DanT's Design Blog

GDC friend speech pimpage

2011-02-26T13:37:00.000-08:00

GDC is next week! I won't be going since there's a lot of Gunstringer stuff going at this stage of the game, and it's almost definitely better that I work on adding more awesome rather than doing GDC and PAX East back to back. Hopefully things will work out scheduling wise next year.

Even though I'll be here in Austin, three of my close friends are giving GDC speeches this year. They're also all about some subjects that have pretty interesting backstories, which means I'm obligated to pimp them out:

Pro Guitar in Rock Band 3
1:30pm Wednesday with Sylvain Dubrofsky

Pro Guitar was probably the most universally hard feature to develop on the Rock Band platform, since it had huge hurdles across every single possible direction. Besides the obvious design work to make real guitar readable in real time to people who haven't played guitar before, there were massive peripheral, legal, patent, licensing and authoring issues to work through.

Sylvain came on to RB3 as the senior gameplay dude, and along with Mike Monsalvatge and Bryn Bennett pretty much turned a flawed and shaky prototype that our pre-production team made into something that shipped in a pretty amazing state. There are hours of stories here with amazing solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems, so it's pretty safe to say that you'll be entertained if you show up.

Design Process and Philosophy of Dance Central
3:00pm Wednesday with Dean Tate (@IamDeanTate)

Dean is awesome, and a good friend from way back when we both lived in Australia. When we were ramping up our design team at Harmonix, I knew that we had to get him in to interview as he'd be perfect for the lead role on Dance Central.

After yelling at him for hours, he finally caved in and moved over to Boston, and made Dance Central as his first lead designer title. Those who've played Dance Central know that it's easily the best Kinect launch title. What's even more amazing is that he designed this on a short development cycle, on pre-release Kinect hardware, all while mentoring a design team so junior that they'd never worked as game designers on a game before Dance Central.

If producing Dance Central in those conditions doesn't say huge amounts about Dean's skills and process as a designer, I don't know what does. Maybe his stunning good looks?

Lessons Learned in Music Development: Brutal Legend, Bioshock and Destroy All Humans
3:30pm Friday with Emily Ridgway (@emilyindustries)

Em's pretty awesome at her job. She built all the audio for Destroy All Humans from scratch with something like a $500 budget and a not so spare meeting room, then kicked ass with Bioshock as the audio director, as well as nailing Brutal Legend's music and sound integration. She's now doing her own thing at her outsource startup Emily Industries, which I'd definitely recommend if you need audio outsource work.

It's a late session on the last day, which means it's the perfect session for you to attend and just listen to a bunch of cool sounds while relaxing from the four days of partying you did previously.

More than you should need to know about splash screens

2010-12-26T18:39:00.000-08:00

I’ve started listening to podcasts in my car while I drive to and from work. It’s mainly because I’m sick of Austin’s 101.X only playing ads for the same four strip clubs interspersed with Kings of Leon, and really wanted something else to listen to.

Easily one of the best in the queue is done by the guys at Giant Bomb. If you haven’t been listening to it, I 100% recommend adding it to your podcasting device of choice.

Anyway, in the last episode, someone wrote in and asked why splash screens exist. The response back was basically “Uh, I dunno, maybe it’s a holdover from arcades, or because developers love seeing the name of their games or something”.

My designer sense shed a single tear. The splash screen is actually a pretty important functional piece of the backend guts of how most games work, but if everything goes right nobody ever finds out why! So, in an effort to get my blog writing chops back up, I decided to brain dump more than you should possibly ever want to know about splash screens.

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Quick History Lesson

It's kind of a long and twisty story, since it's evolved from nothing into something that's semi-critical, back into something that you could potentially eliminate if you're smart about your UI design and have a lot of coder time.

Originally, the whole concept of a splash screen originated from the arcades. It's first purpose was to advertise the game in conjunction with a gameplay demo in what's called the "attract loop".

Up until as recently as the Xbox 1 and the PlayStation 2, having an attract loop was a certification requirement - in other words, if you didn't have an attract loop, your game would not be allowed to ship. First parties would even dictate the maximum time you could spend on the splash screen before moving to your attract footage (For the curious, it was 30 seconds on the PS2, 90 seconds on the Xbox 1). With the current generation of consoles, those certification requirements have been retired.

However, games today still have splash screens. Why is this? Well, there are a couple of reasons why:

Determining the “Active Player”, or the “Player of Interest”.

Starting with the original Xbox, some consoles have required that games figure out who the “active player” is.

The active player is a concept that’s used in single player (or, more specifically, single profile) games a lot to determine whose profile and which set of save data to use. From a design perspective, it’s pretty safe to assume that the person who’s pressing Start on the splash screen is the person who wants to play the game.

The splash screen is important because it allows us to figure out who the connected profile is before we move to a more functional screen. Knowing the active player before the main menu means that we can load their save and figure out if we need to show a “Continue Game” button instead of just a “New Game” button, figure out if they’re online-enabled so that we can show online game modes and messages of the day, load any special control settings that would be helpful on the main menu, and generally just let us get a session in order.

Now, you could argue that you could do any of this from any of the menu items on the main menu, but...

The time between the Splash Screen and the Main Menu is the safest place to set up a game session.

...because it’s a chokepoint.

The short story is that it makes things less fragile to know the active controller and the save data that’s being used as early as possible. It means you only have to test one spot (pressing start) instead of the half-dozen or so places on the main menu, each of which might have different reasons for failing.

In the age of motion control, reducing the number of entry methods for enrolling is even more important. Kinect games are a great example, as they require an “enrollment” phase to show that a particular person wants to play and isn’t just standing around or sitting on the couch.

It was awesome to watch fellow Aussie ex-pat Dean Tate wrestle with solving this issue on Dance Central without the benefit of any other games to reference. Mainly, it’s because I find Dean’s tears hilarious. Yes, I’m a terrible person.

(Dean Tate, in his natural non-dancing habitat)

Dean’s solution was to require players to do a single unique gesture to signal their intent to play (in this case, Dance Central’s swipe) before any other options were available, since it was way safer and more accurate than having multiple sets of main menu buttons or gestures that can be accidentally accessed by someone walking into the sensor’s view. In this case, the splash screen was critical in making sure the right person was playing.

Designers are lazy, part #1: join-in-progress is hard.

Having said all of that, there are some cases where the concept of a single active profile doesn’t really apply

#1a) Multiplayer games that support multiple profiles, but no join-in-progress
On most multiplayer games, designers treat the matchmaking screen as their single chokepoint for handling all of the per-player things that they’d usually handle between splash and main.

It’s really handy, since you now have one location that you have to worry about identifying the profile coming into the game, load their save data, make sure it’s valid, make sure that the profile is allowed to play in this session type, and a bunch of other fun stuff. It’s essentially the functional equivalent of a splash screen for multiplayer in terms of identifying the “active profiles”.

It’s also handy for cutting down on edge cases further on in the game, because from that point on in the flow you can assume that all the players are in, and the absolute worst case thing that’ll happen is some of them will disappear.

But, at its core, you’re still choking player identification on one screen.

#1b) Join-in-progress

True join-in-progress is a completely different beast.

I say “true”, because a lot of developers do join-in-progress play with only one “active profile”. It basically means that only one person gets progress, and everyone else is just along for the ride. It’s cheap and it’s relatively easy to communicate to players (“hey, you’re playing on X’s save file!”), but it’s super lame if you want to progress your progress alongside someone else.

True join-in-progress means that you have to be prepared to do all of the things that you’d usually do between the splash screen and the main menu on any screen. You then also have to figure out how you’re going to let the player respond to things going wrong, like joining in a middle of a game with a player that has a corrupted save game - you have to give the player a way to resolve the situation, but in a way that works on any screen.

It’s hard work doing this for multiple reasons. Dealing with the flow ramifications of saving and loading happening anywhere is usually enough for most multiplayer games to skip it, but expanding that to all of the flow on cases like resolving game progress across different people who’ve played for different times, or communicating four different player’s progression at once, well, it’s usually not worth the effort for most people.

I could write a whole separate blog post about this. I really wanted to get true join-in-progress into Rock Band 3, since I wanted players to be able to progress their instrument career regardless of whether they were playing alone or with someone else. While I think we kicked arse with things like the Overshell and making it possible to progress independently, we stumbled on communicating how that works, and how it differs from the “this is x’s save” model that Dance Central and RB2 used.

But, that’s another blog post for another time. Back on track, there’s one other excuse for a splash screen...

Designers are lazy, part #2: the “palette cleanser” excuse.

Of course, all of this is just the mechanical reasons for why the splash screen exists. Because it has existed for so long, it’s pretty easy to claim that it falls into the standard muscle memory of a title. Removing it and just showing a number of options first could make people feel uncomfortable! It also serves as the “opening” of your present of a game you’ve just purchased, which is also a pretty satisfying response.

There’s also great arguments against all of this. Grand Theft Auto 4 pre-DLC went straight into gameplay, and it worked perfectly. They also had a pretty ingenious way of identifying the active controller and loading the save without any real interaction, even if it did require getting waivers from various first parties.

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There. You now know more than you ever probably want to know about why splash screens exist, at least from one guy’s perspective.

Why games are awesome (and why we aren't all going to die)

2010-09-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

I was invited recently to give a microtalk at the Austin IGDA meeting, and as someone who has a poor memory of how long it takes to prepare a good speech, I accepted.

It's also the first time I've done an opinion speech, and I was pretty nervous about not having a backlog of prior development work and 'lessons learned' to lean on. It's also the first time I've ever had to boil a talk to under 10 minutes, which was also pretty scary but also appealed to my optimization part of my brain.

So, what did I talk about? The whole "doom and gloom" reports that had been coming in from analysts had been bugging me recently, so I figured I'd tackle them head on.

Thankfully, the IGDA Austin crowd was super supportive, and cheered me on all the way to the Bill Pullman-lifted ending. Thanks to everyone who showed to listen to all of our microtalks!

Since it's a microtalk, there's a bunch of stuff that I had to cut and just leave the big message. I'm sure people are going to see this online and pick apart small points (for example, "sure, but retail titles make more money because they cost more"/"but Rock Band made less dollars over time"), and there's arguments against that ("sure, but that's gross profit. The net profit is a completely different story in most cases") and on and on, but I think the bigger message is still true - NPDs are no longer the only source of information, downloaded titles are equal to retail titles, and people need to start looking at everything on both the release platform and attached title sales rather than just one subsection.

