The Last and Final Word: Brother Android
Brother Android has both a strong interest in game design and a strong interest in composing music. Although he managed to gain recognition in the Game Maker community with releases such as The Wasteland (and still tinkers with game development with other tools such as Flixel), his interest in composing music has taken over for the last few years.
Name?
Harrison Lemke.
Age?
19.
Location?
United States; Texas, currently.
Development tool(s) of choice?
I used to use Game Maker, because I really didn’t know anything about programming at the time. I’m studying it in school now, though, so more recently I’ve toyed around with other things. I did a game in Flash / Flixel about a year ago, but never released it because I wasn’t really happy with it. I’ve been thinking about doing another, but the time commitment is daunting.
What do you use to compose your music?
I use a tracker, and samples from a wide variety of sources (a lot of them I make myself, using simple wave generators). I’m hoping to get a Game Boy though, so I can try composing on one of those.
What do you do?
These days, I’m a student (Computer Science, of course).
What do you want to do after you finish school?
I don’t really know, to be honest. I’m interested in working on game or non-game software, but whatever I end up doing, I’m sure I’ll continue working on music as much as possible.
Although you’re active in the indie community as a composer of soundtracks, you don’t develop games anymore, right?
I don’t actively develop games at the moment, though that’s not to say I never will. Really, the reason I haven’t worked on any in a while is actually because my interest in music has gotten stronger. I’m a very single-minded person, so it’s very difficult for me to maintain more than one creative hobby at a time. My mind either idles in music mode or it idles in game design mode, and for the last couple of years it’s been the former. And it’s hard to work on a creative project unless I’m thinking about it every spare moment.
Do you still tinker with game projects at all? Is there any desire left to create games?
Yeah; it’s been a while since I’ve messed around with a game, but I come back to the hobby periodically. Game design fascinates me, but I find that it takes a strong design and sense of direction going into a project for it to amount to anything, and that’s a hard thing for me to have unless all of my imaginative efforts are focused on the prospect of developing a game.
What parts of game design fascinate you in particular?
I like thinking about games as alternate realities - self-contained worlds with their own sets of rules and interactions. I think it’s really interesting that the more complex a game is, the more its players seem to be able to discover ways of playing it that weren’t intended by the developers at all. As a result of looking at games this way, the thing that bothers me most is when a game doesn’t consistently follow its own rules, which any of my friends will tell you makes me a bit hard to please when it comes to games.
You’ve worked on a number of soundtracks for videogames. What type of projects do you lean towards composing or do you just help out friends when needed?
For the most part, I help people out. I wouldn’t compose for a game I didn’t like.. but then, I’m not the pickiest person in the world when it comes to games. In general, though, a game like Hero Core is pretty much a dream project for me, because the player has time to come to appreciate the music, and the music has a lot of opportunities to create atmosphere. It also happens to be a kind of game that I like playing a lot - Super Metroid, Seiklus, that stuff is fantastic.
Name the game soundtracks you’ve worked on.
Mountainer, Defem, Hero Core, Feign, Coptra, and Dinosaur Zookeeper. My music was also included in Digital: A Love Story, but it wasn’t made specifically for the game.
Super Metroid, Seiklus, Hero Core… is that also the stuff your drawn to making as a game developer - the metroidvania?
Games that center around exploration and discovery are really important to me, but they’re also kind of challenging to make. Not only do they usually revolve around bigness and a lot of possibilities, which necessitates a lot of work, but their appeal is perhaps more nebulous, and thus designing one solidly is hard. That said, if I ever do undertake a large game development project, yeah, that’s probably the kind of game it would be.
