I thought I had lost music forever, then an indie game changed everything
If someone had told me a few years ago I would be composing music for games, I would have never believed them. 8 years ago I suffered from such an extreme music burnout; I never thought I would do anything with music ever again. I’m not sure if it’s because I have ADHD or just a creative-minded person, but I’m constantly replaying things in my mind from my life like I’m watching a movie.
And the best movies, in my opinion, are the ones with twist endings.
Little did I know that my attempt to quit a life of music would actually put me on a path that would not only restore my love for music in the most unexpected way, but that it would lead me to meet some new friends along the way. I apologize for this sounding a bit like an autobiography, but it is what it is, and that’s just how the story goes.
Back in the day, my dad was a jazz drummer, but sadly, I never took after him in learning the drums. However, when I was about 12 years old, I had a friend from school who was learning bass guitar, so I thought it would be cool to learn electric guitar.
Upon hearing the news of me wanting to learn guitar, my dad excitedly rushed out to buy me a “Squier Stratocaster” guitar starter pack. It came with a little practice amp, a soft case, and a neat little CD called “Guitar 101,” which had video guitar lessons on it.
After a few weeks of running through this program, however, I decided guitar was just not for me. Guitar was A LOT harder than it looked!
At some point, my dad noticed that I hadn’t been playing, and when he asked why not, I told him I just wasn’t interested. I don’t remember the exact words he used, but it was something along the lines of “I bought that guitar for you; you’d better learn it.”
Reluctantly, I gave it another shot. I don’t know what changed in me from that point on, but after giving it another shot, I was hooked. I spent pretty much every free moment I had playing guitar.
A year or so later, I met a new friend at school who was also learning guitar, so naturally, we basically lived our lives in constant competition with each other, determined to be the better guitarist. I’m very grateful for this time and the friendship we had back then, and it really played a major part in where I am today as a musician.
Growing up, I had pretty severe allergies and asthma, which worked together in very bad ways. So, while I did do my fair share of going outside and playing with friends, I probably didn’t do it quite as much as the ”normal” kids did back in the 90s. I spent a lot of time playing video games. I loved games like Earthbound, A Link to the Past, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, and the list could really go on and on.
But since I was also in the stage of learning music at the time, the soundtracks to these games also had a really big impact on me. In fact, they probably shaped me a whole lot more than the actual games did. I listened to game soundtracks while doing schoolwork, playing other games, playing guitar, while I slept, and really, while I was doing just about anything.
In my teenage years, I found a couple of music composing programs like Guitar Pro, Sibelius, and Fruity Loops. After learning how to use them, I wasn’t just hooked on playing and performing music anymore; I was hooked on CREATING music.
In the mid 2000’s I was in a rock (indie/emo) band. We never really got big or signed to a label or anything, but we did do some touring around the US. I was writing all of our music (except for the lyrics because I am an awful lyricist). It was actually through this band that I met my wife. She was friends with some of the other guys in the band, and we just sort of hit it off when we met.
As time went on, we got more and more fans, and bigger and better shows. But I slowly started to realize that our band was turning into something I didn’t really want to be a part of.
The other guys were getting into drinking, drugs, partying, and the whole “rock star life,” and I was always just “the straight-edge kid” who would rather stay home and write music by myself than party. You’d better believe I was called a “video game music nerd” many times by this group and the people they partied with.
One day at band practice, we were playing our newest song, instrumental, again, for like the thousandth time. I was livid. I had created all the parts for all the members of the band months before. We could all play our parts perfectly; it just needed lyrics.
Obviously frustrated, I asked my friend who created all the lyrics if he could, “PLEASE go write something for this thing so that we can finally do something with it.” He said okay, and stepped outside to go sit on the back step of the house we were practicing at, have a smoke, and come up with some lyrics. Whew! Finally!
5 minutes later, he came back inside. “Yeah, I got nothing.”
This was the final straw of all the prior frustrations that had been slowly building. This was the moment I knew the band had failed. They were all going down a path I wanted no part of. The years of songs, shows, and time together with my closest friends, just gone. So I quit, and the band broke up.
Many years later, we were able to rekindle our friendship and are now really good friends again, but I carried the weight of that moment for years. Any time I saw someone performing on stage, I felt a sense of longing, and honestly, a bit of jealousy.
Fast forward several years later, I’m married, with a growing family. I had just had my seventh child, and was working an overnight, 46 hours a week, manager job at a gas station/convenience store (which I hated).
But on the plus side, I was also teaching private one-on-one guitar lessons, selling stock music (to keep that music dream alive!), and building an online guitar teaching business, which involved lots of social media and YouTube, all in my “free time.”
