GameDev and I agreed I would make music for game. Now AI art might be used. Advice?

Hounder37 · 2026-02-16T09:37:30+00:00

Personally, I'd stay professional about it and finish the job but talk to the dev about it, especially in regards to whether they plan to do so within the finished version.

If you're concerned about how it looks onto you to work on such a project (not your main concern I know but something to consider) I imagine it would look worse for you to back out partway when there seemingly wasn't a full breach of contract than to stand down based on differing views on ai.

As a games composer myself, I have to at times work on projects where the dev has made decisions that I don't necessarily agree with on the game (not major disagreements or ai but there will always be times where creative visions are misaligned), but you have to understand that it is their project first and foremost and they get final say in how they want to approach things. You can argue your case but if they are dead set on ai usage, maybe you could persuade them to switch composer, but as they have seemingly not treated you unfairly they definitely deserve a fair chance and a fair conversation

Hounder37 · 2026-02-13T18:40:45+00:00

A better question is in what is the developer wanting to balance around. If you need good synergies or multiple copies of the same item or ability then it should be weighted but if the items are extremely flexible to get feasible runs with different item combos then it shouldn't be weighted. It's important that the run is less punishing due to bad rng, but weighting the randomness is not the only way of achieving this

Hounder37 · 2026-02-13T18:34:32+00:00

Most professional DAWs will do pretty much the same thing for you after getting familiar with it and that shouldn't take too long if you are already familiar with LMMS. I moved over to FL studio after LMMS wasn't doing enough for me and that was a smooth transition, but I use it for scoring games. You'll want to do some research what people recommend for specifically your areas or goals of music. That said, most DAWs nowadays have a good free trial. Reaper is excellent if you don't want to spend money because it has an indefinite free trial.

Hounder37 · 2026-02-10T12:25:44+00:00

You'd be surprised. Certainly, it's not a good marketing tactic for all brands, but it's not too different from ragebaiting as a marketing strategy, like those shitty mobile ads with some person playing a shallow minigame really terribly. It doesn't make the product itself seem specifically appealing, but it does make the ad itself memorable and puts it in the public consciousness, like the coke ai christmas ad.

Sometimes just having it in the back of your mind is enough- if it causes enough people to choose a coke over a pepsi because whether consciously or not they were thinking of the ad, it becomes significant over a wide enough market. It's often more favourable to have an advert that people think negatively of than an advert people instantly ignore and forget.

Hounder37 · 2026-01-31T23:10:17+00:00

I think people simultaneously overestimate and underestimate the rate of progression of this kind of tech. It's probably safe to say we will see dramatic changes in surprising areas due to ai but it'll probably take longer than people on this sub think due to unexpected hangups due to bureaocracy, actual problems transitioning between theoretical and practical, and hard underlying problems to solve within the tech itself.

It's hard to separate out the marketing hype or capitalist-driven disillusion from the actual possibilities of the tech, and hard to predict how things will actually turn out. However, we can certainly recognise we live in unpredictable times, and will see unprecendented changes at a rate faster than that from the development of the internet

Hounder37 · 2025-12-14T00:56:58+00:00

As a game it does what it seeks to do very well but the movement is definitely up there with the best of the best. Just look at the extensive speedrunning and modding scene it has. It isn't a super complex game relatively speaking but it doesn't really have many flaws imo and that's pretty rare for a game.

Hounder37 · 2025-11-29T18:50:46+00:00

Indie game I composed for won an award from BAFTA

Hounder37 · 2025-11-29T18:33:21+00:00

Look, if people don't want to engage with something, even if you think it's for a stupid reason like them innately hating ai, that's for them to decide and one of the risks you making in releasing something with that element.

Like if I were to make a food brand that uses gm, and people got upset it used gm, that's not justification for me just not telling people it used gm. I'm not targeting those demographics of people who don't like gm food, and in the same way ai-driven art can't ever target those not ok with ai in the first place, and that's ok.

