Christopher Kerr

This past March, I attended my first Game Developer’s Conference, or GDC. It was an amazing place, full of talented and kind people, and I returned to Denver feeling more motivated than ever. I was burning to write some music, and I especially wanted to hear it in some video games. So, even though I’m in the middle of writing my Master’s Thesis, working weekends, and falling sick with something I picked up in San Francisco, I (recklessly) decided to join two Game Jam teams as a composer.

TL;DR (read a full breakdown of my experience on each game below): Doing two jams in the same week was hectic, but a ton of fun. It was very educational to learn how to communicate with devs and deliver usable assets. Here are my main takeaways:

If you want your music implemented right, you have to do it yourself (or at least be in close contact with whoever’s doing the implementing)

• On both of these jams, I delivered the assets and left the devs to implement how they pleased, and both had issues to where I wasn’t super happy on the final relationship of music and game. On a pro project, I would pay more attention to that step of the process, and ask to test the prototype myself.

Not offering to do sound design in addition to music made the process more enjoyable, and left me more time to refine the music.

• It is often expected on small teams like this that the composer and sound designer are the same person. This time around, I only billed myself as a composer, and did not offer any sound effects. My goal with Game Jams is to practice making music for games, so I will be doing this in the future.

Now let’s dive further into my experience on these jams!

The first of these Jams was “Jame Gam #38”. This beginner-friendly jam ran for four days, and teams were expected to incorporate a theme and a “special object,” which ended up being “Smoke” and a mirror. I teamed up with a total of 3 other people – an artist, a solo developer, and a sound designer. As my teammates were based in Singapore, and I was in Denver, this was an interesting challenge, to say the least. When I was waking up, they were going to bed, and vice versa. I would see the work they had done while I was sleeping, and I would have some new music ready for them when they woke up. Our game was a “crematorium simulator” called Check Before Ash. Check it out by clicking here!

The second jam was the “Dungeon Crawler Jam 2024.” For this jam, I teamed up with a solo developer named Shaun, who had some experience making dungeon crawlers. When we first connected on Discord, he had a working demo ready to show me! It had no music in the title screen, and an ambient, creepy track in the main game. He said he liked the ambient nature of the track, and so I went to work making the same thing, avoiding anything too rhythmic, but I still wanted a main theme. For a dungeon crawler with eldritch horror overtones, I immediately thought of low strings, choir, and tubular bells, and so I wrote a main theme for men’s voices, in G minor but with a flat 5. This first attempt became the title track, but as I started work on the more ambient main game music, I became more and more convinced that a rhythmic approach would be more interesting and fitting. I ran this by Shaun, and he agreed, and I came up with a pounding low string ostinato. Writing this track flowed much more easily than Check Before Ash, as orchestral music is much more my wheelhouse than “melancholy arcade.” I have been listening to a lot of the God of War Ragnarok OST by Bear McCreary, and I think it comes through here. I had a lot of fun with this one, and I may even work more on it to flesh it out further!

All in all, these Game Jams were a really fun and educational experience that motivated me to write more music. While I need to buckle down and really finish my Master’s Thesis now, I hope to do one Game Jam a month going forward. Thanks very much for reading!