The first challenge was really just an excuse to push me to make an updated Demo Reel. The last one I had was over a year old, and it was time for an update. As the first group is all about exploring the basics of audio implementation (fade in/out, start/stop/pause, alter sound based on variables, applying effects in-engine, snapshots) I thought having a couple tracks to fade in/out of would be a good base to start experimenting with these basic effects. I did all of the audio and video editing in Reaper.

Choosing music for this demo reel was harder than choosing music for my first reel. The first time I made a demo reel I had a limited number of projects to choose from. The first reel had two songs from the same project, and footage from two games I had no part of, cold calling the devs to ask to use footage. As well, the track "Ambient 1" was written specifically for the reel as I didn't have any downtempo songs in my portfolio at that point. For this reel however, I had a lot of new music to choose from, and all of it is from games I directly worked on. The oldest cue is the theme from My Pet Nuclear Monster, coming from a jam back in October 2020. The newest is the cue from Mole With a Goal, having been written for a jam that happened last weekend (as of the time of this post). It was a good feeling to have enough music to make choices about what songs made it into the new demo reel.

I wanted to select music that shows a good breadth of the music I have written, as I plan to use this reel as a first point of contact for general use; for devs generally looking for a composer without really having anything specific in mind. This is a big reason I didn't make the reel sooner, as right now it doesn't really serve a good purpose. The odds of a composer LOVING that I do many different things is quite low, and as standalone pieces my music is average right now. However, I want to look active and having a recent-ish demo reel is one way to do that. Couple this idea with me wanting to start this Learning Series, and making a Demo Reel as my first challenge ended up making the most amount of sense. In my mind it helps to set a good foundation for the Series moving forward.

Listen to the newest reel HERE

As with all of the composition challenges you can download the files for personal use, or even just to listen to them. For this first challenge I just re-rendered the versions of the songs that ended up in their respective games with metadata. The files included are the actual assets that I will end up using in the Group 1 implementation challenge. Enjoy!

(annoyingly there are no direct links to download the files from this post so you'll have to go back to the main page to download the audio)