When it comes to game design, the only feature I find holds me back is music. I can do pretty much anything else myself and I always seem to create exactly what I envision. But I always leave music as the last part of the project to deal with, because it's the only thing that I just don't have the skill (or interest) in creating. I enjoy creating graphics, plots, sound effects, etc... Just I was never a musician.

The game I'm creating now (the pinball style game, if any of you downloaded it off of the news/announcements forum) doesn't have any music, and right now I'm not sure what I am going to do about that. Since I don't have that much money to begin with to hire anyone. So as sad as it may seem, I may just end up finishing the game without music and just use sound effects. In an arcade style game, this usually isn't a good thing, but it seems to be my only option.

Also, my main question is...

In a role playing game, do you believe that it would suffer from not including background music?

Spiderweb Software is an independent rpg development company, and they have never used any background music in their games, they just use natural sound effects, such as birds chirping, people talking, sounds of horses, etc...

This seems to have worked well for them, and unless I find away to create/find free music, this seems like the same path I will use for all of my projects.

I however like to design my rpgs as realistic as possible, and including music might take away from the realisim. So this could work for the better in designing a realistic world when it comes to rpgs, but could the same idea be used for arcade games?

Just looking for your opinions on any of the above really :)

Thanks.

How about licensing royalty-free music? It's not that expensive (you could probably get tunes for under $50 a piece). There's been a number of threads about sounds/music lately, just check them out for good links! :)

But I simply can't at this point in my life. I don't have a credit card, which makes it very difficult to make purchases over the internet, and for what I am doing I don't have the money to purchase music for around $50.00 a piece. In the future, when I have my own place and I'm settled down, then this would probably be a good option for me. But at this point in time, it simply isn't.

There is a guy, Wesley Chua, who is an amateur musician. He's written some music that I think is good for RPG games with a cuter style like Final Fantasy or Legend of Zelda. Here is a link to his music:

http://caravelgames.com/wesleyc/

Wesley is a gamer who enjoys fantasy themes. If you like his music, e-mail me (erikh2000 at yahoo dot com) and I will put you in contact with him. (No commision pimping here. I'm just not going to post his e-mail on a public forum.) I can't speak for Wesley, but I believe if your game is interesting to him, it would be very easy to reach an agreement with him for some free or cheap music.

Also, you could contact Emmett Plant with Funkbunny Studios. He is extremely versatile and polished and will sometimes work for free or cheap if he likes the project. Check out his website at http://www.funkbunny.com.

There are cheaper royalty-free options. http://www.wickedwavs.com is about $20/song. There are some royalty-free CDs out there where you can pay for a collection of tracks. Typical price seems to be about $100 for one of these, but if you look around you'll find cheaper. Google on "royalty-free CD". Always read the licensing terms, because many royalty-free music distributors specifically avoid allowing use in computer games.

-Erik

If you cant buy music you may get away with good ambient noise. Check out trackers. They are prety simple, absolutely free. It takes about 1 day to understand the general principles, but then you will be able to create original background sounds of small size with very little efforts!

www.skale.org (original interface)
ModPlug tracker (windows interface)