But yeah, it's a topic that isn't as black and white as "here's some dev lessons learned" and I doubt that everyone's going to agree with me. Still, It was fun to do a short rant topic about something I'm passionate about, and it's helped to make me a better speechwriter.

PAX 10 Rock Band Panel Videos

2010-09-11T16:42:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone that came out early on Friday morning to watch Bchan, Drake, Trites and I answer questions about Rock Band 3, as well as show some cool behind the scenes footage. It was awesome catching up with the old crew, and still awesome again to see everyone enjoy Rock Band 3 on the floor.

If you missed it, here's the video courtesy of RockBandAide!

PAX and you! (or more specifically, me)

2010-08-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

PAX is this coming weekend! There are a few things going on around that I feel the urge to pimp out:

A panel that I'm on!

Rock Band 3 Design Q&A Free-for-all! (Friday 10am, Pegasus Theater)

Holy crap, a design team semi-reunion! And we're the first panel of the show! And we're in the biggest room! You should come and hear us chat about Rock Band 3, as well as ask us any questions. There's a bunch of awesome behind the scenes photos and materials that we'll have on tap if the right question comes up, like this one of Sylvain doing unmentionable things to an inflatable kangaroo and a keyboard controller prototype:

It's also very most likely my last Rock Band-related thing I'll be at with other Harmonixers, so you should come and ask me incredibly awkward questions.

A panel with other Twisted Pixel representation!

Can Publishers Add Value for Indie Developers? (Sunday 2pm, Serpent Theater)

Sure, I'm biased since Twisted Pixel CEO and all round nice guy Mike Wilford is on this panel, but this is essentialy a who's who of XBLA games on one panel. If you liked Shank, Deathspank, the Penny-Arcade games, Monday Night Combat, or any of Twisted Pixel's games, you should come to this panel.

An awesome booth!

Twisted Pixel have a booth on the Expo floor, which is going to be crammed with awesomeness. Come play the full and final version of Comic Jumper before it's released, or sing along with Chainsaw as he plays and sings "Donuts, Go Nuts" live.

There's also a huge amount of awesome merch there, like T-Shirts, posters, and stuffed Maws! You should stop by booth #3003, say hi, and buy some stuff to support us!

Omeganaut Eric Chon!

Fellow Harmonix Alumni-er Eric Chon has been chosen out of thousands to fight for the title of PAX Omeganaut Champion. He is an awesome and swell dude, and you should follow his journey as he surely crushes everybody in front of him.

Moving on

2010-07-02T08:23:00.000-07:00

I came to the realisation recently that my career has been driven by a secret achievement grind, hidden relatively successfully by the fun of making games.

It started off pretty innocently. "Work on a game" seemed like a pretty fun achievement to go for as a gamer, and it brought me into my first games job in the late '90s, but the first hit is always free. "Work on a game" very quickly leads to "Ship a game".

So you ship a game, and get the adrenaline rush of being able to show something you made to your friends and the world. The trick here though is that you very quickly realise the path you were on before was the tutorial, and now you've got multiple paths in this huge world to chase down for completion.

"Ship a game" gets replaced with things like "Ship a game that's good" and "Ship a game that non-gamers recognise when I mention the name of it". There's sidequests of "Make an original IP" and "Make a game that people still replay after the first month". They're great goals that give you design constraints on the fun and awesomeness of making games.

This was great until I started working at Harmonix. Working on something like Rock Band basically allows you to auto-complete most of the achievements on your life list. "Make a game with unique controllers", "Make a game I'm not sick of after making it", "Make a game that makes first parties do anything to help you" and "Make a game that hits the zeitgeist" all got annihilated in the course of a few years.

At some point during all of this, I forgot to keep track of what achievements I was going for. The sheer fun of crafting new experiences for players puts everything else in the background. Sure, the hit from releasing the title and seeing people enjoy your games was still a big part of it, but I craved the hit of being hands on. It's 100% of your job as a staff designer, but as I became a senior and then a lead on AAA titles with 200+ people on them, the ability to chart the vision and the direction of a title starts to encroach how much time you can spend tweaking the details personally.

This realisation put me in a weird position: I want to be able to help drive the vision and direction of a game, but at the same time be hands on and physically implement and iterate on the low level of making games in a more substantial way than time affords me when working as a lead on multi-hundred person titles.

So, with Rock Band 3 now design complete and on the final path to 0 bugs, GM and distribution, I decided to do that. Today's my last day in the office at Harmonix. Tomorrow, I hop on a plane and fly down to Austin, TX, where I'll get ready to start work at Twisted Pixel on a ridiculously cool new project. It's the holy grail of game design positions - I'll get to contribute and help drive the direction of a well funded and supported new title with a close knit superteam, while at the same time being hands on and able to directly impact all aspects of the game.

I'm sure new achievements will spawn and complete that I didn't even know about while I'm there, and I know we'll be making some amazing and memorable games, but that's not the only goal anymore. I'll be too busy having fun working on awesome new games, learning a whole new set of ways to make said awesome games, eating breakfast tacos, and never shovelling snow ever again to notice.

-DanT

War never changes (unless it does change, I guess)

2010-06-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

Rock Band 3 at E3 press

2010-06-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

We just came back from E3, where both Rock Band 3 and Dance Central totally destroyed E3. There is literally too much press to read through, but if you have a spare couple of days, check out the links after the jump.

Awards and Nominations:

1Up	Best Music Game	1UP's Best Games of E3 2010
Alternative Press	Top 10 Games of E3	10 Must Have Games From E3
Game Pro	Best of E3	Best of E3
Gamer Headquarters	Best Music Game of E3	Best of E3 2010
IGN	Best Music/Rhythm Game	Best of E3
PC World	Thing that made me a fan of a series when I wasn't before: Rock Band 3's Real Guitars	Fear and Loathing at E3: Awards and Accolades
Use My Things	Most Interesting	E3 Awards