Then 2018 rolls around, and I find out I’m losing my job of 8 years, and in no way am I ready to make the jump with music yet.
However, a few months prior, my wife had gone crazy viral on Instagram, gained A TON of new followers, and we had started getting some influencer brand deals coming our way (we even got offered our own TV show but turned it down!). We decided to take the risk, and I quit my job.
A little later that year, I was in the process of updating my MacBook operating system, and it completely bricked on me in the process. It was just a cheap refurbished MacBook, but like a dummy, I had not backed anything up for years. All my guitar teaching logos, templates, animations, videos, stock music project files, social media templates, etc. Everything was gone.
Then the unthinkable happened.
After years of working an incredibly high-energy and stressful job, with a growing large family, prior music paths that just never seemed to work out, all while constantly grinding, grinding, grinding, trying to keep the music dream alive on my nights and weekends, in that one moment, just like before with the band, I knew I was done. It was simply too much weight for me to carry anymore. I just couldn’t recover this time, and even worse, even if I tried, I didn’t even really want to recover from it.
Suddenly, music brought me absolutely no joy anymore. Everything in my life was maxed out, and something finally had to give.
My life felt incredibly empty and lost for a while. Obviously, I still had family and friends that loved me, but one of my biggest anchors in life suddenly wasn’t there anymore. I had to desperately find a way to fill the new creative void in my life.
I tried several things over the course of about a year, like drawing, graphic design, game making, website building, video editing, and programming, but ultimately landed on 3D Design in a program called Blender.
But of course I had a family to provide for. I couldn’t just watch tutorials and play around all day. I needed something that provided income. Well, what if I learn Blender in order to teach it? I have teaching experience and the computer skills I would need to build the thing.
So I did. I spent a lot of time on Instagram getting inspiration and meeting other artists, but my teaching videos weren’t really “taking off” as quickly as I wanted. So I turned my IG account into a 3D art “repost” account, because, you know, repost accounts blow up like crazy!!
As you can probably guess, my repost account absolutely did not “blow up like crazy.” What was I going to do? I needed eyes on my content, like, ASAP.
Maybe instead of simply reposting content, I would review it… on video! I would take selfie videos every day and talk about WHY I liked a particular piece from an artist. No one else was doing this. It was genius! This did actually get me a few more interactions, but still nothing substantial.
Except for one. The dining room scene from Woodo.
Although back then, it was just a picture. No game tied to it. No Foxy or Ben. Just a really awesome-looking Blender image. I made a video review of it and, little did I know at the time, this one review would completely change my life. Julia (the creator of Woodo) was VERY excited that someone noticed her picture.
At the time, she was just starting to learn 3D art herself. And even though she was not a fluent English speaker, I didn’t let that stop me from getting to know her. We quickly became friends, and we talked a lot about different things over the next several months.
At some point, she was telling me about her trailer video she was putting together for Woodo in hopes of finding a publisher. The only problem was she needed music for it and had no idea where to look.
Imagine how amazed she was to find out that I wasn’t even an artist at all, but actually a burnt-out musician and composer! I told her I had an entire catalog of songs just sitting on an external hard drive somewhere, and that I was never going to do anything with them, so she was welcome to use one of my old songs for her trailer.
At the time, I didn’t realize how symbolic the song I picked for her was. To me, it just sounded nice and seemed like it fit the vibe of the video. It was actually a song from my old band (one of the very few I had actually written lyrics for), but it was a song about memories and telling childhood stories, and remember, this was before Woodo was what it is today.
Back then, it was just a pretty picture of a dining room where everything was made of wood. A couple of years went by, and Julia and I grew apart.
During this time, I tried several new business ventures that never really went anywhere. I started feeling more and more hopeless and stuck with every day that passed because it just seemed like nothing I was doing was working. Consumed by the thought that I just didn’t belong anywhere and that, no matter what I did, I couldn’t provide for my family and that I was failing.
At some point in 2023, I was driving in my car, listening to some of my old music, and I vividly remember stopping at a stoplight and breaking down out of nowhere into a super ugly cry. All I could think about was how empty I felt and how much I missed music. But I still had no joy of any kind whenever I picked up my guitar. I was incredibly torn and confused.
In April 2024, out of nowhere, I saw Julia post the picture of the Woodo dining room scene on Instagram again, except this time, she was announcing that she had found a publisher for the game! I noticed the audio she was using for this post was my old song, so playfully, I had to leave a comment saying my congratulations to her and “hey, nice song! 😂”.
Julia messaged me back and told me all about how she had now secured a publisher for her game and how exciting it was for her. Jokingly (well, maybe half jokingly), I said, “Do you need a composer?”
When she said she did, I kind of panicked a little… Then when she told me she could only ever imagine ME doing the music for Woodo, I panicked a lot!
