like a festival with lights, in-game music performances, two straight days of matches, where people get into teams and battle each other.) We called it Inkfinity Fest.

This team had the likes of Caitlin Koi, riji monogatari, tacoyaki, other people who knew what they were doing – 3D modellers like LegendofLonk Studios and Nami so 95, scriptwriters and lyricists like Sally Strings, modders who knew the battle mechanics like Alessio798, composers and arrangers like Lumiflag and Xion … and two meeps, Christoph Jakob and myself. I don't think I've cited everyone in this team – it's an extensive team, to be sure.

Christoph mixed a few tracks, notably our crown jewel, Three Wishes, which is due to release on 13 September.

As for me, I composed a number of the SATUR-8 songs, first drafting them on piano. I'll provide the current strongest example, a battle track called Deepsea Rainbow Trihards, which is based on three songs from Caitlin's, riji's, and tacoyaki's bands – Rainbow Rumble, Deepsea Graffiti, and Triumphant Trihards.

The whole thing includes all the team shouts – ordinarily, if a particular team is winning and there is only one minute left to go, their specific fragment plays at the end of the battle in-game. For illustration purposes, here is Trench's:

The themes were all arranged by Xion, but to demonstrate how they began, below is the behind-the-scenes video that shows the piano sketch that began it all. All themes that I composed for Inkfinity Fest follow this process: I open FL Studio, make sure the piano is connected, and then chordbash until I'm happy with what I hear, then I send the MIDI over to either Xion or Lumiflag for arrangement.

The above video premiered last night to a small audience – my YouTube channel has been small for a long time – but Caitlin hopped on, which made my day, and riji watched it soon after the premiere had ended.

Footage for Inkfinity Fest is hard to come by, especially footage featuring SATUR-8 songs specifically, as the songs are typically played randomly. However, if you want a taste of what Inkfinity Fest looked like, a stream or two of it exists.

My sincere hope, from all of this, is that everyone in this team gets hired for games industry work. There are a good few people who specialise in narrative here and they've all but smashed it. Christoph's mixing takes several leaves from the bands he loves, notably Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bear's Den. Lumiflag and Xion are powerhouse arrangers. Lonk and Nami so do wonderful 3D work, and they, riji, and Caitlin have done excellent work compositing their videos. WiglahWoo has a sexy voice (they are Mito from Trench). Caitlin, riji, tacoyaki, and Sally Strings are great wordsmiths. tacoyaki is a great organiser, for the project wouldn't have come together or the ship wouldn't have been nearly as tight without them. I am the least of these, but I daresay I composed and I composed and I composed.

Games industry people? If you're reading, you've got a pool of people here to hire!

A renewed vigour for solo stuff and Two Meeps

Things are cooking in the background. Watch this space!

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.

Today I wrote a short song about a spirit cat. It was all I could manage this weekend before going off to gig with one of my bands (and I have a long journey ahead. I'll talk about that at a later point, maybe).

You see, I wrote this song in response to a game account that followed me on Bluesky, called Peregrine Point. It's about a lighthouse keeper's cat that guides spirit cats to the afterlife, to where they're meant to go.

The plot summary I typed above made me cry. By that point I already had cultural context about spirit cats guiding other cats, and how sad their stories can be. Some of you reading this might be familiar, perhaps, with Jenny Jinya's comics, specifically this one. The melody I used for spirit cat was already in my head when I'd read that comic, and seeing Peregrine Point made me want to finalise it and put it into the DAW*.

I was having second thoughts about putting this melody into the DAW because I knew that the developer(s) of Peregrine Point were looking for something wistful to serve as the main theme. “Wistful” can mean any number of things when translated into the language of music and musical tropes. I fought through much self-doubt to get this little tune out, and I had initially planned on animating a cat to go with the song, but I'm pressed for time right now.

Thing is, how we process the feel of a song, the emotions of a song, is going to be different from person to person. It is shaped by our experiences, our culture, and the experiences of those around us. The only thing I can say when we feel this level of self-doubt is to put it out there anyway – someone out there will relate to it, and that reason alone is enough. I posted that advice on Bluesky saying that I'd need it as much as the next person.

When writing for games, I tend to process my emotions through melody and underlying tonality. I prioritise these over instrument choice: the simple reason for that is that I am still at a point where I am relying on software defaults and free VSTs. So it falls to me to not only use these tools well, but make absolutely sure that my musicality makes up for it. As with my lyrical stuff, I hope to write things that the everyperson is going to find themself whistling in the corridor or on the commute home. Because of my background – Asian, religious (and queer), raised on loads of JRPGs – I tend to infuse something of the spiritual into some of my work. The thought of a loving soul guiding their lost companion on a long journey home brings tears to my eyes for reasons I will not go into.

Rambling about spirit cats and game audio done for today; enjoy the music.

*DAW = digital audio workstation, a program used to produce music, e.g. Logic Pro, Cubase, FL Studio