By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hey everybody! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and I was excited this year to present a talk at the Game Developers Conference. GDC is one of the top conferences in the video game industry, and it was a fantastic event this year, full of expert sessions and lots of opportunities to learn and network. As in previous years, I thought it might be best if I included the content of my GDC lecture in my articles here, so I’m now kicking off a six-part series of articles based on my presentation in July! I’ve included the substance of my GDC presentation, supported by some of the multimedia materials I used to illustrate concepts during my lecture. I’ve also enlarged upon most of those topics with a bit of further explanation that couldn’t be included in my original GDC presentation (due to time constraints). So now without further ado, let’s get started!
In this article series, we’re going to be taking a look at those two projects: Sackboy: A Big Adventure for the PS5/PS4, and Spyder for Apple Arcade.
As we know, dynamic music differs from linear music in fundamental ways. Linear music is a single contiguous unit, like a straight line moving in one direction, with a beginning, middle and end. But dynamic music is more like a maze that can move in many directions with lots of divergent possibilities. The art of interactive music creation and implementation is not just about understanding and deploying interactive music systems (such as the ones on the pictured list.) It’s also about looking at the nuts and bolts of these systems and seeing all of those divergent possibilities.
Of course, everyone is well acquainted with that international superstar, Sackboy! His incredibly popular escapades in Craftworld have become the stuff of legend. Sackboy’s latest Big Adventure is a smash hit action game that pits him against the evil Vex, who’s bent on destroying Craftworld with his terrible Topsy Turver machine. Of course, as Craftworld’s greatest adventurer, Sackboy must act fast to save the day (as he always does). Let’s watch Sackboy in action!
While Sackboy is famous, many of you may not have heard of our other hero –– that amazing covert operative, that groovy agent of mystery, that globetrotting defender of truth and freedom… Agent 8!
Working on music for these two projects at the same time was an intense and rewarding experience.
For Sackboy: A Big Adventure, I joined a diverse music team, and was assigned the task of composing original music for Sackboy’s underwater escapades. I was also one of the team members responsible for creating cover music to fit into Sackboy’s world.
For Spyder, I was the sole composer, writing original 1960s and 70s-inspired music for Agent 8’s sneaky spy missions. Both games were developed by the experts at Sumo Sheffield, and both included ambitious music systems using similar dynamic strategies. There are a lot of differences that are interesting to us as game composers – and that will be the subject of our discussion.
Coming back to our list of implementation procedures, let’s start with horizontal resequencing. Both games used the fundamentals of this technique, so we’ll now focus on a straightforward example that’s connected to a profoundly familiar musical technique – song structure.
Like the rest of the games in the franchise, Sackboy: A Big Adventure is a celebration of music – incorporating original compositions, licensed pop tracks, and cover songs.
Along with the original music tracks I composed for Sackboy, the team also asked 
The orchestral arrangement was recorded at Air Studios London, and then the final mix was separated into segments for implementation. That’s where Horizontal Resequencing comes in. When we compose music in segments that can be triggered in different orders, that’s Horizontal Resequencing. Shuffling things around makes the music more responsive to the game, and also helps the music feel less repetitive.
Material Girl is broken into segments according to its song structure, which is a pretty straightforward approach. Songs typically have some form of an 
First we get the intro, which plays once. This transitions into the verse and chorus – which is combined into one segment that’s essentially the main loop. Let’s take a look at that:
Once he lands, the music jumps right into the interlude section. So let’s see how that part worked:
Following the interlude, we go back to the main loop for awhile, and then we finally get the outro segment at level completion.
So let’s check that part out:
You can see how the music provides a sense of reward. As Sackboy progresses, the music advances to reveal new content. A dynamic music system like this one has the primary goal of indicating progress through the level. In the case of Material Girl, the advantage of song structure is that it provides well-defined segments that are inherently dissimilar, so jumping from one segment to the next feels very dramatic. We’re meant to notice what’s happening – it’s part of the reward.
So, we’ve taken a look at one of the dynamic music implementation strategies from Sackboy: A Big Adventure. In the next installment in this article series, we’ll examine how the Spyder video game approached traditional horizontal resequencing using dynamic transitions designed to keep the musical texture fresh for long-term gameplay.
After that, we’ll contrast this dynamic music approach against a more context-sensitive implementation strategy in Sackboy, to see how flexible the horizontal resequencing technique can be. Until then, thanks very much for reading!