Articles

1Up	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 Pro Instruments Demo
1Up	Rock Band 3 (PS3)
4 Player Podcast	E3 2010: The David Awards
Aeropause	E3 Preview: Rock Band 3 (Multi)
AggroGamer	E3 2010 Hands-On: Rock Band 3
Ars Technica	Hands on: Rock Band 3 instruments reward real skill
Atomic Gamer	E3 2010 Preview: Rock Band 3
Attack of the Fanboy	News: MadCatz E3 2010 – Rock Band 3 gear, F.L.Y. 9 PS3 Wireless Flight Stick, Xbox 360 Wheel, more
Awesome Game Blog	E3 2010: Rock Band 3
Battle Strats	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 Preview
Big Picture Big Sound	E3 2010: 10 Best Games From the Electronic Entertainment Expo
Big picture sound	E3 2010: 10 Best Games From the Electronic Entertainment Expo
Bit Mob	Rock Band 3: A Skeptic's Take
Blip TV	E3 2010 Harmonix Rockband 3 Conference
Coin-OP Tv	E3 2010 Expo reactions (Tues-Thurs)
Coin-OP Tv	E3 Expo 2010
Consequence of Sound	Watch: Rock Band 3 (CoS Exclusive)
Coolest Gadgets	What else to expect from RockBand 3
CoS	Watch: Rock Band 3 (CoS Exclusive)
Crave	Rock Band 3 - E3 2010 Trailer
Crazy Gamer News	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 demo impressions (Gamer Tell)
Critical Gamer	E3: Rock Band 3 Preview
CtrlAltKill	Preview: Rock Band 3 to score you chicks and gigs?
Destructoid	E3 10: Rock Band 3 on DS detailed
Device Magazine	Rock Band 3 Review at E3
Dmonkey Studios	E3 2010 rockband 3 Conference
El Comercio	El juego 'Rock Band 3' que enseña a tocar música saldrá en noviembre
El Comercio	E3 2010 - Impresiones de Rock Band 3
Engadget	Rock Band 3 Fender Mustang Pro guitar controller and MIDI-Pro adapter eyes-on
Engadget	Rock Band 3 keyboard hands-on (video)
Eurogamer	E3: Rock Band 3
Examiner	Rock Band 3' pre-E3 details
Examiner	The Doors featured on Rock Band 3
Fox AL	Harmonix riffs on Rock Band 3 features
Fox News	E3 2010: Ten Favorite Games
Fragland	E3 Hands-on: Rock Band 3 (All platforms)
Future Looks	E3 2010 – Harmonix Unleashes Rockband 3 and Dance Central and Leonard Nimoy is a Gamer?
G4TV	Hands-On Rock Band 3 from E3 2010 Live!
G4TV	E3 2010: Our First Look At Rock Band 3
G4TV	E3 2010: MTV Games Booth
Game Boyz	E3 Thoughts by Kirby Y - E3 is now over and there is still more work to do
Game Informer	Rock Band 3 Hands On At E3
Game Informer	Rock Band 3 Now With Real Guitars
Game Journos	E3 2010: My Final Thoughts
Game Kicker	SideQuesting E3 2010 Impressions: Rock Band 3 (Side Questing)
Game Kult	E3> Zoom : Rock Band 3
Game Pro	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 – Hands on with all the new instruments
Game Pro	E3 2010: New Rock Band 3 Pro Controllers
Game Rant	Hands On: Rock Band 3
Game Revolution	Rock Band 3 - Xbox360
Game Spot	Rock Band 3 Hands-On
Game Spot	E3 2010 Stage Demo: Rock Band 3
Game Trailers	E3 2010: In With The New Interview
Game Trailers	E3 2010: Debut Trailer HD
Game Xplain	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 Pro Six String Guitar Controller
Gamer Limit	E3′10: Hands on with Rock Band 3’s keyboard – A long road to Chopin
Gamer Limit	E3’10: Rock Band 3 hands-on impressions – the first true band “simulator”
Gamer Tell	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 demo impressions
GameRant	Hands On: Rock Band 3
Gamers Hell	Rock Band 3 Announced and E3 2010 Trailers/Screens
Gaming Union	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 Hands-On Impressions
Gaming Excellence	E3 2010: Harmonix, MTV Games Reinvent Music Games With Rock Band 3
Gaming Ring	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 Interview
Gaming Ring	E3 2010: Rockband 3 Hands On Preview
Gaming Shogun	Rock Band 3 Impressions from the 2010 Electronic Entertainment Expo
Giant Bomb	E3 Quick Impressions: Dance Central
Giant Bomb	Giant Bomb at E3 2010: Day 02
Girl Gamer	E3 First Look: Rock Band 3 In-House Demo
Gizmodo	How Harmonix Is Tricking Lazy Gamers Into Learning Real Instruments
Gizmodo	Hands On With Rock Band 3's Pro Guitar and Keyboard (Keytar!)
Gizmodo	Rock Band 3 Will Try to Teach You How to Actually Play Instruments
Gizmos for Geeks	Rock Band 3 to Feature Keyboards
Globo	Com instrumentos reais, 'Rock band 3' quer ensinar a tocar música
Go Nintendo	Rock Band 3 DS Impressions (Piklbit)
Grab Geek Points	Rock Band 3 2010 Preview
Grab Geek Points	Rock Band 3 E3 2010 Preview
Home Theater Forum	OFFICIAL HTF COVERAGE OF E3 2010
How Stuff Works	TechStuff Rocks Out With Rock Band 3
i4u	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 Details and Trailer unveiled
ICrontic	Rock Band 3 demonstration at E3 2010
IGN	E3 2010: Melting Faces in Rock Band 3 DS
IGN	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 Preview
IGN	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 Real Guitar Impressions
IGN	Rock Band 3 Confirmed for AU and NZ
Inland SoCal	Video-Hands on
Inland SoCal	Rock Band 3 adds real instruments
Inland SoCal	Vote for your Rock Band 3 demo
Joystiq	Have a look at the Rock Band 3 keyboard & MIDI PRO-Adapter
Joystiq	Preview: Rock Band 3 Pro mode
Kombo	E3 2010: Rock Band 3's Keyboard Hands-On
Kombo	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 Hands-On
Kombo	E3 2010: We've Seen the New Rock Band 3 Pro Guitars, and They are Mighty
Kombo	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 Instruments by Mad Catz Hands-on
Kotaku	Man Vs. Massive Rock Band Set List
LA Times	E3 2010: MTV outsources Rock Band instruments, embraces dancing
Legit Reviews	MTV & Harmonix Demos Rock Band 3 at E3 2010
Level UP	Video 1
Level UP	Rock Band 3: la estrella del E310
Level UP	Video 2
Level UP	Video 3
Mashable	Rock Band 3 Live Demo at E3
Metal Insider	Rock Band 3 Might Actually Teach You Music
MMOMFG	Rock Band 3 – Hands-on Impressions from E3 2010
Monsters and Critics	E3 2010: Hands-On With 'Rock Band 3'
Multiplayer.it	Rock Band 3 - Una rivoluzione?
Multiplayer.it	Rock Band 3 - Videoanteprima E3 2010
N4G	E3 10; Rock Band 3 - The PS3 Attitude Preview (PS2 Attitude)
Nerdy Show	E3 Vidcasts :: Rockin’ With Harmonix
New Game Network	ROCK BAND 3 PREVIEW - E310
Newsarama	ROCKBAND 3 @ E3 2010
Nukezilla	E3 10: Dance Central and Rock Band 3 Impressions (With Pictures!)
Nukezilla	E3 10: Rock Band 3 Playable With Your Own Instruments
Original Sound Version	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 Is The Real Thing
Paste Magazine	Paste Goes to E3: Day 3
PiklBit	Rock Band 3
Plastic Axe	Hands-On With Pro Guitar in Rock Band 3
PNOsker	Rock Band 3 Impressions
Pocket Lint	Rock Band 3 demoed at E3
Prefix Magazine	Rock Band 3 Drops Nuke On Game Wars, Introduces Keytar
Press Democrat	E3 Wednesday: 2,144 words about 14 games
Press Fire	Fuck You!
PS3 Attitude	E3 10; Rock Band 3 – The PS3 Attitude Preview
PS3-Sense	E3 2010: PS3-Sense video item: dag 4 in Los Angeles
PSN Nation	Special Episode-E3 2010 Day Three
Punch Jump	E3: Rock Band 3 PS3, Xbox 360, Wii keyboard play rocks
Real Poor	E3 10; Rock Band 3 - The PS3 Attitude Preview (N4G)
Road 4 Blog	E3’10: Rock Band 3 hands-on impressions – the first true band “simulator” (Gamer Tell)
Rock Band Aide	Rock Band 3 DS Hands-On… Oh, and Yes is in Rock Band 3!
Rock Band Aide	Possible Rock Band 3 Release Confirmation and UK Peripheral Pricing
Rock Band Aide	Rock Band 3 Lead Designer Dan Teasdale Answers Your Questions
Rock Band Aide	15 Things We’ve Learned at E3 about Rock Band 3
Rolling Stone Brazil	Quase de verdade
Sarcastic Gamer	SG E3 2010: Rock Band 3 has me at hello
Scatter Tech	Rock Band 3 at E3
SDDT	E3 2010: 'Rock Band 3'
Seriously!	E3 2010: Rock Band 3
SF Gate	E3 a peek at what's to come: 3-D, downloads
ShoGunGamer	Rock Band 3 First Look [E3 2010]
Side Questing	E3 2010 Impressions: Rock Band 3
SmashPad	E3 2010 Showfloor Preview: Rock Band 3
Spike	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 - Debut Trailer
SpillVerket	En revolusjon for musikkspillene?
Student Voice	Things get real with Rock Band 3
Sugar Gamers	E3 Special: Showed up for the Gig, Partied with the Rockband (By Rebecca “Bonks” Rothschild)
Sydney Morning Herald	Split Screen: The future of music games
Tech News Daily	Rock Band 3 Debuts Even More Life-Like Guitars
Technologizer	Music Games Get Real With Fully-Functioning Guitars
The Buzz Media	E3 Rock Band 3 Preview
The Gamers Garage	Gamers Garage: Episode 143 – E3 2010 Day Two
The Koalition	Rockband 3 Will Shape The Future
The Review Crew	Hands On Rock Band 3: The New Instruments
The Tanooki	Rock Band 3 demo impressions
Trendific	Kinect: Dance Central Pre E3 2010 Media Briefing
Tweakers.net	E3: Rock Band 3
VG Revolution	E3 2010: Rock Band 3 Hands On Impressions
VG247	Harmonix details Rock band 3’s guitar controller
VGChartz	E3 Preview: Rock Band 3
WCBS 880	Dishin' Digital
Wii Nintendo.net	(E3 2010) Rock Band 3 (DS) – Hands-On First Impressions
Winnipegfree Press	Video
WireJacked	Rock Band 3 instruments, screens, and info revealed
Worth Playing	PS3/X360 Preview - 'Rock Band 3'
Xbox 360 Digest	X3D @ E3 2010: Harmonix/MTV Games booth
YNN	E3: Rock Band 3
Youtube	Rock Band 3 Hands On Demo (G4TV)
Youtube	E3 2010 -- COE @ MTV/Harmonix (Rock Band 3 P3)
Youtube	E3 2010 -- COE @ MTV/Harmonix (Rock Band 3 P2)
Youtube	E3 2010 -- COE @ MTV/Harmonix (Rock Band 3 P1)
Youtube	Rock Band 3 E3 2010
Youtube	Private Rock Band 3 Demo at E32010

(rockband.com) Welcome to Rock Band 3

2010-05-25T10:47:00.000-07:00

(This was originally posted on the rockband.com 'zine)

Hi there!

My name's Dan Teasdale, and I'm the Lead Designer on Rock Band 3. For the last two years, the Rock Band 3 design team has been feverishly working on making not just the next Rock Band game, but also the next big leap in music gaming. Over the next few weeks and months, we'll be taking you through the details behind Rock Band 3 through a series of designer blogs, right here on rockband.com.

There's so much stuff in Rock Band 3 that I can't personally blog about all of it! The rest of the Rock Band 3 design team will also be writing blogs about various features. Your brave authors, in order of attractiveness:

Sylvain Dubrofsky is the senior designer in charge of gameplay on Rock Band 3. He'll be blogging about some of the revolutionary new experiences you'll be able to play with in Rock Band 3.

Brian Chan is the senior designer in charge of various metagame systems. He'll be talking about some great new game modes and overhauls to how you experience the game.

Casey Malone is our designer in charge of player investment. He'll be blogging about some of the cool things that will make you keep you coming back to Rock Band 3.

Dan Teasdale is...me! I'm the lead designer on Rock Band 3, and one of two token Australians at Harmonix. I'll be talking about some other changes we've made to make Rock Band 3 the ultimate music game.

(While they won't be blogging, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the design contributions to Rock Band 3 by HMX alumni Doug Church and Grace Williams. They've made some huge impacts to the design that we'll do our best to represent in these blogs.)

We'll also be taking any questions from the community that we can. If you have questions that you want answered, please reply either in the comments or on the rockband.com forums. We'll do our best to answer these as we write our blogs.

So, stay tuned over the next few weeks and months as we chat about some of the in-depth details that make up Rock Band 3. I think you'll be surprised at just how big this game really is.

-DanT

Video from the Rock Band PAX Panel

2010-04-18T12:27:00.000-07:00

RockBandAide has awesome video footage for almost all of the panel that Rock Band designers were involved in at PAX. Check out the hour+ footage below!

Harmonix Podcasts, Pope/Teasdale editions

2010-03-03T17:34:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Harmonix super community wünderkind Eric Pope and recorded a bunch of ramblings that might be interesting if you're into the design process at Harmonix.

Part 1 is where I talk about Rock Band's design philosophy, starting at Harmonix, what a designer does, that sort of thing
Part 2 is where I answer questions like "What is Awesomeness Detection?" and "How many licks does it take me to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop roll?"

"Casey Malone" RBN Source Files

2009-10-31T10:03:00.000-07:00

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)

----------------------

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!

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

2009-10-15T14:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Rock Band Network, the day before

2009-09-07T09:18:00.000-07:00

Sure, Google for RBN now and you end up with every link going to an announcement or article about our awesome Rock Band Network initiative, but the day before things were very different. These screenshots were taken the day before we announced:

Designer Emails #2: Item Hoarding

2009-06-18T19:14:00.000-07:00

Dan Teasdale

Welcome to the designer email thread, Mr. Brian Chan! In honor of him joining the thread, I have a topic that he might have some idea on how to solve:

Item Hoarding

As a collector, I find myself hoarding powerful weapons and never using them "in case I need them later". I did it with airstrikes in Mercs 2, I did it with nukes in Fallout, and there's probably a bunch of games that I've repressed doing it in.

Is this good? Is this bad? How do you think designers can solve this, or at the very least balance a game where people won't use the most powerful weapons?

