No musician here so I'm probably not too much help, but for what it's worth, I've used FruityLoops to make some game music in the past and enjoyed it.

I have used lmms to compose music. It comes with some built-in instruments, but I find that there are much higher quality ones available elsewhere for free. In particular, I have enjoyed GeneralUser GS, Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra (here is a more user-friendly file format), and DSK Music plugins.

There are two main file formats I deal with here for instruments: SF2 and VST. I find that lmms generally has more trouble with VST instruments, though I think it works better on Windows machines.

Good luck!

Hi, there are several books worth reading out there that speak about making music for games, for example "The Game Audio Tutorial", it's a good starting point.

For 8bit music I would recommend two free plugins that are really great, "Chip32" and "Magical 8bit Plug".

For other styles also free plugins are a great starting point, the Sonatina Symphonic Ochestra that mentined DezrasDragons is pretty good.

It's a good idea to first start doing mockups of your favourite game music, it's a good exercise before writing your music.

Also see https://musescore.org/en/handbook/soundfont for some handy links to various Soundfonts (SF2).

@mdwh - That Musescore soundfont list is pretty great, thanks for sharing!

I'd be careful before using some of it's plugins though. It mentions the Arachno SoundFont, but previously I had found on the documentation page for that soundfont, it explicitly states that:

But, please be aware that this bank is primarily distributed for private, non-commercial purposes only, as it uses portions from other authors

I don't know about the others, but I guess in general it's a good idea to look up licensing information for any plugins you use before using getting too invested in it.

I know that Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra is CC-SAMPLING+-1.0. DSK doesn't specifically mention a license (that I could find), but the website says it is 100% free for private and commercial work. GeneralUser has it's own custom license, but basically is CC0.

Though now that I read the GeneralUser license more carefully I see this:

Many of the samples are original, but some were taken from other banks freely (and legally) available on the Internet from various SoundFont websites.  Because GeneralUser GS originated as a personal project with no intention for publication, I cannot be 100% sure where all of the samples originated, although I do know that none of them came from commercially published SoundFont packages or sample CDs.  Regardless, many "free" SoundFonts available on the web may indeed contain samples of questionable origin.

...

This uncertainty may concern you if you intend to use GeneralUser GS in a commercial software product.

Just more cause to be careful I suppose. It does go on to mention that there have been no documented infringement claims made against composers using GeneralUser over the last 15 years.