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.
Back in the summer of 2019, I started working with Sumo Sheffield on music for two different games. It was pretty intense work over the course of many months on two awesome projects with very different musical needs. The list of musical requirements was quite long for both projects, and I spent a lot of time ping ponging back and forth between them. After they both hit retail in 2020, I realized how eye-opening that experience had been. Both games required complex musical interactivity, but each met that goal in very different ways.
showing how a comparison between these two projects can shed some light on the utility of the top interactive techniques and strategies. While comparing this list of interactive music techniques provided me with a lot of material for my GDC lecture, there were other ways in which the two projects were similar. I thought I’d share some brief thoughts on one of the other common threads I found between these two Sumo Digital games.
the GDC Vault: a repository of lecture videos from the long history of the conference. During Showcase week, GDC curated a selection of lectures from their illustrious history and spotlighted those talks in live-streams accompanied by enthusiastic text discussions in an accompanying chat box. One of my lectures from a previous GDC event was featured during this GDC Showcase, and I was happy to participate in the chat discussion, answering questions and providing additional resources. My lecture was entitled, “Homefront to God of War: Using Music to Build Suspense,” and 
and I was able to land the gig because an example of my work landed on the desk of a music supervisor for the project at exactly the right time. What are the chances of that? It’s akin to being struck by lightning, and I certainly can’t advise young composers to depend on that kind of lightning to strike. But I don’t want to leave hopeful young composers in the lurch either.