Home - Introduction - Preparation - MMORPG - Composition Process - Sound Effects - Feedback - Scientists - Web Design - Blog - Screenshots - Conclusion
Preparation
The preparation of this project has become a major part of the whole experience. It's taken a lot of time and effort to present myself well, to the right people and to market my product appropriately and in a way that would interest members of the industry. To see the dates of my progress on this, and for a more informal explanation of this achievement, visit the Blog Section of this documentation.
Who was I to contact?
The first stage of preparation was gathering contacts and information regarding how company's employed associate members.
My first idea was to contact an old friend of mine Gabriel Ralls who works for Sega of Europe, I sent him an email and he later responded with a very helpful and informative phone call, providing information on several matters.
He told me of some developers who are open to employing developers on a one off contract basis. These where Creative Assembly, Sports Interactive and Sega Driving Studios. He also told me about a Games Developers Conference in Brighton and Gave me the email of a Secretary at Sega Europe who could help me refine my contacts.
I also modified a CV and joined two games industry recruitment agencies. Aardvark Swift and Gamasutra. Both of which are operated online via email and their web sites.
The Contact information that ultimately lead to my success in finding a good contact however was a list of games developers on wikipedia. which was accessed at the below link between 8/7/06 - 17/8/06
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_developers
I went down this list of games developers, visiting every web site link, gathering contact details and sending each one a standard email offering free music. I figured, there would be more chance of finding someone interested with numbers.
If you are not online right now, or the link fails here is a list of these developers.
List Of Games Developers.txt
How did I Present Myself?
I created several online files to aid the marketing of my offer to the games industry.
The Games Developers Demo
I began by creating a new branch from my web site (DJAllergy.com). This would give a brief background as to who I am and what I do, some relevant samples of my music, information about my experience in the world of games modifying, a link to my online portfolio, a link to the DJ Allergy Myspace and a contact email. I then placed this demo at
To view this demo from the disk (recommended) click the image below (this will appear exactly as if it where online)
Some careful consideration went into the selection of demo tracks that where presented here. They had to be relevant to a wide range of games company's, whilst demonstrating what the sound of my music is like overall.
To the right are the tracks that I placed on this demo along with reasons why I included them.
Level Design
I also made a level in quake 3 to place in the "Games Experience" tab of the site. You can view more about this here.
Here you can click on the track titles to listen to them. Please note if your browser loads the tracks in the same window by default, you can right click on them to open them in a new tab or window, enabling you to read on whilst listening.
Ice Games
This track (as it is explained in the demo) was written for a channel 4 competition in late 2005. The assignment was to create music for their coverage of the winter olympics. I wrote this track as an addition to their music archive with the intention of it being used for scoreboards and replays etc. The context of scoreboards also links in closely with computer games which ties in closely also to menus and interactive interfaces. It was for this reason (along with it being a recently produced piece of mine) that I included this as the first sample of music for the demo
Perry Fighter - Nikki's Stage
This track I wrote for a computer game called Perry Fighter in the first year of Dartington. The game was going to be a fighter involving the tenants of Perry house (our halls of residence). Although we got the game engine working, we only managed to get one character in the game before Luke (the programmer) left college. This track is the most appropriate out of all I have made to suit the context. It shows my response to the assignment of creating music for a computer game, making it a good bit of experience as well as showing potential employers my stylistic approach.
On Cover
This track I put up, for some pretty simple reasons. Firstly, it's one that's (relatively) easy to listen to. Secondly, it sounds (to me) like computer game music. Also after putting this track on my Xbox, I found it went well with a few games.
Drop Echoes
This track went in for a couple of reasons. I wanted the demo to show some of my more recent work to demonstrate where I am compositionally at the moment. This track is selected from my latest album on production "No Input Sampling". I also thought it would be relevant to games developers as the format of no input sampling is based around composing under heavy restrictions. This in the earlier days of gaming was an essential skill to posses, and although it's not quite as important nowadays, it's still a skill that would prove helpful if I where to be employed by a developer for mobile phone games for example.
Web site Redesign
I figured, if I was to be taken at all seriously by these developers, I must look good. Within the context of the internet, what I place online is everything most people will ever see of me. The developers demo also has a direct link to my web site If anyone was interested in accepting my offer they would more than likely take at least a glance at the site to get a better idea of who I am.
Click the link below to view the original site
Note the mp3 content of the sites have been removed in order to fit on the CD.
The Old DJAllergy.com
There where a few problems with the old web site which badly needed changing.
Firstly there wasn't enough order to the music or information. It seemed that one would have to trawl though loads of unfinished scraps in order to get to the decent stuff. There was also no indication of the chronological order of the track creation.
Also I made the site using microsoft word, when I knew nothing of web design. It didn't look that bad as I kept it simple, but there was definitely room for improvement. Also the site was extremely awkward and tedious to update due to it's construction method. Although at the time, I didn't know much more about web design., I recently acquired a much better web design program and some Lynda.com tutorial CDs.
After solidly going through the tutorials, to the point of having dreams about an american Lynda.com narrator telling me how to make frames and layers. I came up with this design.
The New DJAllergy.com
The most major change made to this site is the organization of the music. If you go to the DJ Allergy section of the new site, you can see I've got it arranged similarly to the original, with album cover folders containing categorized music. However, These folders now have information regarding when the music was made, the genre and a bit of blurb. Most importantly however, I put the unfinished scraps in their own section, cleaning up the other sections.
I also put a lot of effort into the graphics on the site to make it look more professional, such as the 3D work on the navigational buttons, the backgrounds for different albums and the cut out objects.
In the process of creating the new site I also had a few other Ideas. I decided to host other artists to improve the hit rate, and I created web streaming M3U files to make the music easer to listen to.
Responses
It took about two weeks before I started getting any responses from people.
There where a few emails informing me of forwarding my message on to more relevant contacts which was great, but unfortunately, I didn't receive any responses from those refined contacts.
The big difference I got from my responses after I made the online demo, was that the rejection letters where personally written (instead of automated). it seemed also that people where actually listening to the sample music, and in many cases, enjoying (or at least respecting) it. Here is an example of such an email sent by Magnus Alm of Muskedunder Interactive.
Eventually (but much sooner than I had anticipated) I received this response from John Bergman of Guild Software, which I must say felt like a bit of a breakthrough.
So he hadn't got as far as most of the others who had turned me down, but in this case (and more importantly) he was up for accepting my offer.
The lack of response at the time did seem a little strange considering the offer I was making. Is seems that in the world of the games industry, it is difficult enough to even give away your music let alone get a commission.