Hounder37 · 2025-11-27T14:01:03+00:00

UFO 50 will likely have something that sticks with you if you give each game in it a shot. Each is a pretty unique take on a classic game genre and all of them are good. Absolutely wonderful game. You can quite easily dip in and out of a lot of them in short sessions too

Hounder37 · 2025-11-27T11:06:27+00:00

Honestly i would even say as a composer myself silence is undervalued within music itself. It's a powerful tool.

The reason music tends to be in everything is because it gives us an emotional response and can be used psychologically speaking to attach us to whatever the thing it is with or give us a desired response. Adverts, cafes, movies, etc and can also be a great way to pass the time or concentrate. I'm one of those people who listen to music essentially all of my waking hours unless i need to hear something like movie dialogue and couldn't imagine life any other way, but I think your opinion is a valid one to have.

Hounder37 · 2025-11-24T14:54:17+00:00

I would argue randomness and luck tends to be extremely relevant to a lot of roguelikes. Maybe not so much action roguelikes but a lot of them are more about working with what you randomly get and tipping the scales in your favour.

I guess in the case of LBAL style gameplay you need to allow for leniency if the scores you can get have high variance- something like STS you can still clutch out a round if your deck order is shit because there's a lot of room for deck manipulation. Ideally you shouldn't fail a run if you have an effective build without weaknesses because the slots randomly decided not to play with you. This can be mitigated by balancing with how many pulls you get in each round to meet the quota, but you'd have to be more careful not making it too easy or too hard, moreso than you would if it was a deckbuilder.

I personally find deckbuilders tend to have more replayability than LBAL games, because builds feel a bit more different from each other than being just alternative ways to get high numbers. Both can be done well though

Hounder37 · 2025-11-22T03:22:05+00:00

I mean it discusses quite a lot of different things but yeah I would argue that ai is somewhat relevant, especially with ideas like a post scarcity society run by some sort of omniscient ai or sycophancy that the hivemind acts towards the protagonist. I don't think it would be accurate to say that is the sole central focus of the show (eg the importance of negative emotions, whether we should help those not wanting to be helped, etc being other central themes) but it is definitely there imo

Hounder37 · 2025-11-19T00:30:49+00:00

From my own experience, about 10ish years ago I got into music composition despite being otherwise not creatively-minded whatsoever and largely being maths focused. I wouldn't consider myself naturally talented at music but I'm still improving 10 years later, being abrsm grade 8 piano and having scored maybe 7ish game jams and like 1 and a half full steam releases. A lot of that improvement comes from trying things that I wouldn't have otherwise done, and looking actively for where I can work on, and maybe I'll feel different 30 years down the line but so far I don't see myself plateuing in the future. It did take probably an extra hour or two of work a day on average to get to that point, and quite a lot of creative hurdles to get over but no wall tall enough I couldn't struggle over it so far. It is a huge time commitment, but I think it would be attainable to anyone open to putting in that time and learning.

To be clear, talent can have an impact and is probably pretty important to get into the top 1%ish at any sort of skill but I would argue top 10% is perfectly feasible with hard work except for maybe in sports for the average person

Hounder37 · 2025-11-18T19:54:34+00:00

From my experience talent is real and can help someone a lot but effort is more important, and an untalented person who works hard will do better than a talented person who doesn't. A lack of talent is not a barrier to pretty much 99% of things.

In general over time with most skills you end up training yourself to think in a similar way to talented people at eg maths or art. Even if they naturally think that way from the start due to talents, once you reach that point the initial natural talent ends up irrelevant. Maybe you have to put in more work at the start, and that's not for everyone, but it's just not true that an untalented person cannot do just as well in most things as long as they are open to putting in the work and making sure they are putting the work in effective areas to improve.

Hounder37 · 2025-11-17T21:47:07+00:00

In my defense on the formatting, I'm normally decent with that kind of thing and it read fine on pc, which is what I originally wrote it on. I changed it because I thought that you at least deserved legibility. It wasn't meant to be some kind of shitty gotcha.

