▼ Selected works ▼ Informations and conditions ▼ Contact

So I kinda make music

Photograph of Arnaud staring intensely at you. My name is Arnaud Savioz, I’m 23 years old, living in the south of France, and I am an expert at failing to ever start an indy game project. I have reliably and consistently failed to decide to start an indy game project since 1996. Well, except for that horrible RPG I made in 2000, which I’d rather pretend it never existed.

Over the course of my multiple failures at deciding to start making a game, I accidentally became a music producer. Some day in 2006 I started thinking, “so, it’d be nifty if I could make myself the soundtrack of LDCDBVSDLC” (LDCDBVSDLC is the acronym of a game that I successfully canned).
Well, as soon as this thought occured to me, it was too late. In a matter of weeks, I had irrevocably become an artist.

I am currently working on an indy game, which I have yet to successfully fail at, or failing that, succeed at.
Until my game needs a soundtrack, I’d like to improve my skills by making music for freely distributed non-commercial indy games.

This offer is only valid for a few weeks (Last update: Jun. 2008). If you’re not reading this from the URL http://savioz.com/arnaud/music/for-games/ then please make sure this text is still there before e-mailing me! I will stop accepting requests while I’m unavailable, and I may decide not to renew my offer after that.

Selected Works

Most of my favorite work so far consists of energetic, upbeat synth rock and electronic tunes that demand your immediate attention and drill their melodies through your head whether you like it or not.

The following tracks showcase some of my work in various styles and moods:

Superdignity (2007 ver.) is a boastful and relentless piano rock adventure.
Histograms of Tragedy (2007) is a pretty brutal robot opera.
The Poem of Overgesticulation (2007) is classy until overgesticulation takes over. (This track will loop back on the same theme at its half.)
Master, sir, did you just see my MAD SKILLZ!? (2007) I hope you will also find mine reasonably mad in this short jazzy track. (This track will loop back on the same theme at its half.)
WN-Untitled 1 - A6 (2007) will never be granted a name, because it was made for a game that the project head chose to cancel for mysterious reasons. As you listen to it, picture yourself walking at night in a village that will only ever exist as a bad scan of the draft of a concept art. (This track will loop back on the same theme at its half.)
Hypnagogic Logic (2006) will make you doubt about a few things. (This track will loop back on an alternate version at its half.)
Dawnive (2007) never tells the whole story. Those trancey synths are peculiar narrators.
Obsessararvations (2007) is a sparkly ride that can make significtionant sense.
Occasional Vampire (2006) comes from a lost episode of Castlevania that is about happiness and puppies. (This track will loop back on an alternate version at its half.)
The magnisonant ballet of overlooked divinities (2007) will give you even more of the obnoxiously happy overgesticulation than you thought you had bargained for.

Please note that some of these tracks were not conceived as VGM, which is why they have a progressive structure unsuited to most video games.

You will find a few more tracks there:

The music I have already made is absolutely not available for use anywhere, sorry. Most of them are WIPs that I want to redo from scratch for my own game, so I seriously endeavor to make your life hell on earth by any means necessary should you decide to lift them for any purpose (which I am way much more likely to find out than you could imagine).

Informations and conditions

Since I am going to be pretty picky about this offer, here are many details you’ll want to know:

