It's a bit upsetting to do some soundtrack work when I'm isolated from the rest of the team, or even from info about the rest of the game. It feels too much like I'm "making music for" instead of "working on"
Of course I'll ask as many questions as I have to to make sure the music matches what the devs want, but when the dev tells and shows me more about what they're doing on the project, or allow me to see that on my own, not only it can eliminate a lot of the questions, but it can also give me inspiration I'd never have just following the content given to me on the request.
If I could make a request for every dev who'd want to work with me, it would be to please open up more about your games! Show screenshots, footage, any new assets, talk about how it is at the moment, how you want it to be, etc. anything counts! I love seeing the project grow bit by bit and it feels so much more like I'm contributing to its growth!
idk if it's okay to jump off from this (sorry if not, Saria!) but I had some interesting experiences with music in Brave Earth. Notably, there are two musicians (Necrophageon and SK Ultra who... idk where he stashes his stuff??)
The first guy I head hunted and he's brilliant but he was very sporadic which made it impossible to give much detailed direction too. If I asked for a change it might take months. But every time he did show up, like... gold. The man sent me gold. So I actually ended up designing areas partially based on his music rather than the other way around.
SKUltra, at the time younger, popped up and offered to make stuff. Since he was more 'present' and we could actually have conversations, I used him to do stuff like title screen and ending tracks and other shit that had to be a way. And for him it was like.... reference tracks, pre-vis story boards, WIPS, going back and forth and while he made less tracks than Necro, those tracks had a lot more back and forth.
So like no matter who your musician is you should really go out of your way to figure out where you meet mid way. Music is so important to games so if you're not feeding your musician ideas and visuals and stuff like... you or your artist better be ready to follow their lead.
(Also god next time I want someone to go down leitmotif hell with me but I don't know how I can risk wrapping someone else up in one of my long ass dev cycles)
