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.
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.
My virtual talk will focus on the best ways to create memorable thematic material. Catchy melodies can help to enhance a game’s distinctive character and originality, which can subsequently lead to a more memorable gameplay experience. In preparing my presentation, I conducted quite a bit of research. Because of time constraints, not all of that scholarly research made it into my final presentation. I was sorry to have to cut those materials – I thought it was pretty interesting stuff! So let’s now discuss some of that extra info in this article. We won’t be delving into the actual subject matter of my lecture, since I’ll be saving that material for my actual presentation that will be included in the slate of GDC 2020 Virtual Talks. But the general relationship between music and memory is a fascinating area of study. If our music can help games to stick in the minds of players, then it should be useful for us to understand some expert scholarly viewpoints on the relationship between music and memory.