I’ve been contemplating making some tracks specifically to sell on the asset store.
I was wondering if it would be worth the time to create the asset pack(s), if people would be interested in buying.
So my question is, do you ever buy music packs on the asset store?
If so, any particular genre or things you look for when purchasing?
I’m particularly grounded in metal/rock music, but I can create for most genres.
Here are a few (rough) tracks I’ve created in the past:
I wouldn’t buy any since I think music is a very unique part of the game, maybe music that merely serves as ambience could be okay from being non unique, but I personally don’t want non unique music
Honestly, for things like sound effects and music, I will take a look at the Unity asset store even if the game I’m working on isn’t running in Unity.
Mostly I’m more interested in sound effects, but sometimes I look at music too.
That being said, I have yet to actually purchase either, but that’s just because I’ve never finished a project and I always seem to be doing something else before I get to the point where I’m going to lay down some money for some assets. But one of these days I totally will.
Now having said that…
I do honestly agree with what QFSW said, at least to a point. Ideally I would like to hire someone to compose an original score for my work. But by the same token, I also want to create my own art assets so my game will look original. And I even want to program my own features so I can get my game to function exactly how I want it.
And I’m pretty sure everyone feels that way.
But yet, people are buying art assets.
So how is music any different?
Yes, everyone WANTS their own original music, but sometimes people decide to just buy it instead. Maybe they just want one or two tracks to fill out an otherwise original soundtrack, maybe they’ve just accepted the fact that their game won’t be crazy popular and the cost of original music isn’t worth it. Shoot, maybe it’s a school project and they want good music for it.
I wouldn’t expect you to be able to make a living just from selling music through the asset store, but still I see nothing wrong with selling some here anyway.
I felt the same way about buying music assets, since you want a unique sound for your game.
I also though maybe I was being biased as a musician, I would want to make my own, in the same way that i don’t mind using art assets from the store since I’m not an artist.
I’ve been toying with the idea of musical blocks that people can put together to form a fairly unique version of tracks for their game. What do you think about that?
I’m unsure, it’s a good idea in concept, but I feel like those who are skilled enough to make music from loops could also do it themselves, or am I mistaken?
I suggest doing something like this. I like the fact that I can build up the atmosphere of the game using instrument layers, for example using just percussion for a subdued/tense atmosphere or just melodic instruments for something very fanfarish and bright. I’ve spent a lot of time looking for music and I’m finding that being able to remove the melodic instruments is very important for not breaking tension, especially for ambient music as opposed to menu music or something like that.
It still doesn’t offer the degree of flexibility that I’d like, since removing the melodic layer tends to make it sound too empty. So I would suggest creating a variety of melodic layers that can be added to the same percussion layer and which are very similar in melody but quite different in energy. Or perhaps creating complementary melodic layers that still sound full enough on their own, if possible.
This is almost exactly what I want to do.
In fact I’ve already done something similar in one of my games: Tracky Marble on Google Play
On the character customization menu, I keep a similar melody but the instruments change as you switch to customize different parts of the character.
I want to possibly make packs of music which allow you to create various customizations around a theme.
I guess I’ll need to put some work into coding a framework users can place into their project for quick customization.
Along these lines, it would be nice to have an asset that allows one to do this with music one has for oneself. I believe it can be done with audio packages like WWise, but an asset that allows me to take my own music and mess around with layers in real time would be nice.
Yeah I’m not sure what’s up with the new asset store, links seem to be problematic.
Do you mean an asset that separates your music into different layers? Seems to me though that id you already know how to make music it’s probably not too hard to do this yourself from the beginning.
Not just separate it but allow for the layer mixing and such as well. Like, it can no doubt be done right now, perhaps with something like:
if(something happens)
{
get current time in playing track (or one layer of the currently playing tracks)
add new layer/track, starting at the same time
}
This also requires that your music have exactly the same (or comparative let’s say) lengths. And that you have like 5 different “tracks” (for each layer) in your asset folder for a single piece of music.
It would be nice if you could just give it a file, perhaps something like a SONAR file or what have you (don’t know if importing proprietary file types like that is allowed), it automatically separates out the tracks from the file, and then you can just tell it to drop or add a layer and it automatically picks the right time and everything.
It probably wouldn’t be very difficult to do, sure. But it might be nice to have a simple, clean way to take care of it.