Saturday, October 31, 2009

"Casey Malone" RBN Source Files

Hi!

So, the short story behind this song is that a while back, I "wrote" a song for Casey Malone in 5 minutes. By "wrote", I mean I cobbled together some samples and recorded me saying "Casey Malone" into a laptop speaker, then assembled it and put it to a YouTube video:



I was not proud.

Cut to the RBN Open Beta. I've authored two songs already for our band Speck, and in a drunken haze I bet that I can author a song in an hour. Remembering CASEY MALONE: A CASEY MALONE, I bounce out the stems, author the repetetive instruments, commision some album art, and voila.

As a joke, I put it into playtesting on the RBN site.

In the last week, I've had more people congratulate me on a 52 second song that took 5 minutes to make than I've had on any of Speck's real songs combined. This is depressing.

Given that there's no way that I can feel morally right about putting this song into Peer Review and eventually on the RBN store, I decided to release the source materials for this song.

Download here!

While it's short and probably sloppily authored, having a completed song to reference while attacking a real song for the first time is incredibly useful. I wouldn't be in the games industry if it wasn't for all the people who put up full source for their Doom and Quake 1 mods, and I hope that this helps new authorers in the same way that mod source helped me start making games.

There's bound to be some inaccuracies in here, so please comment either on the RBN site or via Twitter with any bugs you see.


(Note: literally just before submitting this, the offical RBN site posted "The Future Soon" by JoCo as a sample song. That's probably a better example of full authoring, but I'm leaving this up as a "minimal case", since it contains the bare minimum authoring to be considered a "shippable" track)

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If you're coming new to this whole Rock Band Network thing, you'll need to download the tools to view this stuff:

- Reaper, for authoring
- RBN Plugin for either OSX or Windows
- Magma, for compiling and testing your song

Check out creators.rockband.com for authoring help and guidelines!

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band (Designer's Cut)

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band (Designer's Cut) from Dan Teasdale on Vimeo.



This is a special "designer's cut" of the GDC speech I gave at GDC '09. This was recorded at Boston Postmortem earlier this year, and includes some bonus footage that wasn't in the original speech.

This speech is focused on the lessons I've learned while at Harmonix, primarily around design lessons for innovating on a yearly basis.