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Seeking A Composer For Tactical Breach Wizards

Update: Applications are now closed! It’ll take some time to go through them all.

Update: We’ll continue taking applications for the composer position until noon Pacific Time on Wednesday this week! This link should tell you when that is for you.

Original post:

We’re looking for a composer to handle the music for Tactical Breach Wizards!

• This is a contract position for this project only.
• Remote, paid – let us know your preferred rate. Ask for what’s fair, getting this done cheaply is not a priority for us.
• See below for the scope and nature of the work.
• We expect to be working on the game for at least 1 more year, so that’s the rough time frame for working on this.

We don’t care about years of experience or prestige of prior projects, all we need is to hear some of your existing work – whether it’s personal or professional. You don’t need to have worked in games before – the game-specific concerns are outlined here so you can judge if they’re gonna be a problem.

Instructions for applying are at the bottom of this post, but first I’ll give as much info as I can about the job:

The Work

Tactical Breach Wizards is a story-driven puzzle tactics game about wizards in modern-day tactical gear tackling a global conspiracy. We plan for the campaign to be about 12 hours long, alternating between turn-based tactics missions and interactive dialogue scenes that progress the story. So our music needs include:

Mission music: (probably 70% of the work) We’ll generally want the music during gameplay to give a sense of tension and stakes but also have a bit of a groove to it, and not to steal focus – the player will be thinking through some complex situations so we don’t want anything too distracting or intrusive. The campaign will take you to four different countries, and it would be nice if the music for each conveyed a sense of the place. But the countries in the game world don’t relate to ones in our real world, so we don’t want the music to specifically evoke real world ones. I can run you through these in more detail once we’re working together, and your input would be welcome too. I estimate these tracks would need to be 3+ minutes to avoid getting repetitive, and we’ll probably need at least 6 of them, probably not more than 12.

Story scene music: for some scenes, we’ll want bespoke music to convey a mood or a moment. The story involves some dramatic events and some intense emotions, but the dialogue is text-only, so the music will be important to get across things like intensity, tone, and emotion in a more direct way. I’d estimate these would be around 1 minute long and we might need about 6 of them.

Incidental music: for the larger number of less intense/impactful conversations, something a bit more chill than the mission music, at a guess these might be 2-ish minutes and we might need around 4 of them.

We’re not looking to do anything too complex in terms of dynamic music – being a fixed story campaign, we have a good idea of what we want the mood of each level and scene to be. However, the structure of our missions is that you play 4-6 short levels in the same location, with a ratings screen between each. This seems like it could be a good fit for several variations on a single track, giving the place a unified mood but with either variation between each level, and/or rising intensity for the final levels of the mission. If hired, we’d want your thoughts on whether that’s a good direction or if you have other ideas.

Us

We’re an entirely remote team of 3 people (UK, US, Canada) and entirely independent, meaning no external parties giving notes or setting milestone dates etc. So far I haven’t found it necessary to set deadlines on tasks, I just give a brief, you go off and make something, come back when it’s ready and I’ll give feedback. But if you prefer to have a hard deadline we can do that too. If the pace of that ever does look like it’s gonna be an issue, we’d discuss to see if the pace or the scope of work needs to change.

We mostly co-ordinate via text on Discord, where each discipline has its own channel. I’m also happy to work entirely via e-mail or DM, which we’ve done in the past, if you prefer our feedback loop to be private (very reasonable). We have a zoom call roughly once every two months, at 9am Pacific Time, but that’s optional. It’s not a job where you’ll see our faces much, for better or worse!

We don’t require an interview call, video or otherwise, but we can do further in the process if it’s useful for you.

You

We’re looking for 3 things:

Talent: you already have this, don’t worry about it. In all the times I’ve done this process I can’t think of any candidate who wasn’t talented enough.

Fit: this is a bit of a crapshoot I’m afraid – it’s just, is the kind of music you make, the kind of music I like – for games. Here are links to the soundtracks for our previous games Gunpoint and Heat Signature to get a sense.

Working relationship: we’ve had the best work produced and the happiest work life with folks who are happy to make changes and expect it as part of the process. We all have to kill our darlings pretty regularly on the altar of practicality and playability, so if you’re someone who gets very attached to a version of your work and hates to mess with it, this won’t be a good fit. I’m afraid I have no musical education and I’ll be the one giving you feedback, so it’s going to be bumbling things like “I’m not sure what’s happening at 1m28s but it sounds kind of discordant to me?” and “This is a bit too busy or intrusive” without a lot of specifics and accurate technical terms.

A few practical requirements:

• You must be at least 18
• It’s a big help if you’re able to play games on a Windows machine, you’d need to to hear your work in context
• If you have an existing job, check they don’t have any claim on what you do outside of work

Applying

If you’re interested, you should read Please e-mail wizardcomposer@suspiciousdevelopments.com with, first and foremost, a link to where we can hear some of your music that you think best shows your suitability for this role – especially for the Mission Music part of the job. A direct link to (or attachment of) an MP3 or two is ideal, if possible – if I can put everyone on a big playlist and listen to it on loop that’s a great help. Attachments up to 25MB are fine.

Please don’t make anything for us yet – after this phase, we’ll choose some candidates and offer them a fee to produce a sample, we don’t want anyone doing it for free.

You don’t need to write a cover letter – we don’t need you to declare your undying passion for the thing before you even know if you have a chance. If you’re looking for work you have to do a lot of these, so let’s make it as quick and easy as possible for both of us until we know if we’re a good fit.

Do feel free to list your previous work – as I say, prestige isn’t a factor for us, but if it happens to include something I’ve heard, that’s a helpful shortcut to me knowing more about your work. It’s easier if you list this in the e-mail than needing us to open up a resume and find it.

Do tell us what you’d like to be paid. An hourly rate would be nice, so that if we need to keep asking for revisions of a track you’re still being compensated for the extra time. If you prefer a per-track rate, a rough idea of how many hours an eg 3-minute track typically takes you would be helpful.

Thanks for reading!