By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
So happy you’ve joined us! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and I’d like to welcome you to the continuation of this series of articles based on my lecture from GDC 2021 – From Spyder to Sackboy: A Big Adventure in Interactive Music! Using the example of two of my projects from the previous year, I explored the contrasting models of dynamic music design employed in two games – Sackboy: A Big Adventure for PS5/PS4, and Spyder for Apple Arcade. (Above you’ll see a photo from one of the sections of my GDC 2021 lecture in which I’m discussing the Spyder project). Both Spyder and Sackboy were developed by Sumo Sheffield and featured whimsical characters and situations. Each of the two projects had a long list of music requirements and strategies that were dramatically different. In composing music for these two games, I learned a lot about the flexibility of dynamic music systems. Since I worked on music for both games simultaneously, it was fascinating to make comparisons between the two projects after the fact. Preparing my GDC presentation became an exercise in understanding how flexible video game music can be. If you haven’t had a chance to read the previous two installments of this series, you can read first about Horizontal Resequencing and Song Structure, and then Horizontal Resequencing & Dynamic Transitions.
As we discussed in the previous article, interactive music design is highly contextual. The circumstances dictate our choices. No single method can be considered the best way, or the right way. Working on these two projects at the same time, I came across this idea over and over again.