First, please understand that out of all the skills I’d like to hone by offering my services, learning how to deal better with jerks is not among my priorities, this is why some of my conditions intended to deter them will sound ridiculously obvious.
I WILL ONLY WORK FOR FREE FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PROJECTS. Your project must be provably non-commercial and free to download. That means either open-source or freeware with absolutely no strings attached (such as having strong restrictions on digital distribution, making the player sit through an ad before playing or being delivered with optional adware, being extendable with things you can pay for, being branded with a name you use commercially or intend to, etc.)
There are many good ways to establish your good faith if you can’t provide enough evidence that the game will be free to download and non-commercial, for example granting me access to the code repository and development builds.
I expect to do an amount of songs that is appropriate for the scope of your project, in the range of 1 to 12 polished pieces, a few more if some of them are simple incidental works. If you need significantly more than that, I’ll need help—but I don’t want to have to work with more than one other composer, as it would be a communication nightmare.
The more work you request, the more I have to appreciate your game to participate in it.
You need to understand that I’m pretty far from having great skills. I’d love to get opportunities to explore some different musical territory, but I think you’ll still see some of the idiosyncrasies that tend to emerge frequently in my work.
Your project must value game music, and have an entirely original soundtrack. If you think of VGM as mere decoration, then there are already tons of muzak legally available all over the place, no need to have me produce more. I want my work to help you build the player experience, not to fill gaps in a collection of generic digital assets.
The previous point also means that I expect to to get quality feedback on unpolished drafts by all the people in charge. I do not expect to work isolated from your creative process, given approximative objectives, then wait weeks for a yes/no on a finished product. I need a clear and honest communication channel with everybody responsible so you can kill unsuitable ideas early, before I invest many hours of work in them. Nobody wants avoidable outtakes to be produced.
Very few indy game concepts ever make it to the working prototype stage. I want to see that you have the dedication required to build what you’re pitching before I give you some of my time. I will only provide you with serious work once your project has built enough momentum that you won’t drop it.
I will do everything I can to never bail you out once I explicitly confirm my participation in your project, but on the other hand, I will get out of the project at the first hints that it has become too unhealthy to get released.
But if you are in the early stage of a project with a pretty short development cycle (something like less than 6 months) then feel free to ask me right now if I’d like to consider participating later.
I’d prefer to license my work under a creative commons license of your choice with the non-commercial clause, to spare us some snail-mailed paperwork. Alternatively, I can also provide you with a license specific to your project if exclusivity matters. I will not provide work without a license.

Whichever option you choose, I will keep the copyright for my songs, and I will reserve the right to distribute the music as freely downloadable individual tracks on the internet, but I only intend to make use of that right if you discontinue the official distribution of the game.

Let me know whether you understand clearly how the whole international copyright and licensing thing works, or if you’ll need some clarifications, so we can make a deal in good faith.
My tools are software only. I use master MIDI keyboards, but I do not record any instrument live, I use samplers and softsynths. My software setup is a byzantine multi-software, multi-computer, multi-OS rig. I cannot provide you with easily editable source material, as it would require to reproduce my setup (specific versions of my software, some of which is commercial, samples, and routing the various applications on multiple computers together…) — I can only provide you with audio files, mixed or as separate tracks, and the raw MIDI data.
"Raw MIDI data" doesn’t mean .MID files that can be directly played as music. MIDI technology and music distributed in .MID format are two very different things. I work with MIDI technology, but I do not work by producing .MID files that I fancy up later. It would take some serious work to manhandle the raw MIDI data back into some sort of actual music.
I don’t have any experience making SFX. Unless you also want a few abstract bleeps and jingles, you’ll have to take care of producing or acquiring most of them yourself.
You may elect to have song titles that actually make sense.

Contact

I hope this big wall of text won’t discourage you from contacting me if you have a project I’d actually like to work for. I am not a litigious guy, but if you’ve hung out long enough in the less professional areas of the indy games development scene, you surely understand that there is no shortage of people whom I definitely don’t ever want to do free work for. I’m really just trying to establish a context where nobody is likely to get screwed over, accidentally or not.

My e-mail is arnaud☮savioz♘com (Please replace the ‘☮’ and ‘♘’ symbols by ‘@’ and ‘.’ to reveal my address, which I’d like to protect from gentlemen wishing to provide me with additional inches, because firstname@lastname.com is the pinnacle of geek chic, and the metric system is much more intuitive to me anyway).

By the way, I’d like to remind you that I WILL ONLY WORK FOR FREE FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PROJECTS.