Welcome! I'll try my best to answer your questions. For reference, I've been working in game audio for almost 20 years, with the first 11 of those freelancing in mostly music composition and production and the last (almost) 8 of those at Epic Games working as a technical designer.
It generally starts with a project where the need for bespoke music has been identified. Audio Leads or Directors will work with Creative stakeholders to determine a specific direction to take the music. Sometimes the nature of the project itself can drive these needs, sometimes there is room for exploration or discovery.
To be honest, contracting talent, especially key talent like a Composer is a fairly political process and is often a power wielded by only a few folks depending on the studio hierarchy. I have been in situations where hiring a composer has preceded music direction and situations where music direction has preceded hiring a composer.
In either case, a mood board or collection of example music is collected and organized by the Audio leadership and other music stakeholders in order to communicate musical ideation to non-musically or semi-musically inclined Project leadership.
Feedback is refined and it's safe for the composer(s) to start sketching ideas out or prototyping. Some directors like a "paint-over" where the composer will compose music to a video of prototype gameplay, animatics, or story-board/collages; other directors may just look for audio recordings they can audition. Sometimes one method or another is dependent on the progress so far as well as the linearity or non-linearity of the gameplay or cinematics.
Depending on the personalities of the various leadership involved as well as the flexibility of the production timeline, this pre-production process may take longer or shorter. When on tight deadlines, you need to just make decisions even if it's just a better not best type of scenario. When you're lucky, you can spend time refining the musical signature or identity, which usually brings a lot of additional value to the play experience and the game branding.
Because games are generally non-linear experiences and because game engines support stochastic design, music design will begin communicating with the composer (if they are separate) in terms of potential interactivity and explore together how the possibility space can expand on the work done in the prepro phase to establish a musical identity for the project. Often this is coincidental with that prototype phase or slightly shifted as a follow-up.
Often times, as is the case in game development, the initial idea is bigger than the budget (time and human resources), and so scope management may begin eating away at the initial design ideas until something reasonable shakes out.
On very small teams, music design and implementation are done by either the Audio Director or a designated Technical Designer.
Music designers and/or points of contact to the composer will request music to be authored to explicit specifications and formats. This is because music design dictates how the music is separated into smaller parts and this also dictates how recording will progress in cases where live players are needed.
For example, a lot of group-rate recording options out there offer separate sessions by instrument group, which is great for traditional music mixing requirements but is not necessarily how music designers on a project will need the music broken down.
As soon as possible Music Designers will be putting music into the game (if they know what they're doing), sometimes even non-interactive or with very limited interactivity, just so people can start hearing what it will sound like.
After the prototyping is done and it's time to author real-boy cues, using synthetic instruments/virtual instruments is often requested so the music designers can work on the necessary implementation pathways while simultaneously, composers and their music prep team can start making arrangements for live recording.
After which, the temp versions can be swapped out with the live mixed versions.
Then the Audio Director and the Music Designers will refine and debug the music system and the game mix. The same composer may be called upon for commercial media or promotional work, and so there may be cues that are going to marketing or whomever needs them to promote the game, etc.
Unless you're a particularly technically inclined composer, it is often not the purview of the composer to implement in the game. It can be, but you would basically replace "music designer" in my previous answer with "composer." So it doesn't necessarily change the process. I have been on small gigs where I both composed interactivity and handed it off to a programmer to implement AND composed music where I implemented it directly into the engine.
One thing to note is a composer, except in rare cases, is outsourced and music designers, except in rare cases, are in-house.
On LEGO Fortnite, I was acting as music designer. I programmed the initial music management system in C++ (which controlled the music's general playback behavior), I worked with the composers with the Audio Director on delivery requirements as well as explored the possibility space both for initial releases and future ones, and I also designed the music in the Engine tech (MetaSounds), which controlled the music's specific behavior.
Skills generally used by technical music designers:
- Music theory
- Music math (intervallic, rhythmic, as well as modal math manipulations)
- DAW proficiency (Music editing skills, seamless loops included)
- Middleware proficiency is often requested or useful, though a lot of companies have their own audio engines or systems that you'd be expected to learn
- Computer Programming/Scripting (Understanding Computer Logic)
- C++, C# (Unity), Blueprints (Unreal) (proficiency in any Object Oriented scripting language will be translatable to whatever the company uses)
- Organization skills, time-keeping/production skills, etc.
- Proficiency in a graph design environment is appealing:
- Reaktor, Max/MSP, Pure Data, Kyma, etc. (MetaSounds is becoming more common)
Technical stuff moves pretty fast, books tend to be out dated by the time they're popular, so they can be a poor resource for technical proficiency.
Check out the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, and GameSoundCon in LA/Burbank every year. Those are good places for a lot of learning.
There are lots of YouTube videos channels and books as resources.
As a note, some people conflate procedural design with generative AI. Procedural design is just the same as stochastic design. A good procedural music design will adhere to the composer's rule set for the project's musical identity and just accelerate the workflow for expanding how useful cues can be in different game contexts.
Keep writing music, pursue writing great music, keep learning about today's technology and tomorrow's technologies and KEEP PLAYING GAMES.
Be a gamer, be a game developer.
- Dan