Brian Chan

Thanks, everyone, for presenting me with such a warm welcome. I'm looking forward to learning a great deal from all of you. And thanks, Dan, for asking me something I can actually answer (I'm still in that muddle of new terminology and culture shock that comes with switching workplaces [and cities]).

When a player finishes a game with "leftover" items, it can be either a positive or negative indication. On the positive side, the leftover items suggest that the game presents choices, with the items representing the path not taken. If players vary as to their leftover items, even better-the game presents meaningful choices and allows for alternate solutions. On the negative side, leftover items might signify poor communication to player of item utility or scarcity. That is, the player might not have used the item because he or she didn't understand its value or how common or rare it was.

The problem is summarized by the notion that, if players cannot experiment, then they cannot plan. By providing safety nets for experimentation (and failure), designers can discourage item hoarding.

I like when a game provides the player with some sort of consequence- free sandbox in which to "try before you buy." Often, games do this via gated tutorials. In a game where balancing is achieved via scarcity or resource cost, it's nice to give the player "freebies" so as to whet their appetite. And, if an item is a higher- magnitude version of another item the player is already familiar with, then this fact should be made abundantly clear to the player.

A few games solve the scarcity problem without sacrificing balancing- by basing the economics on (easily) renewable resources. In Bioshock, I don't mind testing out new plasmids because EVE is relatively plentiful. In World of Warcraft, all resources can be translated into time, which is a resource that the game's players don't seem to mind spending prodigiously.

Chris Foster

I thought I came to Harmonix after past jobs strategy games and MMO's so that I didn't HAVE to think about balancing uber items of destruction!

I can think of a few tools to balance hoarding versus wanton nuke-spamming: consequences, limitations and scarcity.

Consequences are ways to say that using a superweapon isn't all wonderfulness and smiting, but that there are potentially painful tradeoffs at work. If a super item is going to create lasting negative faction somewhere in your game, or hurt your character/base while crippling someone else's, then you can make people think more strategically about its use.

Limitations are ways to make sure a superweapon isn't always useful in every situation. I think there are a bunch of limitations that aren't appropriate here, since if a weapon is too limited, it's by definition NOT super. I'd be more interested in limits that make the weapon harder to use but no less potent, such as a missile that is slow moving and therefore somewhat easier to avoid, or a weapon that requires prolonged manual control to hit its target in the most destructive manner possible.

Scarcity is a double-edged sword, as Brian called out. Having plentiful resources in your game, but a significant cost for the best weapons, can be a pretty potent balancing factor. You can see this in everything from Civilization to Death Tank. (And if you haven't played Death Tank multiplayer, stop reading this and play it now.)

Dan Teasdale

I'm going to channel a conversation Sylvain and I had after I sent the email, and in turn steal his thunder. Hopefully I'll misrepresent it and he can come in and make it sound more awesome.

So, the biggest problem I have isn't on the spamming end - making something less appealing to use is kinda easy. My problem is when things are so powerful in a way that's not a direct tie to my standard weapons, with the direct example being airstrikes in Mercs. I'll swap my normal weapons up to the most powerful instantly, but I'll hardly ever launch airstrikes unless:
* I've cornered myself in a save and have nothing else to use
* The game forces me as part of a mission objective

Sylvain then brought up Halo, which solves this problem so elegantly that I didn't even realise they'd solved it. Essentially, restricting you to two weapons means you can never hoard a weapon. If you get a superweapon, your incentive to use it is that you'll be able to pick up another weapon soon, so you'll happily spend the small amount of resources.

Thinking forward to Fallout 3, they end up in this weird mushy area. You have your inventory, and when it's full you'll start burning through some of the cooler things in order to make room for other cool things. The problem with that though is that there's still enough room to carry lots of weapons, so the "superweapons" you're burning are things like medical supplies and stimulants.

(As a side note: It's unnerving how many pacing and design problems Halo solved compared to how revolutionary people think of it as being - especially so considering how much designers didn't enjoy it past the first few levels (myself included). Say what you want about the level design issues in the second half or the cookie-cutter narrative, but things like balancing health for encounters rather than levels, or getting players to experience more cool things by reducing their amount of choice, these things have ended up changing how people balance all types of games.

Funnily enough, designers never give Bungie never credit for it because of the other issues in the game. At the same time, Half-Life did the exact same thing but flipped (standard mechanics, amazing narrative innovations) but it's the game that people reference in terms of the turning point of FPSes. For mechanics designers, it's mildly depressing food for thought :) )

Chris Foster

While waiting for Sylvain to take back what's rightfully his, I'll chime in with this observation.

Your Halo anecdotes remind me that good game mechanics are really like good film editing. When I studied film in college, one thing that was hammered into me is that bad editing -- like an jump-cut, or someone facing left talking across the room to someone who's supposed to be looking at them but is ALSO facing left -- immediately draws attention to itself. However, good editing is invisible editing; it works so well that no one realizes it's working, and all of its subtle emotional and psychological manipulations occur while no one is looking.

When a game mechanic does exactly what is necessary to produce fun, then it's likely that no one will notice that the mechanics are even there; they're too busy having fun. And while that can be a little tough on the designer's ego, remember that the flipside is someone calling you out for your BAD design decisions. I'll call it a fair trade.

Sylvain Dubrofsky

Thanks Dan! I realize at this late hour that the deadline for this email is tomorrow and you typed up a lot of stuff I immediately thought of from my own gaming experience so I won't have to lose too much sleep :)

I remember finishing Half-life 1 having used primarily pistol and crowbar throughout the game. I had all this ammo left over for all these cool weapons that I barely used. The same thing happened with RE 4. I must have had 30 grenades when I finished that game!

Halo had a nice natural solution for the problem. As an aside I am a fan of the series (especially Halo 1 and 3) and think the innovations the game generated are often overlooked - primarily: checkpoint saves, dedicated melee and grenade buttons, 2 weapon slots, dual wielding, regenerative health and the FPS-style driving controls.

I agree with the Brian in the previous email that I prefer getting each new weapon (or any item really) in an environment where I can freely experiment with it - AND that fact is made clear to me. Also agree with Chris that Death Tank rules :) I find if I get too many weapons in Death Tank I get overwhelmed so I tend to only concentrate on 3 or 4 powers at a time.

The biggest improvement in this area was a personal change. I've changed my tune since I was younger and started "trusting" developers more. By this I mean that I will now use my best/funnest weapons first and trust I will continue to get ammo drops such that I won't be stuck with just my pistol and melee weapon. This trust worked very well in Half-life 2 - they had very well paced ammo caches and the tension of getting low with my best weapons had a nice release when I found the next cache of ammo.

Where I answer questions about getting into game design

2009-06-13T12:19:00.000-07:00

I've been kicking around some emails with Nick Cummings basically giving job advice and answering questions about how I got into games, and I realised that it's probably good fodder to put up here and link people to whenever they have questions about how to get into the games industry.

Below are Nick's questions and my replies. I'll update this post whenever people ask me new questions.

What led you to get into game design? Was it what you expected it would be?

A near death experience and ladies.

Long story summarized: I caught Cerebral Malaria when I was five, almost
died. My present for not dying was an Amiga 1000, which I played while I
was recovering. I became a huge game nerd and played games and made small
games for ages. I started doing an IT degree, but hated talking about
Pascal and database structure.

At the time, I had an unrequited crush on an older American exchange
student, and was looking for excuses to fly over to the US in April
during break. I was also trying to figure out what to do with my life,
and I was curious about games and had dabbled in making some games in
high school. GDC (then CGDC) was around that time, and as a huge game
nerd I'd always wanted to know what goes into making games - so I
attended and had my mind exploded open by people talking about the nuts
and bolts of making games. It was exactly the kind of thing I liked
doing, and I knew then that I wanted to make games as a job.

I then spent 6 months making mods for Quake and applying everywhere, and
was picked up by a company called Auran Games (they did Dark Reign, a
pretty good for its time RTS) as an Assistant Designer. It's exactly
what I expected post-GDC, and I still love making games.

What do you love/hate about game design?

I love making things that are fun to interact with. That "critical mass"
point where the game is fun for the first time is an amazing feeling.

I hate it when I miss something that makes a game not perfect when it's
released. Having "Continue" and "Choose Rocker" on the RB1 matchmaking
screen is a great example of this - it was originally just "Continue",
and we snuck in "Choose Rocker" at the last minute without thinking of
the ramifications of having another state-changing button on the screen.

That one stung a lot, since it was one change with a huge ripple effect
that made it really hard to get into bands. Needless to say, first thing
we fixed in RB2 development.

How much variety is there from company to company (or game to game) in what a game designer actually does?

It's massively different not just from genre to genre, but also from
company to company. It's one of the main reasons that the current
courses on game design aren't great for learning how to design games -
they teach you a toolset, but not the instinct that you need across
games and companies.

A good example is going from a Senior at Pandemic (where my time was 30%
open world level design, 60% systems scripting and iteration, 10%
narrative and specwork), to consulting at Irrational (40% UI design
consultant, 60% audio implementation), to a Senior at Harmonix (50%
specwork, 30% scripting and balancing, 20% UI), to a lead (50%
mentoring/managing, 20% specwork, 20% iteration oversight, 10% vision
shenanigans)

From your experience, what skills and interests are beneficial for a game designer to have?

There's a bunch of things.
- Communication skills are key, since you're either trying to describe
a system to other team members, or communicate an experience to a player
through level design.
- Being able to disassemble and reassemble why you like or hate
something is also important. A bunch of iteration skill is in
identifying what's wrong, and plotting a solution to fix it.
- Secondary skills in programming and/or art are always useful. They
don't have to be at the level of "I can ship a game", but enough so that
you can hang yourself always comes in handy.

What advice would you give to somebody who's potentially interested in a career in game design?

Make games.

Seriously, the best way to show that you understand the basics of game
development is to go and make a mod for an existing game, or make a
flash game, or generally just try and complete something and show that
you've gone through the process. I'm more impressed by a game doing
something cool than I am any amount of university.

Can you elaborate a bit on some of the terminology you used to describe the things a designer does? (Specwork and iteration in particular)

So, there's a bunch of things that designers do, but they all vary from company to company.

The common ones involve coming up with a proposal for how to implement a system or a level, and documenting out exactly what you're planning to do. In the olden days of design, this would be part of a huge monolithic Game Design Document that was like 90 pages long and had everything about the game.

