Game Jams : my initial adventures
If you are not familiar, Itch.io is a platform for indie game developers to share their projects. It is also a great place for aspiring game developers and artists to network and meet other people who want to help make a game and improve their skills.
On this website, Game Jams are a popular way for people to meet others and work on new projects. As the name suggests, small teams come together and bring what they have to the table and, based on an announced theme, try to "jam", that is to say, to create a game from scratch in a small development window that matches the theme somehow, and the time window is usually somewhere between a few days to a month.
Oddly enough, to give a brief bit of backstory (sorry for any repeats from other places on my website or YouTube page), I started composing music again last year because of my brother working on his own games, the first of which, Sortlandia, is on the Apple store (iPad only). I should clarify here that by" composing music" I am referring to creating "fully intentional and arranged" pieces of music rather than continuing the 'lyrics with chord names over the words' approach I had been doing for fun for the previous 10 years or so (like a lot of pop songwriters might do).
My experience writing loops for Sortlandia encouraged me to start composing a lot of different music, both synth-pop and orchestral. Still, even with all of this reinvigorating momentum, I wasn't actually all that interested in writing music for video games (and I still remain ambivalent despite liking the process and challenge a lot)- I'm very much a "album-centered" type of composer. Outside of R2R Games projects, I have mostly focused on the two albums I finished over the past year (shameless plug! --> check out both [Ludic Moments] and [Moods for the Day] using the store link on this page).
GAME JAMS
Still, I eventually gave game jams a try because I became curious if my work flow could handle much shorter development cycles. Also, I figured it would be good to work with people who weren't family to round out my experience. The first jam was a particularly disappointing situation that ended being a bit of a damp squib, so much in fact that half the team had essentially gone MIA half way through and I wasn't quite grasping exactly what kind of music was desired. Still, if there is one thing about me I can say for sure: I don't give up on such things so easily, so I ended up joining a further 10 game jams between mid May and the end of June 2026, as well as 2 composer jams where you just compose a suite of music for a hypothetical game based on theme selected for the jam.
All in all, the hit rate for teams completing games was just about 60%. Given that teams only have a 4-7 days usually, if there is some sort of obstacle or rough going early on, which can include teams simply being too ambitious and then losing interest when reality sets in, it doesn't take much to derail things, so I was very impressed by the programmers and artists I worked with. Some really great work was done, even if half the time the combined skills did not get the project to the finish line in time. Making a game this way is tough. Making a game at all is tough; there are a lot of moving parts to consider. For my own development, I felt by the end that I was definitely improving my workflow as well as successfully stepping outside my comfort zone a bit in terms if music style.
MY VERDICT: If you are an aspiring video game composer, then you probably already know that the market is absolutely saturated right now with budding composers. Seems like every other person wants to write the next JRPG soundtrack or be the next Toby Fox. I even see some professionals with actual AA credentials putting for-hire ads on the relevant Reddit subs as well, so I imagine well-paying projects might also be in shorter supply these days (after the indie game boom during covid 19 times). The idea of building a portfolio in such a situation may seem daunting to many of these aspiring artists, but a good show-reel or slick webpage is truly needed to stand out in some way. This is where I think game jams can play such a good role. You get to work with others who have the same aspirations as you. You have music and (with luck) actual game play to share with potential studios and teams.
You also get to find out if you truly are a good communicator, and how good your work flow is when you are not calling all of the creative shots for your music, and how thick of a skin you have. I worked with several people who seemed to assume any alternative suggestion or polite opposition was deeply rooted in ego, and that can be a bit tiring to try and deal with. Still, this will happen in any creative endeavor, and as a way to test the waters and see if you even like working on games, I think games jams are the way to go for early portfolio building, I think, as no one is getting paid to do them. You may find that, like me, you actually enjoy the challenge of committing to ideas quickly and making them work for the theme. Or, you may find out that you just like writing the music you like, and want to have it the easy way and just keep writing the kind of music you want to write and hope there is a project out there eventually waiting for just your kind of tunes That is a much rarer occurrence, I reckon, and you might be better served by just making your own game at that point (I am joking, but only just a little bit).
Here a couple songs I wrote for different jams this year. This should give you an idea of the range of music I was working with.
COMPOSER JAMS
The composer jams are also great. I took the two I did very seriously, because I wanted to have something that was ready to share at the end of it. I was a bit competitive- I wanted to get better at thematic music, but I also wanted to make sure my songs sounded well put together and not so amateur. This all motivated me to try hard, although in both cases, while I had a month to do either one, my regular life schedule, as well as prior commitments to some game jams, only left me with about 6 or 7 days for each OST project. Even with such a rushed schedule, I think the two original OST albums I made, [Duck Walkers: the Waddling Wanderers] and [Locked and Downloaded] are some of my favorite music that I have written this year. I mean, I am a big fan of all of my music (and I think I would have trouble understanding composers who hate listening to their own music), but Duck Walkers in particular is something I am quite proud of, as I built (in my opinion) a cohesive sound and narrative for a made-up game idea about a mama duck and her duckling fleeing to the city to escape some vague danger in the wilderness.
You can listen to the Duck Walkers OST, as well as handful of songs I wrote for various game jams, on either the landing page or store page of my website. You don't have to pay to listen to the music, it's just the way the web host handles music via music players. That said, if you like what you hear, the best way you can support me, as well as encourage me to create more musical stories, is to purchase some of my music here on my website. You can listen to the Locked and Downloaded OST from the playlist on my YouTube page below:
Comments