I've got a post down there somewhere that should answer this question. I'm totally available to work on music for any game projects anyone has, regardless of completion state, or badassness, or whatever. I would certainly enjoy the above (exact number/nature of tracks), as that would make it ridiculously easy for me to bust out some tunes.

E-mail me, even if you're project isn't done, and we'll talk.

I'd be extremely interested in doing that given the opportunity, but at the same time it would depend on what style of music you would like.

I've been involved with a lot of projects over the years, and recruited solely as a musician that have never seen the light of day. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy working on these projects, I've always felt that the more I compose, the better I get.

So it's great experience to write music even if it'll never be used. It helps build up a portfolio of works you've done, and gives you something to show off to people, especially if you're trying to get involved in a big project.

In any event, the prospect of being a part of a project that will eventually be completed and distributed is an exciting one, for me, because it's kind of the next step...

When I eventually stop hearing from former team partners, or it's generally agreed that the project is dead, I take that and think of it as practise, in preparation for the "real deal". So the idea of actually finishing a complete soundtrack, one day, is really exciting for me as a musician as I know that if ever I compose a complete soundtrack, it would be something to be extremely proud of, and a great accomplishment.

But I also mention that it depends on the style of music that you would like, because I'm just simply better at some styles than others. An example, would be that I was once asked to compose for a side-scroller, and I found it really difficult to write anything that I was pleased with. I think that the best thing I ever came up for it was my infamous "Hatchetman!" which I wrote for MegaMan Verge (if anyone remembers that ^^;) It wasn't the greatest quality, but it seemed to suit the game well. After that though, I really couldn't come up with anything as cool. :P But the project was cancelled eventually anyway, so it wasn't that big of a deal.

In any event I'm more of an orchestral person, so I think my music would be better suited for something like an RPG.

So the bottom line really, is that yeah, I would be extremely interested in working on a completed game, but only if I felt that I was able to compose good music that suited the game. :)

Yes! About the Sorceress girl and her cat! And you could walk through a forest as it played the "Four Heroes" theme from the Lunar 1 OST CD, and it had a battle system and everything! The girl's name was Molly, I believe, who had left Magic School. Quite a competent demo.

That game made me realize CD playback was cool. Bummer it won't run on winXP.

Well, waiting on the musician is never gonna happen in this biz. First off, a great time to start doing something like this is when the game is almost finished, practially finished, has a year or two at least of work put in already, and will under no circumstances be cancelled. It could still take a few months or more for a game to be ready for release and it should give a composer enough time to do the soundtrack.

If I didn't have to rush Diver Down out when I did I would have tried to get something like this to happen. But I was way too busy to manage the process. I can't believe I had the time to get the thing done.

In many ways it would be much easier to involve the musician at some point during mid-development. This is especially true of tracks that will take place during scripted sequences, video clips, and stuff like that, where you want the music to match the images and action onscreen as closely as possible. In this case, it's very important that the musician and the developer(s) can work together on implementing these scenes. For example, the scene might reach a "climax" point but then fall off very, very quickly... the musician needs a little more time to develop the climatic part of the track so it doesn't cut off so abruptly; but if the game is completed, this isn't an option, and the music ends up feeling overly truncated or overly elongated.

This isn't so much the case with your ambient tracks. I mean, you can give me a dungeon level and I can compose the looping background music and it's no problem, because it doesn't matter how long the track is and I don't have to sync it to anything.

However, the other side to this is that the musician's job is to solidify the mood of the game, and given that, the musician can often positively influence the development of the game during production. I'm currently producing the soundtrack for a game called Iauns (neither a Verge game nor an RPG) and my musical ideas have had some influence on the direction of the game's development. I think this kind of developer/composer relationship is especially important in RPGs, where the soundtrack is so crucial and thematic.

Anyway, that's good that you would provide a bunch of sample tracks, that's probably the greatest tool a soundtrack composer could have. Well-thought.

That is all.

Alright, I compeletely agree with Invicticide. A musician should really be involved in everything down to the design process of a project, at least ideally. This is going to give you the best sounding music in my opinion. That game you guys were talking about is really awesome, I remember that. But no one here should have to be forced into using shoddy work-arounds for music. I think there's a great community of composers here (me =D and I know Rysen is a badass).

Alex, I already got your email, I'll start working on a track for you tomorrow or the next day. If anyone else has any desire for some tracks, PLEASE let me know, because I really want to get some practice working on actual game projects. I'll plug my site again too, just for good measure:

Click Here

Let me know! I've got nothing better to do.