New York Game Awards!
The New York Game Awards! Another exciting honor has befallen my first major title as composer: a nomination at the New York Game Awards for Best Hidden Gem! As crazy as it sounds, I’ve never been to New York before! LA several times, as you would expect for someone in my industry, but never New York. So I’m excited for a multitude of reasons. One, of course, is the exposure that will result for the game the team and I spent six years bleeding and sacrificing for. But I am also excited because I get to hang out with the team in-person at a fancy awards show. The team is actually totally remote, so it’ll be the first time I will have met some of these folks face-to-face! I am also excited to experience a new city with them (and its food – I remember all cities in terms of food, I love it so much). And of course, the other benefit of these kinds of things is all the new friends I have yet to make! I couldn’t be more thrilled. For a brand-new IP from nothing – no publisher backing, no budget, no real support of any kind – this tiny team has managed to release a title with AAA scope AND managed to garner critical acclaim and snag a pretty hefty award nomination. That’s kind of insane. To quote one of my favorite people, Austin Wintory: “If you shipped a thing, congrats. You’ve done the near-impossible.” 99% of things crash and burn and fail and never get off the ground. So really, anything on top of that is just icing on the cake! I’ll come back and edit this post when I get back from the trip, but for now, have a look at all of these other incredible games on the nomination list here!
Shujinkou Soundtrack Available for Purchase!
Shujinkou Soundtrack Available for Purchase! The Shujinkou soundtrack has been available to stream for quite a while now. But if you’re looking to directly support the composers involved, as well as add nearly seven hours of ecclectic variety to your mp3 (or whatever format) collection, you can do so now! It’s available for purchase on several platforms, including: Bandcamp Rice Games Website Steam It’s very difficult for artists to make money these days, particularly on streaming platforms. That’s a topic of discussion for another time. Sufficed to say, the best way to ensure your favorite artists continue to have the means to produce good work is to directly support them by purchasing their music! So whether you feel moved to do so with this project or not, I encourage you to consider adopting that mindset with your favorite artists. They deserve it! More exciting news to come in the year ahead!
Shujinkou #1 on 2025 Hall of Fame
Shujinkou #1 on 2025 Hall of Fame Shujinkou was such a huge part of my life for the past six years. It not only marked my first credit as composer proper for a video game of scale, it also served as such a formative experience as a composer, a leader, an interactive music implementation engineer and all sorts of things. And while there are a few things here and there I wish I could change, I am SO proud of the vast majority of the work I did here, and indeed of what the entire team came together to achieve. Particularly Julian, the project lead who did the jobs of at least a dozen full-time professionals. So as you can imagine, I was ecstatic when I heard the news that this game was in the #1 spot for OpenCritic’s 2025 Hall of Fame! To provide context for how insane this is, Shujinkou is a brand-new IP from a studio with no other titles at all, and has only been out for a grand total of four months. It literally started from zero clout and track record. And while sample size certainly is playing a role here, the critical response has been heartwarming and consistently stellar. The fact that it’s sitting above the wildly popular Clair Obscur is wonderfully affirming. Whether this is a momentary anomaly or a long-term honor, it feels good to be making a splash like this, particularly after such a long and grueling development cycle. For those of you curious to try the game, there is a free demo on Steam here. I also highly encourage you to check out the soundtrack, which has nearly seven hours of music from myself and four other talented composers, with styles ranging from rock to epic orchestral to traditional Japanese folk and so much more. We also tried our best to feature live musicians as much as we could manage on our shoestring budget, and so talents like Zac Zinger and Sasha Y helped to elevate key moments in truly lovely ways. The cherry on top is how many of these reviews are specifically shouting out the score. I went over some of this in a previous blog post, but some examples of that are below! Shujinkou: Contender for Year’s Best Score Glowing Tech Gaming review highlights the music. Shujinkou: Editor’s Choice RPGFan awards a staggering 98/100 for sound. Shujinkou: Music a Strength Strict publication shouts out the score! I’ve been silent for several months here on this blog until recently, but expect more updates to be coming down the pipe more frequently! Exciting things are on the horizon!
GDC Concert 2025
GDC Concert 2025 I am thrilled to announce that the GDC Developer’s Concert is now a regular thing! Even more thrilling is that Austin seems to be hiring me to arrange for them as a regular thing as well. This remains a highlight of my year! We really upped the ante this time. The highlight of the concert was the very first chart, which had the audience in stitches. It was a medley/mashup of musical jokes: what if X composer wrote the score for Y game? This is some of the most fun I’ve ever had as an arranger. I’d go into more detail about it here, but the YouTube video I recently posted covers pretty much everything in great detail. I have an embed for that below. There should be more coming from this concert, but sufficed to say I am ecstatic that this has become more than a one-off celebration. It is now a fantastic tradition that I hope continues for decades to come. Video game music certainly deserves it, and I’m just thrilled I get to be included and to be putting charts in front of monster musicians like Rob Kovacs, Laura Intravia, Kristin Naigus and Tom Strahle! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AhjZUs95sI
Hidden Crunch
Hidden Crunch One of the downsides of being a freelance composer is that you invariably run into hidden crunch. When you have multiple clients (by necessity, in order to sustain your income), none of them really have any idea about what else you have going on. So deadlines can start to compound and overlap in very inconvenient ways. In my experience, this happens more often than not. It’s just one of those realities of being a freelancer. There aren’t really a lot of ways to mitigate this, either, because deadlines are deadlines and there’s rarely much you can do other than A) be transparent about the situation to all parties and/or B) hire on additional help to pick up the pace. A won’t always do much, because clients have deadlines too and can’t always wait on you. And often times, particularly in your early career, B is out of reach financially. So quite often, you simply end up overworked, overstressed and with deteriorating mental and physical health. Even when you love what you do, it can be overwhelming and can threaten to sap the very joy out of it. Ideally, what happens as you progress through your career is that B becomes more attainable because you’re earning more money, and A also becomes more effective because you don’t have to take on quite as many projects in order to stay afloat. But a lot of people don’t ever get there. In fact, it’s a pretty extreme minority of people who end up in that enviable position within the industry. I am fortunate enough to be in a position where I am actually turning down work on occasion, but I also am nowhere near that lovely sweet spot. This is one of the many reasons why most people can’t or won’t stick it out until their career takes off. Frankly, I don’t have an answer for how to solve this problem. The old addage “if it were easy, anyone would do it” does indeed apply here, but I am also the first to recognize that sacrificing health for a career is a pretty toxic mentality, whether it’s necessary in the short term or not. This cognative dissonance is something I meditate on quite often. This is also further complicated by the fact that I, personally, have had some of my best experiences on projects where I’m putting in 16+ hour days and sprinting like mad. This has been the case on everything from being a lowly copyist on AAA films and games to writing my own stuff: being in the zone and putting everything you’ve got into something that you love is an amazing feeling. I am certainly not alone in this either, as most of the more successful people I know are like this too. So it’s a complicated issue. This is also a big part of the reason why I haven’t posted anything for the past few months. Rest assured, though, that once I’m out of this insane sprint and after perhaps the first full-week vacation I’ve had in something like seven years, I will have a mountain of things to post and talk about all over my website and social media. Until then, wish me luck!
FMF Young Talent Award 2023
I had the great honor of being selected as a finalist for the Film Music Festival’s Young Talent Award this year in Krakow.
Stan LePard GDC Scholarship
Yesterday I received the stunning news that I was one of the five candidates annually selected for the Stan LePard GDC Scholarship!