By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Welcome! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and I’m happy you’ve joined me for the second installment in this series of articles based on the content of a lecture I gave during the Game Developers Conference 2021. My talk was entitled, “From Spyder To Sackboy: A Big Adventure in Interactive Music.” In my presentation, I compared and contrasted the interactive music design of two of my video game projects from the previous year. Both projects were developed by one of the game industry’s top development studios – Sumo Sheffield. Both projects included ambitious dynamic music systems, using similar techniques and approaches. However, there were lots of differences in the execution of those techniques. This series of articles explores the similarities and differences between the dynamic music design of the popular Sackboy: A Big Adventure game for PS5/PS4, and Spyder for the new Apple Arcade (a great platform for supporting larger-scale game development for iOS). (Above you’ll see a photo from one of the sections of my GDC 2021 lecture in which I’m discussing the music systems of both of these projects). If you missed the first article in this series, you can find it here.
In the previous article, we took a look at how the music design of Sackboy: A Big Adventure employed horizontal resequencing to introduce musical interactivity into my cover version of Madonna’s famous Material Girl track. For those of us who could use a refresher, here’s an excerpt of my discussion of horizontal resequencing from my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music:
“In music, we mentally picture the ephemeral concept of time as a horizontal phenomenon, moving inexorably from left to right (like the notes on a musical staff). Likewise, most audio editing software visually presents audio as a waveform moving horizontally from left to right. The fundamental idea behind horizontal re-sequencing is that when composed carefully and according to certain rules, the sequence of a musical composition can be rearranged. This process occurs while the music continues to move forward on the horizontal axis of time, allowing a continuous free-flowing transformation of musical content….
“In horizontal re-sequencing, a musical composition is constructed as a collection of segments, each representing a discrete chunk of the overall composition. The duration of these segments can range from a scant few to a large number of measures. Each segment of music may contain digital markers that indicate convenient and logical points at which the game engine may switch between that music segment and another in the collection. These markers may be positioned on each individual beat, at the beginning of each measure, or at designated points in the composition where switching to another music segment would be feasible.” (Chapter 11, page 188)
The interactive system triggered the music to advance through song-structure components such as verse, chorus, bridge, and interlude, and this progression rewarded players by revealing new content as they proceeded through the level. Around the same time, the developer, Sumo Digital, was also asking me to compose horizontally-resequenced music for the Spyder video game, and that was a very different approach that employed more distinct segmentation and dynamic transitions. So let’s now move to that technique in our list of dynamic music strategies:
Spyder is a pretty stealthy game – it’s not about running and jumping – it’s about being a secret agent, so the music had to be sneakier, 
There are also a lot more segments involved. Every level of the game had over thirty music segments. This provided the greatest flexibility for enabling divergent and unpredictable music during puzzle-solving gameplay, and the order of those segments is randomized so that players can’t anticipate what they’ll hear. Let’s check out an example of this system in action:
So you can see, this interactive system isn’t really indicating progress through the level the way the Material Girl music did. Instead, the focus of this music system in the Spyder game is to create musical variety, and avoid predictability. A system like this can keep game music from coming across as repetitive. However, the system also reveals its segments in an overt way, without making any attempt to hide its dynamic transitions.
But what if that isn’t the goal? What if we want the horizontal resequencing system to completely hide its dynamic transitions? To get a taste of how that approach would work, let’s look at one of the original tracks I composed for Sackboy: A Big Adventure:
So now we’ve explored how these two games have adapted the pure horizontal resequencing technique in different ways. In the third article of this series, we’ll approach the next item in our list of dynamic music techniques:
When we resume our discussion, we’ll be exploring how pure vertical layering can be adapted to gameplay circumstances, using several examples to demonstrate how this dynamic technique can be molded and shaped to accomplish different tasks. Until then, thanks for reading!