The thing designers learned about a decade ago is that nobody reads a 90 page document - the only benefit is to show how awesome you are at typing things. People on the team would print out the 90 page doc a month into the project, throw it on their desk, then reference that printed out document instead of viewing the latest document.

This spawned smaller more concise documentation called specifications, or specs for short. These are 2-3 page documents with clear goals at the start, and easily digestable information for what the system is and how it should be implemented. It's also easy to track changes between revisions too, since they usually live in a hyperlinked form like a wiki and you can track their individual changes.

So, you write your spec, sign off on it, then put it in the game. Unless you're inhuman, your design won't be perfect the first time. The process for going from that first revision to the final thing you ship is called "iteration" - which is basically making changes and course correcting until you come up with something perfect.

What was it like making your first mods? Was it much of a struggle? Where did you look to for inspiration and ideas?

Making my first mods was pretty cool. It was a little bit of a struggle as my programming knowledge was a little weak back then, but it was easy to cobble together and infer things from other mods and make your own unique thing.

The biggest help was just having a community of developers that you could share information with and get answers to questions from. There was an awesome Quake 1 community that I learned a lot from, and there are more places like that now for things like XNA, Unreal and Source that I'd totally recommend people check out.

And just for the hell of it: What are some of your favorite games, and why?

Favourite Game that nobody has head of: Midwinter II, by Mike Singleton. I played this on the Amiga back in the early '90s and it blew my mind. It was essentially a huge sandbox with loads of vehicles, open ended missions, a strategy metagame campaign tree, metric-based minigames, and pretty much everything you'd want in a sandbox game to get narrative consequences across, but ten years before GTA coined the "sandbox" term.

Besides that, I'm a big fan of a lot of the classics. The first commercial game I played was Winter Games by Epyx, which made me want to make awesome party games that everyone could have fun with. LucasArts adventure games shaped (warped?) my sense of humor very early on, and made me want to make funny games. Super Mario World was the perfection of platform gaming for me, and just oozes perfect balance and Miyamoto accessibility on multiple levels. I lost a lot of time playing through the scalable missions in Goldeneye, and I still go back to it from time to time. I play Peggle like it's free crack. I grew up in an aviation family, so I'll fire up X-Plane now and then to mess around with taking off and landing planes, but that's more towards the simulation rather than gameplay side of things.

Designer Emails #1: E3

2009-06-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

So, a bunch of us designer types are kicking around a weekly email thread to talk about things both gamery and designery. Besides keeping our brains balanced and not just thinking about work, it also gives us free blog post fodder!

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Dan Teasdale

Okay, let’s try kicking off this whole email design thing with something that’s sure to cause contention. I am a classy gent, after all.

E3 is next week. It’s the return of the huge 40,000 person behemoths of old, complete with 8 hours of doof and awkward-looking booth babes. What is everyone looking forward to? Any games that are off most people’s radars that you think will be awesome? Any trends you hope to see, or not see?

Casey Malone

Well, this is my first E3, so I'm expecting an orgy of decadence the likes of which even David Bowie or Robert Evans would back away from slowly.

Seriously, though, growing up reading about and imagining the floor of E3 I'm not sure what's coming; is it going to be full of multimillion dollar booths with lights, decorations, props, costumes and fun like Disney World or is it going to be a starkly lit nightmare full of cranky nerds and too-loud music like Euro Disney? I'll let the old hands at this convention thing take guesses towards that.

I guess what excites me the most is seeing what some of my favorite developers are bringing; I have been itching to get my hands on the next game from DoubleFine since the moment I finished* Psychonauts, so I'll be rushing to try Brutal Legend. I'm hoping that Warren Spector brings his long-rumored Mickey Mouse game, so I can at least get a look at what he's bringing to the Disney universe. I want to try out The Legend of Zelda: We Love Toy Trains Edition**, because I have no idea what's happening with this title. And I will proudly wear the badge of the only Harmonix designer who is excited at whatever new game Kojima Productions is working on; yes, I'm sure they'll announce MGS4 for 360, but I'm really crossing my fingers they're bringing something else with them.

As for games that'll secretly steal the show? I think people are going to walk away from Scribblenauts amazed - and no, I don't just love games with "nauts" in the title. And I don't mean to get all "blow our own horn-y"***, but I think The Beatles: Rock Band is going to make jaws hit the floor.

The trend I really want to see and also want to see avoided is sort of a contradiction - I want to see less of a casual market taking over the games industry and instead see games move more towards accepting a casual audience. I mean fewer fitness and weight loss products, and more games that have bright friendly art direction and no lose conditions. Fewer mini-game collections and more intuitive controls. I want to see game makers trending away from the hardcore, but not the point where we lose focus of what makes games fun - interactive fantasies we can provide that movies can't. If the focus of E3 is on experiences like that instead of the gritty FPSs of the world, I'll be really excited for gaming in the next year.

* I never finished Psychonauts, but instead had to watch a friend finish it. Damned Meat Circus.
**Which Dan will tell you he designed a decade ago, I'm sure.
*** There was a better way to say that, I'm sure.

Dan Teasdale

Casey, you have reminded me of Scribblenauts and made me throw in my 0.02c for that as potential dark horse of the year. I'm really curious to see how deep the vocabulary is. Maybe they're really smart about it and target common words plus people's playtest list? I heard that's how Al Lowe did the vocabulary in the first Leisure Suit Larry, and it seemed to work pretty well in being a jerk to me because of it.

I loved E3 the first few times I went. As a game nerd, having everything you want to play on a show floor is awesome. I'm pretty sure this will be the Casey experience. Then, I demoed a game with a 15 minute linear demo for three days and got to see the seedy underbelly of E3, and now I'm a curmudgeonly old jerk. This will probably be the Sylvain experience.

This curmudgeonliness has raised a question in my head: Do we need E3 anymore?

The justification about Ye Olde E3 was that it was a single location that publishers could meet with retailers to buy shelf space for the holidays. Sure, there was a nice side bonus of all the people attending getting to play each other's games and see in action upcoming trends, but the only reason you were flown out there was so that you could guide your hastily-duct taped demo for the King of Walmart*, who would then decree the amount of shelf space you'd get in November.

In the break between Ye Olde E3 and this year's E3, the publishers figured out news ways to talk to developers and vice versa - shows like EA3 and the GameStop Manager's Conference took the place. Bloggers picked up video cameras, thereby negating the need for me to walk the floor or wait in a three hour line. Services like Steam and the first party marketplaces have meant that shelf space isn't a problem, so they can focus on spending their marketing budget towards players rather than wooing retailers ($1mil+ on a booth for E3 2006, EA? Really?) Games like Bioshock have proven that you don't have to come out in the holidays (or be held over to March 31) to be successful.

My gut is that while it'll be a good press boost, it's going to be more like Harrison Ford in Crystal Skull than it is Harrison Ford in Raiders. We'll see this old format played out, realise that it was great before, but that as an industry we've grown since then and that our needs for an expo need to be different if we're going to treat it as a PR festival rather than a distributor pimpathon.

To end on a cheery note, my predictions for E3:
* Brutal Legend blows peoples brains open
* The Beatles: Rock Band gets nominated for an E3 Critics Choice award.
* The most popular booth will be the Target relax-and-feed-me-snacks lounge.

-DanT

*I'm assuming he's your king, or at the very least your Governor General.

Chris Foster

Between being seven months into Raise-A-Baby-Quest, and only now getting de-Beatled after over a year in the Rock Band mines, I'm going into this E3 fairly cold and devoid of specific expectations.

But while it's been a few years since my last E3, I do have my memories. I think my first significant recollection of E3 (though maybe it was an ECTS from the same year) is seeing this mindblowing, totally unexpected 3D console called the "PlayStation." I particularly remember that they demoed Ridge Racer using these weird pre-Dualshock analog controllers from Namco called NegCon, where you steered by twisting one half of a split controller while holding the other half.

I also remember, a year or so later, the massive robot-spider both that Scavenger Software used to present their dozen games and game demos-in-progress. I think that spider-booth was pretty much the only concrete thing they ever actually shipped.

I also remember the multiple appearances of the Gathering of Developers outside E3 at their personal trailer park -- though I never personally visited due to a pathological distrust of strippers and loud people.

I guess that covers the range of experiences I'm hoping for. I'd love to be wowed by something as monumental and game-changing as it is unexpected. I'll also keeping an eye out for those companies where you catch glimpses of a massive train wreck to come, if only in hindsight. And I'm expecting to see things that I will immediately wish that I could unsee.

E3, how I've missed you.

Sylvain Dubrofsky

Hey I remember that E3 booth that you manned Dan. I was actually really looking forward to DAH after that presentation.

I'm really excited E3 is back in the form I remember. I've been in the industry for almost 10 years. I think I went to E3 in years 2-7. At first it was a similar experience to going to a big out-of-town concert. The first couple industry jobs I had wouldn't pay for us, so we'd get our own flights, share beds in hotels, and take vacation days. By the end I have been spoiled getting my flights, hotel room, and per diem covered.

There is one common experience with all my E3 visits. Exhaustion after it's all over. As much as I love it, I'm sure I'll get massive headaches, muscle soreness, and extreme lack of sleep. This year that will be mitigated by my excitement showing off our HMX games which I'm tremendously proud of.

Ok enough history. To the games! I'll be on my usual hunt for obscure titles that may not have received enough coverage. The truth is, besides actually playing the games, you can get a large picture at home in front of a computer or watching G4. That's why I'm gonna do my best to actually play the games while I'm there and have free time.

Things I wanna play if they are there:
Modern Warfare 2
Halo: ODST
Half Life 2: Episode 3
Batman Arkham Asylum
Splinter Cell Conviction
Trico
Madden
Starcraft 2
Anybody else's music games

Casey, I find it odd that you mention FPS-sequel-X as a problem but are excited by yet another Metal Gear. Everyone has their things they enjoy (I'm always excited to try each new Madden, or anything by Valve, Bungie, Infinity Ward, Epic...). I personally don't get the fandom behind the regular E3 trailer of the next Metal Gear or Final Fantasy but I don't see it as something that takes away my excitement.

Labcoats and Design: A Clarification

2009-04-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

Recently someone on ScoreHero commented on my design process, in regards to my GDC speech:

"Now I feel like spraynwipe was just some guy in a lab coat with a clipboard checking off boxes while he watched us post."

This perplexed me.

