By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Welcome! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and in this month’s article, I’d like to go into some depth about an interesting aspect of our work as game composers – creating music for timed challenges. In timed challenges, players must complete a set of tasks within a limited window of time. Over the years, I’ve created music for lots of timed challenges featured in highly divergent projects, from the darkly strategic space battles of Hades’ Star (pictured above), to the wacky assembly-line mayhem of the Fail Factory VR game, to the brand-new DLC release from one of my most recent projects — the Spyder video game. It was this most recent release that actually got me thinking a lot about how difficult timed challenges can be for game composers.
Developed by Sumo Digital, the Spyder game stars a high-tech robotic spider named Agent 8, who carries out secret missions on behalf of an elite spy agency. 
The circumstances of gameplay for this DLC was distinctive, which made my job especially interesting. Each of Agent 8’s training missions offers mind-twisting challenges, and no single mission can be completed twice. Once players have successfully finished the day’s training mission, they’ll have to wait until the next day for another mission to become available with a whole new set of challenges. 
Timed challenges are unique, and require their own creative and technical approaches in order to be as impactful as possible. With that in mind, I’ll be dedicating my next two articles to the process of creating music for timed challenges. Along the way, I’ll be sharing my music composition strategies for timed challenges from five of my video game projects:
- Call of Champions (Spacetime Studios)
- Hades’ Star (Parallel Space)
- Sports Scramble (Armature Studio)
- Fail Factory (Armature Studio)
- Spyder (Sumo Digital)
In part one of this two-part article series, we’ll be discussing musical approaches to timed challenges in Call of Champions, Hades’ Star and Sports Scramble. Part two will elaborate on dynamic music strategies for timed challenges, including both the Fail Factory VR game and my latest project, the Spyder Micro Missions. During these two articles, our discussion will include an assortment of implementation structures, so let’s start with the most basic way to address the issue.
Applying a Linear Loop to a Timed Challenge
As game composers, let’s imagine that we’ve been assigned to create music that will accompany players as they accomplish a set of goals while watching an inexorable countdown clock. The timed challenge will be a finite length, but here’s the twist — the music will be shorter than the length of the challenge. Therefore, the music has to loop.
Call of Champions – The Battle Arena
Spacetime Studios developed the Call of Champions MOBA (Massively Online Battle Arena) game. As a well-reviewed game developed exclusively for mobile platforms, Call of Champions was the first-ever 5 minute version of the popular MOBA strategy game style. All battles were time-limited to 5 minutes, and whoever had the upper hand when time ran out would emerge the victor of the match.
When I was hired to compose the music for Call of Champions, the development team had already created a music implementation plan that included a three-minute looping structure for battle gameplay. So when the battle was reaching its finale, the music would not be nearing its end. Instead, it would have already looped back to the beginning and be somewhere in the middle when the match concluded. Nevertheless, I knew I wanted my music for these battles to emphasize the timed nature of gameplay.
These were solutions born of necessity, but they worked within the Call of Champions battle sequences. Here’s a video of one of these timed battles, including the music I created to accompany the action:
So now that we’ve looked at the difficulties imposed by the linear loop structure, let’s take a look at the next logical approach.
Writing linear music timed to the length of the challenge
Video game experiences are distinguished by their changeable nature. Gamers are usually afforded enough personal agency to shape the nature of their gameplay journeys. This tends to make the contours of their adventures difficult to predict. How long will a typical gamer take to solve a puzzle, or complete a quest? Who knows for sure? For this reason (among others), music composition for games has pursued interactive structures and techniques that allow the music to adapt to player choice.
That being said, composing this music isn’t the same as composing for traditional linear media. While there are similarities, the biggest difference lies in the role that the music plays. For TV and film, music serves as a scene-setting accompaniment that hits the right emotional notes and helps to tell a story. But music in a timed gameplay challenge is a source of information and a warning system. If we do an expert job, players may come to rely heavily upon the music we create to help them complete the task within the allotted time. Here’s an example:
Hades’ Star – The Blue Star challenge
Hades’ Star is an expansive space strategy game with a persistent universe and thousands of players. The game gives players the opportunity to build an interstellar empire by exploiting the resources of numerous star systems while fighting off relentless competition. Designed with thoughtful strategists in mind, most of the gameplay proceeds at a measured pace. Every so often, however, an opportunity shows up to quickly earn large rewards in a high-stakes multiplayer free-for-all challenge that takes 5 minutes to complete. Players rush into a system circling an unstable Blue Star. The system will be completely destroyed in five minutes, and players work to survive the hostile environment while mercilessly attacking each other. All the while, the hazardous boundaries of the blue star system encroach from all sides, inexorably contracting in size until the system reaches a single point and the Blue Star explodes, leaving nothing behind. The player who manages to survive up until the final moment wins the match and reaps the rewards.
However, Version 2 would be more intense, and would be featured during gameplay within Blue Star Systems. It would start out sounding similar to White Star gameplay, but three minutes into its length, it would diverge into all-new material. This new musical content would need to convey messages to the player about the progression of the Blue Star system contraction, the urgency of the situation, and the limited time remaining.
I’ve included a video showing an entire Blue Star playing session from start to finish. You’ll notice that the first three minutes of music are unhurried and thoughtful. However, once the player has reached the three minute mark, urgent strings begin playing alongside heavy synth rhythms and a large horn section. Unlike the intermittent string rhythms heard earlier, this insistent momentum continues unbroken and builds steadily from this point forward — sending a clear signal to the player about the passage of time. It’s just as effective a notification as any visual warning message or beeping alarm. When the player only has 30 seconds remaining, the music sharply changes, darkening with dissonant surges and orchestral bursts. Players who have participated in more than one Blue Star match will recognize this musical change as their 30 second warning. The horror-inspired musical score finally crescendos when the Blue Star explodes, destroying the star system and ending the match:
Now let’s take a look at another way to approach the composition of linear non-looping music for a timed challenge.
Sports Scramble – Bowling
In most circumstances, game music is designed to support the gameplay experience in subtle, transparent ways. Players will notice the music, but they won’t usually focus on it. However, there are some games that use music as an overt component of the gameplay mechanic, with the intention of grabbing attention and communicating vital information in an assertive way. The Bowling sections in the Sports Scramble VR game are a great example of this. Sports Scramble is a VR game that takes famous sports and turns them upside-down, introducing oddball rules and equipment. Fun times and hilarity ensue. The development team at Armature Studio asked me to compose several linear tracks for these timed challenges.
The Bowling music in Sports Scramble is timed to play for the entire 1 minute and 40 second length of the challenge, with a linear structure that includes a beginning, middle and end. This linear structure and specific timing are qualities it shares with the Blue Star music I composed for Hades’ Star. But unlike the Blue Star music in Hades’ Star, the Bowling music for Sports Scramble includes a voice performance of a starting countdown that’s integrated directly into the track, along with a musical build-up and a starting bell that signals the beginning of gameplay. 
In this example, the music for the timed challenge is providing vital information to the player in a manner that’s meant to arrest attention. Because the music is structured to last the entire length of the challenge, it has the option to send signals about important gameplay events.
Conclusion
Now we’ve looked at ways that music can be structured to align to gameplay circumstances during a timed challenge, but with the caveat that those circumstances must be fixed and predictable in nature. What if there are changeable components to the timed challenge, and the music needs to adapt to those changes?
In part two of this two-part article series, I’ll be addressing this issue with a discussion of music composition strategies for timed challenges in the VR game Fail Factory and the training mission DLC from the Spyder game on Apple Arcade. Until then, thanks for reading!
