Here’s a response to an inquiry I made to Brian on a game developer site. Thought I’d share it with anyone else here who is starting to dabble in this area of post production and sound design.
[quote]
Over the past few years,many people have entered games whose previous experience was mainly more ‘traditional’ music/sound design.
For better or worse, most game audio gigs are through networking or referrals. Residing in South Carolina is going to make that a bit tougher.
There are some in-person events (unfortunately, on the other side of the country) for getting your name/face known. The biggest is coming up next month: “GDC” (Game Developer’s Conference-- Feb 27-Mar 3) is the huge (25,000+ attendees) annual conference for game developers held in San Francisco each year. There really is no substitute for getting to know–face to face-- both game developers and other game composers/sound designers.
Locally, you can search for things like “game jams” (smush programmers, artists, game designers and sound designers in a room for a long weekend and at the end of the w-end, they’ve made a finished game). Local universities are also good places to look-- many times there are student game projects who have no composer/sound designer.
You should definitely make sure you have a good web presence, including demos of your work. One thing people sometimes do is make a video capture of some gameplay and then rescore and/or re-do the sound design. It sounds like you have a lot of traditional media work-- definitely use your best material from that for your demo.
The more savvy start to become familiar with some of the game audio tools that are out there, including Wwise and FMOD (“Middleware”). And the even more savvy become literate or fluent in basic game audio programming using engines like Unity (C#) or Unreal (“Blueprints”). You can try to learn these all online, but you have to be a pretty motivated self-starter. Also, the middleware tools themselves are designed to solve fairly unique problems we have in game audio-- if you’re unfamiliar with game audio in general, those will probably be pretty confusing.
There are also some organizations you might want to get involved with, both online and in the real world. Facebook groups include Game Audio Denizens, Game Audio Network Guild, “Video game: Composers and sound designers” are good places to learn/ask questions (but don’t spam with “listen to my stuff” demos–you’ll get kicked out quickly). follow “@lostchocolatelab” on twitter, as well as GameSound.
Some other resources. There is also a gameAudio slack channel.
Here are some other resources:
GameSoundCon (www.GameSoundCon.com) Annual conference in the fall for game composers/sound designers (Generally in LA)
Game Developers Conference (www.gdconf.com)
Gamasutra (www.gamasutra.com) Most popular web site for game developers. A lot of good info here.
Game Audio Network Guild: www.audiogang.org Organization that puts on the Game Music & Sound awards, provides scholarships, promotes and evangalizes game audio
Reddit/GameAudio (https://www.reddit.com/r/GameAudio/)
Designing Music Now: http://www.designingmusicnow.com/
Here’s a video with an overview of game music/sound (how it differs from film/tv, etc.)
http://soundworkscollection.com/videos/gamesoundcon
You also might find this industry survey interesting: http://www.gamesoundcon.com/single-post/2016/08/17/Game-Audio-Industry-Survey-2016
-Brian
Disclaimers: I’m on the board of GDC, am Exec Director of GameSoundCon, am President of the Game Audio Network Guild and that’s me in the soundworks collection video.
Brian Schmidt
Executive Director, GameSoundCon:
GameSoundCon 2016:September 27-28, Los Angeles, CA
Founder, Brian Schmidt Studios, LLC
Music Composition & Sound Design
Audio Technology Consultant [/quote]