So, just to make sure we're all on the same page - the purpose of that takeaway wasn't to talk about us "researching the internet", but instead to tell a story about how we learned about the differences in our audience. At no point were we playing a science experiment. In fact, I don't even know where to get a labcoat, let alone a clipboard.

To be honest, the whole idea of me intently observing the internet and checking off boxes while people post about Rock Band is ridiculous, and would never happen in real life.

I hope this clears up any confusion.

GDC Slides

2009-04-05T12:40:00.000-07:00

So, it looks like Think Services put up a version of my slides that was sent for speech approval rather than the version that I actually showed at GDC. Boo-urns. Hopefully they'll update it with my real slides soon.

In the meantime, you can get the slides that I showed here - as well as a bonus slide that was approved, but was cut for time:

Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from ROCK BAND

I'm sure once all of this dies down I'll write up a nice postmortem of the GDC process, it's been hair-pullingly interesting and intriguing.

The Road to GDC, Part 3: Secret Slides

2009-03-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some last minute GDC revisions, and have learned some valuable lessons:

* Polishing speeches is hard
* If I do three speeches in a day, I'm going to start losing my voice. I should try not to do that.
* Drinking carbonated water during your speech is a terrible idea
* More importantly, I have a bunch of cool videos and movies that while cool, don't fit into the flow or direction of my speech. That means...

...that's right! If you ask me a question that's along the same lines as some of the footage I have in my "Secret Slides" section, you'll get to see some extra bonus stuff! There's a bunch of "approved but no longer fitting" stuff like movies of hardware assembly and email proof of me being psychic. So, if you ask the right question, you'll get a pretty awesome visual answer in response!

(Also, if you guys ask questions, I don't end up awkwardly staring at a blank audience for 20 minutes at the end)

The Road to GDC, Part 2: Shameless Begging Commences

2009-03-05T20:06:00.000-08:00

Good News: My GDC slides have been tentatively thumbs up'ed by the higher ups at Harmonix! Come GDC, you'll be able to come and check out 70-odd entertaining and informative slides, complete with never seen before video and picture footage!

Interesting News: My speech now has an official time and room! Room 2007, Friday at 9am

Firstly, that room is awesome.

...and really big...

...and I'm super psyched that the GDC guys think that my speech is going to be that interesting.

However, the big lesson from GDC'08 for me was that you need to plan out your nights more than your days. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, all the big publishers will be throwing huge parties late into the night, which in return is causing some realisations to dawn in my head:

Many people will be drunk or asleep at 9am, making this room harder to fill
I may be drunk or asleep at 9am, making this speech harder to give

So, reader, let's make a deal. I'll speak a little slower and quieter, and ask the lighting guy to turn down the lights a bit, if you show up at 9am and recover while hearing about Rock Band stuff. On top of that, I promise to show up sober, answer hard questions after the speech, and - if you're lucky - show up in clean clothes and a cleanly shaven face.

Deal?

The genesis of Destroy All Humans!

2009-02-12T05:15:00.000-08:00

Pandemic Studios Australia was recently shuttered. While there's a combination of feelings there, the important one is that almost everyone there is going off into more awesome new territory, which is great news.

Anyway, I was going through old emails last night when I found the email thread genesis of Destroy All Humans. The basic backstory was that we were pitching around games to make after our last project was cancelled, and one lunch a bunch of us designers came up with the concept of causing havok as an alien invading earth. Matt then sent out the one-liner, and the rest is history.

"Strike" means Desert Strike in this context - at the time, there was another team at Pandemic working on a sequel, which eventually turned out to be the game 'Mercenaries'.

This is a classic example of how things can both skew off vision quickly, and at the same time be recovered if you have a good project lead.

Matt Harding (Lead Designer/Dancing around the world guy)
alright:

Fly around in a UFO sucking rednecks and cattle onto your ship.

Anyone? Anyone?

Brad Welch (Lead Artist, future Design Director on DAH)
Is there a reason that a more adult style of humorous game is no good?!?

Doing a funny abduction game could actually be a laugh, or even doing a game that's all sort of spoofing cliches...

I have no idea what the game would be...adult party game perhaps?!?

Dan Teasdale (me!)
It'd be similar to Strike - you'd have a whole bunch of mission goals that you have to complete, getting more and more complex (military, etc) as time goes by. Just without the mass amounts of guns and terrorists, and with a comical retro sci-fi story.

Brad Welch
Maybe.

Wha about a setup where some of the major historical events of the 20th century were actually committed by aliens on a conspiracy to control the puny earthlings?!?

JFK - faked he's living on Mars

Marilyn - glamming it up on Alpha Centauri

John Howard - well he looks like an alien

Brendan Andrews (ex-Studio Manager)
How about ...

Where you are a time traveller / alien whatever.. who is the conspirator in all of the events that evoke conspiracy theories?
You pull the trigger for JFK, kill Marilyn, James Dean, Princess Diana, Princess Grace, kidnap Elvis - or perhaps you try to *stop* this happening and in so doing discover a new twist on each.

For each there is a story, people and associated environment already and the plots are already hugely popular.

Brad Welch
SO I guess it would be a mission based, third person game - sometimes a shooter (grassy knoll Warrior might be a bit sensitive in light of the Washington events), sometimes stealth, sometimes action..

Could be kinda fun, if it kept a sense of humour about itself...would the end boss be the weird alien parasite that is attached to Britney Spears spinal column forcing her to sing (when she plainly can't) and control the money spending teen masses?!?

Brendan Andrews

Well - I think the hook is *very* strong and the stories are already part of the culture. You could call it 'Conspirator' if you were the baddie, and Conspiracy of you were the goodie trying to stop the baddie. It might also need a gimmick, though - something that ultimately makes sense out of all of what was formerly a mystery. But as you said, certainly the different events lend themselves to variety on the 1st / 3rd person shooter. But the mechanic is basically that.

Lachlan Creagh (Lead Animator)

how did we get from abducting cows in a space ship to a fps with jfk?

Brendan Andrews
Just be thankful it's still on topic of game designs! ;-p

Do you think it's any good?

Brad Welch
Sorry about that!

Fiona Francois (Senior Artist, future Lead Artist on DAH)
What would the visual style be - realistic? Hmmm.

Adam Iarossi (Lead Programmer)
conspiracy theory interests me

the game could be you travelling around the world over the course of many years, as a spy or hired mercenary, trying to piece together some puzzle while finding yourself in the middle of these major events. something like "where in the world is carmen sandiego" meets "ronin".

Craig James (Senior Programmer)
What about in 'Stupid Invaders' style - without the crappy gameplay.

http://www.stupidinvaders.com/

Adam Iarossi
oh, and you are being hired by aliens

Christie Peterson (Office Manager, future Studio Director)
I like that a lot – this is a game that will hold your attention and you can incorporate many of the elements previously discussed.

Brendan Andrews
There may be concerns on one of :

Gritty / Realistic / Mature / Edgy

.. or perhaps all of them ;-p

Andrew Payne (Project Lead)
I think there's something pretty cool about getting to fly a UFO.

Maybe you could start as a lowly pilot in an alien invading force, where your missions are to abduct specific people from farms and towns without being detected. If too many people see you then the military gets called in and you battle tanks, choppers or whatever other crazy stuff we throw at you.

As the story progresses, you get promoted, get better ships, get tasked with putting 'adjusted' people back into the community to take over American state by state. Try and abdjuct the president? Missions could then be more "strike-like" and your upgraded kick-ass ship would become important. Just to steal more stuff from Strike, perhaps you could get out and drive cars or fly planes into towns to avoid being 'detected' and abduct people thru stealth.

I think if you made the aliens deadly serious then it could be funnier than the more obvious humor in Stupid Invaders.

Geoff Suttor (Animator)
If we could art direct it similar to Mars Attacks, that would be cool. :D

Lachlan Creagh
you could have parrappa style press conferences at the end of each incident where your alien government stooge has to explain why theres no cause for alarm,

a later mission could be abducting an entire us statelike nebraska or idaho- where there could be bewildered farmer types (you place antigrav lifters at each corner and lift the whole thing off the planet)

or is there an invader zim licence we could get?-nah forget licenses altogether

Dan Teasdale
Heheh…

"The Nor---thern lights, just--a weatherballon"
X X A B L L X

----

The first Destroy All Humans! build

----

The name "Destroy All Humans!" was all Matt though, it was an epiphany when he was walking home one day:

"yes, DAH was an epiphany while walking home from work. I text messaged it to Andy. I remember passing by Family while I was sending it. By the time I was opening my front door I had one from him saying something along the lines of "Perfect. Done." And that was pretty much the end of it, huh?

At least that part was easy :)"

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

2009-01-07T14:09:00.000-08:00

I received an awesome book from Sylvain, another senior designer here at Harmonix. It's 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, and despite the title it actually has a bunch of really useful, spirit-raising and enlightening things about the creative design process in general:

I highly recommend it, even more so if you're doing any kind of level design.

In other news, GDC Speech is coming along. I'll probably post some small chunks of it over the next few weeks. Content reuse!

The Road to GDC

2008-12-14T11:52:00.000-08:00

My speech proposal for GDC was accepted this week! "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band" is what I'm delivering, and it's war story retelling under the lens of how to ship awesome games in no time and less resources.

First step: Celebration
Second step: Abject terror about talking in front of hundreds of peers

After a conversation with some friends, I realised that there a bunch of pitfalls that I need to avoid - for example, less talking about standard things like "more resources needed/Top 10 of x/scrum is great" and more talking about interesting stories and lessons that nobody else would be talking about.

So, I'm opening it up to both of the people who read this blog: what are the kinds of things that you'd like to hear in a design speech about Rock Band? And what are the things you hope to never hear at a GDC speech ever again?

Child's Play 2008

2008-12-10T19:55:00.000-08:00

I've had a bunch of people ask me "So, what was the deal with the Harmonix Microwave that you guys were auctioning for Child's Play?".

It was the official Harmonix microwave, covered with signatures from everyone at Harmonix. It was then filled with loads of HMX games, swag, and band CDs. It also had a certificate of authenticity! It ended up selling for $1,800

My favourite item at the auction was the hand-painted guitar case that John Dee did. Dee is the guy responsible for a lot of the shell art in the game (like the tiger, eagle, and rocktopus), and he slaved over the case for days to hand paint a bunch of RB2 stuff onto it. Then, we signed the back of it. That was another $1,900 for Child's Play.

Oh, and then we gave them a $30,000 cheque.

Eyeball Pics (science!)