She did say that she understood if I didn’t want to, or couldn’t, but I told her I wasn’t sure and that I would think about it for a few days and let her know.
Wow.. What was I going to do? I knew I missed creating and playing music, and that was a good start, but I wasn’t even out of my major 5-year music burnout yet.
I didn’t know if I COULD do it, let alone if I even WANTED to. What if I messed her game up? What if I couldn’t hit the deadlines? Or worse, what if I WAS able to do it, but it didn’t turn out any good, and my childhood dream turned into a nightmare of bad reviews I could never live down?
I talked with some people I trusted. My wife, kids, friends, and parents were all very supportive and encouraging to me, but my mom said something that I will never forget. “You CAN do this.” At the time, I didn’t know if I could or not, but I chose to believe her. It was just enough for me to go on to realize that the kid-version of myself would never forgive me if I said no.
So I said yes.
I spent the next several months trying to hone in on the exact vibe Julia imagined for the game, but I just kept getting it wrong. Every day I would write a 30-second clip of music, send it to her, and ask her to rate it. And boy, was it getting really discouraging every time she said, “No, not this one either...”
But then, finally, one of my attempts nailed it. It was the song, “Yew and I”. It was my first “hit” after like a month of misses. Julia placed it into “The Village” level as a progress-check deadline for her publishers. It was a really big moment for everyone. I was so nervous as I waited to hear back from Julia that day.
I knew Julia liked the song, but would the publishers? After the meeting, Julia messaged me and said I had been approved! And not only that, but the publishers even really liked the idea of friends making a game about friendship.
My confidence was for sure lifted after this meeting, but I spent the next year feeling major imposter syndrome and just general anxiety about whether I could keep it up and continue to get the music right for each scene. Julia and I used to joke about how we were making a therapeutic and relaxing game, but as developers, we were actually very stressed and anxious during its development.
About a year later, we released the Woodo demo on Steam and had a player survey at the end. I couldn’t believe the number of people who had praised the music. Here are just a few:
“I had tears playing the beginning; the melodious music swept me into a state of reminiscence.”
“The sounds and music fit the vibes so well. It all comes together beautifully.”
“The music perfectly complements the gameplay and sets the right mood.”
And just a quick side note here: I just want to make it known how much your reviews mean to developers. When you say things like this, it really does give us the strength to keep going. The people who said these things had no idea what I was going through at the time, and how much their reviews mean to me.
Anyway, this was such a pivotal moment, not only in my burnout recovery, but also in my life. Having solid confirmation that I was actually impacting people’s lives? How amazing is that?
And now, Woodo has finally been released (I didn’t even miss any deadlines during any of the production!) and for the first time in years, I know I want to keep making music. I don't know exactly where it will lead, but I finally feel excited to find out again.
Woodo has brought me back to the thing I love! Can you believe it? I worked on Woodo for a year and a half, not even knowing if I ever wanted to do music again?
It’s really wild for me to think back on the series of events that brought me to this point. The path I was on for all those years made absolutely no sense to me at the time:
The burnout that takes away my lifelong passion.
Reinventing myself to be a 3D artist.
3D art ultimately fails, so I never actually pursue it, but I’m only in it long enough to basically meet Julia.
Years later, she has a publisher and needs a composer, RIGHT when I am considering music again, and this project lands in my lap without me even looking for it.
But through it, I am brought full circle back to my one true passion. Talk about a twist ending and “movie magic!”
So wrapping all this up, and PLEASE understand that I’m not saying burnout is the key to achieving all your dreams. Burnout is no joke. It took me like 5 years to even begin to overcome it, and I still can’t touch a guitar to this day without the feeling of dread coming back over me. I’ve since switched to piano, and that’s been a lot better.
My favorite TV show of all time is LOST, and one of the main characters, John Locke, said something that I think really applies to everything I have been saying so far:
"I’m not lost anymore.” “How did you do that?” “The same way anything lost gets found... I stopped looking.”
Everyone has a unique path in life, and you never know where that path will lead you. I believe everything happens for a reason, and even though I hated my burnout phase at the time, I can honestly look back on it now and see how important it was for my own life.
If you’re struggling with burnout, know that you’re not alone. I don't know what the next chapter of my life looks like yet; I just know that after years of recovery, I'm finally happy to be making music again.
About the author: Don Roberts | |
 | Don Roberts is an indie game composer, lifelong video game music fan, and major iced coffee enthusiast. Inspired by the soundtracks that shaped his childhood, he loves creating music that brings games to life and connects with players emotionally. He composed the soundtrack for Woodo, a cozy diorama puzzle game, and lives near St. Louis, Missouri, USA, with his wife and seven children. |
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