Quote
I'm not an audio professional in games, but my understanding is that there's almost no need for any programming competence for musicians or audio people these days. The various middleware tools and engine facilities make integration a code-free experience
While middleware is great, it doesn't make game audio integration a code-free experience. There's still a lot to do even if you're using something like Unity or UE with "play FMOD event on collision" style UI. Sometimes you need fairly subtle logic to prioritize and call FMOD or Wwise events, which requires coding.
To answer the original question, I have both music and CS degrees, and I've found that having good programming chops has made more valuable as a game composer/sound designer. It helps to 'speak the language'. I've written up audio specs for programmers, and by putting them into very 'programmer-istic' format, it was easy for the game programmer to understand how I wanted the sounds/music created specifically implemented. And in a couple cases, I've dug into a games code to make sure that the music/sound I was hired to make was being implemented in the game correctly.
Although it isn't really so applicable these days, when I started, I had my own "sound engine" for various arcade, Genesis, SNES, PS1 games I did audio for. If I wanted the engine to have a new feature, I could just add it to my engine.
Quote
oes anyone else here find the design or logic end of the game world just as much fun and intriguing as playing your instrument?
That all said, although I enjoy the logic, etc of programming, if it's not audio programming (which is fascinating), then I find programming to be really uninteresting.