2008-11-22T11:59:00.000-08:00

I finally got my act together and went to get new glasses. Cool things to note:

* My doctor is a huge Rock Band fan. He was telling me about how he uses the Drum Trainer as exercise, for example. It's both awesome and scary seeing how deep Rock Band is sinking its tendrils.
* I had two choices for determining my eye health - either get eye drops to dilate, or get a camera to take a photo that could be emailed to me. No guesses for what I did:

My Right Eye. Perfectly Healthy!

However...

..my left eye has a freckle (or as it's called, a nevus) on the inside. Not a big deal, but they need to keep an eye on it over time to make sure it does tumorise.

After showing me the pics, my doctor's first words were "So, can I get that as a tattoo for my Rock Band character?". Awesome.

Watson McPupperson's Etsy page is up!

2008-11-16T18:16:00.000-08:00

Like the page says:

Watson McPupperson's Crafty Goods specialises in uniquely crafted everyday items made using unconventional canine construction techniques and household materials.

Translation: Stuff our puppy chews up goes here as art. There are some very "unique" items coming soon!

(rockband.com forums) On Tiering/Difficulty Numbers

2008-11-10T06:32:00.001-08:00

(from the forums, regarding how we come up with our song tiering and difficulty ratings)

So, there's a bit of a difference between "tiers" and "difficulty numbers".

Internally, each song has a difficulty number for each instrument, as well as a "band" difficulty. For example, "Conventional Lover" is 235 on bass, 219 on guitar, 193 on vocals, 191 on drums, and 236 on band. These scales are different for each instrument, but it's not uncommon to see a scale range from 100 to around 500+.

For tiers: We assign these numbers to all the songs on the disc. Then, the tiers are determined by splitting up the songs on disc evenly into 7 tiers based on those numbers! For example: "One Step Closer" is #12 for bass at 165, and "Let There Be Rock" is #13 for bass at 171, but since 84/7 = 12, LTBR becomes the first song in the second tier.

"Well, what about those numbers? How are they determined?" I hear you pre-typing. There's a different process for disc songs compared to DLC songs:

For the disc songs, it was the design team's job to balance the songs. Sylvain, Casey and myself (with guest stars 100% GS guitarist Grace and expert vocalist HMXJohnlok) usually locked ourselves in a room for hours and argued about relative difficulties. Yes, that does mean we've played the Endless Setlist multiple times for the sake of work.

For DLC songs, these are handled by the audio team. They go through and try to figure out how difficult a song is compared to songs on the disc, and assign appropriate numbers.

Some songs are hard to assign numbers for band ratings. Take "Let There Be Rock" - hard guitar, but dead simple bass. When this happens, we tend to trend towards the most used instruments (guitar, then drums, then vox, then bass) when laying down a number, as well as some personal fudge based on where we feel the song should lie.

The basic summary is that it's a blend of science and gut, based on the other songs we've released. Sure, I think we've been a little off the mark on a couple of songs, but I think the vast majority available on the platform (500 songs by the end of the year!) fit a nice balanced curve.

So much press..

2008-10-31T01:20:00.001-07:00

It's kinda quiet here since I'm on a whirlwind RB2 press tour with PR Czar John Drake. In case you're interested in hearing me ramble on message:

* BritishGaming
* Virgin UK
* Boomtown
* GameSpot UK
* ...picked up by Kotaku
* nu.nl
* Play.tm misquoted me a fair bit, but they did a bunch of articles:
* ...on Rock Band 2
* ...on being misquoted on Harmonix's goal of player expression
* ...on what I'm working on now
* Eurogamer on Mannilow
* VideoGamer on music creation

A tale of three communities

2008-10-14T18:16:00.000-07:00

I've been kind of grating against this whole "hardcore vs casual gamer" distinction that keeps coming up, specifically on the hardcore side, because it's a very old school way of looking at things. Ten years ago, we had "hardcore gamers", which were people who were on the internet reading Blues News and downloading Quake maps, and it was all the same community.

Now, we've fragmented eighty kazillion ways to the point where the definition of "hardcore" is even broader than the definition of "casual". An example, I hear you ask?

---

Today, I handed off a chunk of my battle design duties to new design intern Grace. As part of the task, we had a mini coming out party on our three "hardcore" forums for "the hardcore" to say Hi and suggest new ideas for us to add into our battle schedule. The three we targeted were Something Awful, rockband.com, and ScoreHero.

The response from Something Awful was five pages of incredibly useful battles, with the occasional peppering of sarcasm and humour:

"Parenthetical Challenge:
Bang a Gong (Get It On)
Train in Vain (Stand by Me)
Snow (Hey Oh)
Charlene (I'm Right Behind You)
Come Out and Play (Keep 'Em Separated)
Pleasure (Pleasure)"

Is this hardcore? Not really, if anything it's more of a "highbrow" gamer view.

The response from rockband.com was 10 pages of battles. Naturally, a little more noise than SA, but definitely constructive and useful to battle development.

"Battles based on music from certain countries.
Of course, that means you need to get some Frenzal Rhomb, Men at Work, Regurgitator and Grinspoon into RB for the Aussie challenge.
Followed a week later by Aussie Chalenge #2 with Silverchair, AC/DC and Jet :-p"

Is this hardcore? I mean, this is our official forums, so by definition it's both our most casual and our most hardcore fans in one place. But I think in general these are our "casual hardcore" - if they were super hardcore they'd gravitate towards a gamer forum like SA or NeoGAF, or towards a dedicated game site like ScoreHero or NMA.

The response from ScoreHero, well, I'll just quote the first post from a moderator there:

"I think that before you churn out new challenges, you need to decide how to properly rank bands. PeridotWeapon made some great points here. I agree that ranking by Star Rating seems flawed. If yo watch my Literal Battle Solo Expert Guitar video, you'll see what he means when he says that stars start to crawl after the 6 star mark. I know you're looking for ideas for actual battles, but think the first thing that needs to be done is to make a way so that ties aren't so prevalent. Aside from streak battles, score is the way to go. If you want to give solo or less-than-full bands a chance to compete, then don't lump everyone into one leaderboard. Score by full band is probably the best way to rank bands, especially when you remove overdrive from the equation (most notes hit/fewest broken streaks will win- that's the best band, right?). "

Is this hardcore? Is this even fanboyism? I think this is a new subclass of "hardcore", the evangelical gamer. For the record, we make sure all of our "hardcore" content (which comes out every Wednesday) is score only, which makes this mainly a "hardcore complaining about casual content" post, but at the same time the hardcore are seeing all content - not just stuff targeted at them.

---

As press, I guess "gamers" are something you can lump together.

As a designer, all of these groups (and there are more than just the three we have here) have radically different goals and expectations when playing. It's not enough to just design content to satisfy each of these groups, but you also have to hide the content that they're not interested in. You either have to build the path of least resistance for each group so that it doesn't cross any other paths, or provide multiple layers of depth in the same mechanic ("finishing a song" vs "5 starring" vs "deployment paths/squeezing" is a great example of this in RB).

Okay, smoking jacket theorycrafting over, I promise.

(rockband.com) This week in Battle of the Bands

2008-10-14T06:58:00.000-07:00

One of the perks of being the Lead Designer on Rock Band 2 is that you can have final signoff on things like Battle of the Bands events. So, what better way to abuse that power by setting up a battle to throw myself a birthday party in Rock Band 2! Bonus: you're all invited!

The "Lead Designer Birthday Battle" kicks off on Friday for 24 hours! Play "Conventional Lover" with a bass player in your band. The best part is that we'll be giving away huge chunks of in-game money for any characters that decide to play.

Looking to play something less self-congratulatory? I'd recommend the "Expert Time Signature Battle". Consisting of songs that aren't in 4/4 or 3/4, it's a great way to show that you can count beyond one hand.

I'd also like to welcome HMXVegas to the Rock Band 2 Live Team! Vegas is going to be helping out with battle design, and we're really excited to have her on the design team here. Be sure to send her your awesome suggestions for battles!

-DanT

(rockband.com) BOTB Community Week

2008-10-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

(The new website has launched today, which means that I'm going to be shifting this post to be "Dan's pick for this week")

This week is the first week with community suggested battles! My favourite this week is the "Animal Hardcore Marathon", featuring Eye of the Tiger, Hungry Like the Wolf, Cool for Cats, Hammerhead, and March of the Pigs.

This is just the start of community-suggested battles. As long as you keep the suggestions coming, we'll keep putting them up for everybody to play! Thanks to Osteo, this battle opens on Wednesday.

There's also The Overlooked Song Battle, featuring "Cherry Bomb"! Like the description says, "Come on now, '70s all-girl punk band The Runaways have earned their due! Joan Jett and Lita Ford could beat the crap out of you if you say otherwise."

At best, you'll discover some great 70's girl punk. At worst, you'll be a very high ranking person on the battle leaderboards. Thanks to murfinator, this battle opens on Tuesday.

Rock Band 2 "Game With Developers" tomorrow!

2008-10-04T08:01:00.000-07:00

(Edit: It's over! Thanks for coming out and playing, everyone!)

Just a heads up that tomorrow afternoon I'll be playing in Microsoft's "Game with Developers" event as HarmonixDev1 . Come and play if you want to see me limp along on a bunch of songs!

The creators of Rock Band 2 are jumping into the LIVE Weekend, and they're ready to rock and roll with the Rock Band community. Look for the following gamertags on Sunday, October 5 between 2:00 – 5:00 P.M. Eastern Time (11:00 A.M. – 2:00 P.M. Pacific):

Dan Teasdale – HarmonixDev1
Caleb Epps – HarmonixDev2
Sylvain Dubrofsky – HarmonixDev3
Alex Gold – HarmonixDev4
Michael Lattiak – HarmonixDev5
Estevan (Milo) Martinez – HarmonixDev6
Matt Boch – HarmonixDev7
Dan Johnson – HarmonixDev8
Tom Brown – HarmonixDev9
Tom Peterson – HarmonixDev10
Jeff Cardin – HarmonixDev11
Colby Grenier – HarmonixDev12
Joe Pagliuca – HarmonixDev13
Ryan Griffin – HarmonixDev14
Jay Magrisso – HarmonixDev15

(rockband.com) Battle of the Bands, Week 3

2008-09-29T12:54:00.001-07:00

Week 3 is here!