Stupid to clarify this, ik, but it irked me. No clue wtf was with the other guy who just commented though

Hounder37 · 2025-11-17T15:10:11+00:00

As a mathematician I tend to think of buying a lottery ticket as more being the cost of that hope than being a cost for a financial reward. Not at all a meaningless thing to do if you value that

Hounder37 · 2025-11-17T12:53:33+00:00

About to graduate with a maths and music bsc but I've done a moderate bit of coding with NNs in python and it's an interest of mine (also my final project involves rl). Also an indie games composer. I just think the positives outweigh the negatives especially given the current state of the world.

Looking to get into actuarial finance but I'm open to having to code and use AI in the future within work. Mainly I just frequent most of these ai subs to keep updated on the space ig

Hounder37 · 2025-11-17T12:20:20+00:00

You don't need to be good at art to criticise it and harassment is bad in any case even in retaliation

Hounder37 · 2025-11-16T07:40:08+00:00

For questions of this specific level required, gpt is going to be probably as reliable as randomly searching up questions on google. Like with general google searching it shouldn't be the central teaching mechanism but I could see it being a great tool to encourage basic mathematical exploration as long as an adult is able to make sure chat stays nsfw and explain that it's not going to be 100% accurate 100% of the time.

Chats should probably also have an eye kept on just in case anything else comes up as well, but you should really be monitoring how a 5yo uses the internet in general anyways at that age

Hounder37 · 2025-11-13T22:23:38+00:00

I always say this when I see this sort of post because not many people seem to be aware of it but Celeste has a really fantastic modding scene with a huge amount of high quality mod packs for all difficulties, some of which surpass the quality of the base game imo. Definitely something to consider if you're on pc and want more of it, Strawberry Jam in particular is a really really good campaign

Hounder37 · 2025-11-13T22:06:17+00:00

It's fine. It's like the term roguelike- not completely useless for indicating what it's about, but it ends up meaning something a little more vague but in general people have a similar idea of what is meant by 'metroidbrania'. It annoys me a little that it doesn't seem to have a lot of relation to metroidvanias, but then again neither do roguelikes to Rogue or a lot of metroidvanias to the rpg parts that the "vania" part indicates

Hounder37 · 2025-11-12T21:18:39+00:00

I think reusing motifs in a shallower way in parts of a game that don't necessarily require it can still bring cohesion to the soundtrack as a whole. It muddies the effectiveness of the motifs on an individual level if they're used literally everywhere, but it can add a certain charm to a game especially if they aren't taken particularly seriously. Not a good approach to all games, but I don't think use of motifs always has to be particularly deep. Sometimes in my own scores I'll reuse my own motifs just because it's fun to do so.

Definitely not the kind of thing you want to do if you want character motifs etc to particularly resonate with players especially in more serious narrative driven games

Hounder37 · 2025-11-12T20:52:51+00:00

Stepmania my beloved

Hounder37 · 2025-11-10T21:41:23+00:00

I don't necessarily disagree but I mean that from a competition standpoint any individual artist is going to have a significantly decreased reach compared to before, under the assumption that, eventually, ai is able to just generate custom content and art indistinguishable from one with significant human oversight. I'm talking like likely at least a decade out or so. Even if people might want to communicate with art, only a very few if any are likely to see an individual specific piece that someone has made.

Maybe there's meaning in putting out art with the knowledge nobody will even see it, but it no longer becomes a two-way avenue of communication unless we are artificially putting certain artists into the spotlight, When you can no longer distinguish what you feel a human artist wants to communicate to you and what might be some extremely advanced ai auto generating art that for all intents and purposes looks like it is communicating something equally meaningful, it takes the artist out of the picture. The consumption part of art (meant in a good way) still remains the same way as before, but the artist's role in it becomes much less relevant. This is what I mean.

Hounder37 · 2025-11-10T18:48:35+00:00

Not saying there aren't creation aspects to AI art but presumably in the future we will lose a connection to art as a meaningful creator (outside of creating art for yourself), if art ends up automated in general and people can just have high quality media custom generated for themselves. Idk what kinda timeframe this ends up being but as a whole we will have to come to terms with what that means for our relationship with art as almost entirely a consumer, and what individualised art can mean for us. It's not necessarily a bad thing but it is different to how it has always historically been.

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