* Monday:"Ramblin' Basslines"
* Tuesday: "Blood Sugar Sex Magik Battle" and "Three More Degrees..."
* Wednesday: "Guitarist/Frontman Battle"
* Thursday "Shooting Star Battle"
* Friday: "New Wave-Off"
* Saturday: "History of Metal"
* Sunday: "Tangled Up in Vocals"

Very soon, the new rockband.com will be up, which will contain a swank new interface for viewing upcoming battles! It'll also make these blog posts pretty redundant, so I'll probably change the format of this to a "Dan's Battle Pick" rather than a directory of upcoming content. It'll probably be more interesting then, too.

As usual, post your battle suggestions below. Next week you'll start to see some of your suggestions go live!

Twitter and stuff

2008-09-28T14:54:00.000-07:00

I have now joined the future and integrated Twitter into my social network shenannigans:

* I now use my Twitter feed, after a long standing ridicule of people who obsessively use it like Casey and Scott.
* I update my status via Twitterific
* Twitter now feeds my Facebook status update and the gadget thing on the side of this blog.

This completes the dragging of me into 2006.

(rockband.com) This week in Battle of the Bands

2008-09-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

This week in Battle of the Bands:

* Tuesday brings the "This Week in DLC Battle". Play "You're No Rock and Roll Fun", "Shoot the Runner" and "Bandages" in a single setlist!

* "The Hardcore Guitar Battle" lets hard and expert players prove their dominance on "Colony of Birchmen", "Battery", and "Peace Sells".

* "The Literal Battle" is exactly what it sounds like.

* The "Intensive Care Battle" is a touching story about ill people, featuring songs like "Sick, Sick, Sick" and "Vital Signs".

* The "Saturday Rap Battle" is all talkies, all the time. Rap your way to success in "So Watcha Want", "Give it Away" and "Testify".

* On Sunday, drummers get their chance in the spotlight with the "Drum Solo-off!"

PAX footage on Channel 10

2008-09-12T20:54:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's Channel 10 site has a quick RB2 interview with me at PAX if you're interested in hearing many on-message things being said.

Spore

2008-09-09T17:22:00.000-07:00

I'm about to start my first Spore session. Feel free to friend me if you have awesome creatures!

DanT's Spore Profile

(rockband.com) This week in Battle of the Bands

2008-09-09T13:53:00.001-07:00

Well, it's my last blog before Rock Band 2 comes out. It's been a fun ride filled with information, arm wrestling and sandwiches, but I'm glad you all stuck it out.

I realised that during this whole time, I didn't talk about the biggest feature in the game - Battle of the Bands! While we have a bunch of surprises that people will experience when they play a battle for the first time, here's a quick primer:

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I’m really excited about Battle of the Bands because it feels like a real battle of the bands competition – it’s not just four people playing against four other people.

We’re going to be uploading new daily and weekly battles every day, each of which have unique setlists and gameplay conditions. One day you might be playing an Expert Guitar Battle that disables overdrive, the next day it might be a family-friendly band battle that you can’t fail out on.

You have to battle through your friends list first, then once you're the king of your friends list you can battle against everyone in the world for the crown of "best band in the world". When you play the song, you'll be matched up with your nearest competition, and a Tug of War-style meter will show up in the middle to let you know how you're doing in real time.

This is essentially asynchronous multiplayer, kind of like what Spore does with its community aspects, and we think it provides a much more accessible and rewarding band multiplayer experience.

---

So, what am I going to be posting about now that the game will be out? This week in Battle of the Bands, that's what! Every week, we'll be posting a "best of the week" guide for the battles that are coming out, so that you can prepare yourself for competition.

This week's pick for battles, Launch Week Edition!
--------------------------------------------------

Between now and the end of the launch week, we have 19 battles opening! My picks are below.

* Did you somehow luck into getting a copy of the game before it launches on the 14th, and want to celebrate? In that case, you should jump into the "Late Night Rock Band Bash" on Friday - a Star battle with Pump it Up, The Middle, and Lump, all with no fail enabled.

* On Sunday from 12am to 9am, the "Break of Dawn Battle" goes live. Compete in the first official Rock Band 2 battle to prove that you're hardcore! The cool thing about this is that every band has a battle history, so by playing this battle you're essentially getting a badge of honor in your "Battle History" list to show that you were there not just on Day 1, but at the midnight launch.

* If you need your beauty sleep, you'll also have the "Launch Day Battle" and the "Rock Band 2 Week Battle" that you can compete in during the day or week, respectively.

--------------------------------------------------

We want to make sure that the Rock Band 2 Live Team is making the battles you want to play, so definitely leave your ideas for cool battles in the comments of these posts. Some cool future battles for inspiration:

- A "Stalker" battle with "One Way Or Another" by Blondie
- A "History of Metal" battle, with one metal song from each decade
- A "Six Degrees of Separation" battle, where we connect one band to another through songs available in Rock Band.

Sparked your interest? Post your battle ideas below!

Rock Band 2 TV Ad, 30 seconds

2008-09-05T18:08:00.001-07:00

There's a 60 second one too, but I don't think it has aired yet.

Interview with Heather and I about all things Rock Band

2008-09-05T16:58:00.000-07:00

While Heather and I were in Portland, we stopped off at Ground Kontrol for their Tuesday night Rock Band bash - and brought a dev kit with RB2 on it for them to play on!

Before they set up, we did an interview with some of the guys there, and it's gone live today.

Read it now!.

What have I done?!

2008-09-05T15:05:00.000-07:00

An offhanded comment about hardcore sandwich eating, and less than 24 hours later we have this:

(rockband.com) Secret Rock Band 2 feature announced!

2008-09-04T20:46:00.001-07:00

I recently recieved a request from a Rock Band fan that I'm allowed to anwser without checking with LL Cool Drake or the Viacom Lawyer Squad:

"I hope Rock Band 2 comes with a deli fresh ham sandwich, as I could certainly go for a deli fresh ham sandwich. At the rate you guys are going with feature requests I figure it's worth a shot."

Well, while we won't be including a deli fresh ham sandwich in the Rock Band 2 Special Edition box due to the inability to create sandwiches fresh at our retail partners, I can confirm here first that Rock Band 2 will support players eating their own deli fresh ham sandwiches during all songs on the Rock Band 2 disc, as well as all of the songs available on the Rock Band Music Store and songs that have been exported from the original Rock Band disc.

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Deli Sandwich Q&A:

Q: How will sandwiches work on "missing part" sandwiches such as open-face melts?
A: Extra care will be required in eating to make sure you don't stick your thumb into the sandwich.

Q: So, I can eat a deli sandwich on any song?
A: Technically, yes. Some songs will compliment sandwich eating (Cherry Bomb, Margaritaville), whereas other songs may provide sandwich eating challenges (March of the Pigs). It opens up new emergent eating choices, and we're proud to be pioneering this design ground with Rock Band 2!

Q: How can I trust someone that cheats in an arm wrestle?
A: I totally didn't cheat. Check out that video footage on Destructoid, my elbow is on the table the entire time I am using my crushing weight to win. I will admit, however, that I caught out good sported James Mouat with a thumb-wrestle "fast count". Point is, I'm your hookup for sandwich/rhythm gaming crossover.

Q: Will there be anything for the ScoreHero crowd vis-a-vis sandwiches?
A: I can't talk about anything right now, but I can give you a hint with three words: Cheeseburger in Paradise.

Q: This isn't innovation! TF2 did this already!
A: TF2's implementation is dramatically different to ours - for a start, theirs is a virtual sandwich which doesn't sate any hunger of the player, only that of their character. Sandwiches eaten during Rock Band 2 are as authentic as you can possibly get, and can be eaten at any time. Also, it has a W rather than a V.

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Post your questions below, and I'll do my best to answer them.

(rockband.com) PAX and Tour Challenges

2008-08-26T20:49:00.000-07:00

We'll be at PAX this week! If you're there, be sure to come and say hi to us at the booth, and/or come to our 90 minute panel of awesomeness.

On that topic: It has come to my attention however that "big name" gaming celebrities always make these outrageous claims and stunts in order to get press time from the gaming blogs. Therefore, as a D-list gaming celebrity who's trying to make sure that Team Harmonix isn't talking to an empty room on Saturday, I am making the following proclamations:

* I challenge Kotaku's Mike Fahey, Wired's Chris Kohler, and Destructoid's Nick Chester to an arm wrestle. Mike is allowed to substitute for Crecente if he can't make it, but in that case I'm allowed to take my elbow off the table and Brian isn't - Crecente looks like he works out, so I need any advantage I can get.

* I challenge 2K Boston's Ken Levine, Epic's Cliff Bleszinski, and Hothead Games' James Mouat to a thumb wrestle, to determine once and for all the title "Best Designer with a Right Thumb". If multiple designers accept the challenge, I will do 2v1.

* I challenge any members of the Guitar Hero: World Tour, SingStar, and Rock Revolution development teams to a manly hug/complement off. First person to pull away or stall on a compliment loses.

The only condition - the challenge needs to take place immediately after the "History of Harmonix" panel finishes up. If you don't show up, I win by default. If you've been served and want to bring it, then give me a yell ahead of time so that I can put myself into intensive arm/thumb/hug/compliment training.

And now, your regularly scheduled programming: Tour Challenges

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When we started developing Rock Band 2, we had a bunch of goals for progression:

* We wanted to update Solo Tour. Progression is an important part of playing the on-disc songs, but the whole "play a list of songs" is stale, and World Tour is more focused on exploration than progression.

* We wanted to include DLC into the campaign mode. At the end of the year we'll have over 500 songs for people to play, and we wanted to integrate it properly, not just as a "Downloaded Songs" list.

* We wanted to solve the problem of people getting stuck on one song and not progressing (Freyaism/Reaperism). Just because I suck on one song out of 84 doesn't mean I'm not good enough to play the final songs.

* We also wanted to make sure every song played during the progression was the best for that instrument. Singing "So Watcha Want" is an awesome experience, but playing bass on it isn't as good as playing some of the other bass songs. At the same time, everyone should be able to play every song - mode-exclusive songs suck.

After messing around with different ideas, we came up with Tour Challenges!

In the Tour Challenge mode, players play increasingly difficult sets of songs known as "Challenges", represented as your band's discography.

Unlike Solo Tour in Rock Band, Tour Challenges follow a tree structure rather than a linear path - beating a challenge unlocks multiple other challenges for you to beat. This way, you are never 'stuck' on a song when progressing, since they can jump around between various challenges.

Let's give a quick example. I start up Rock Band 2 for the first time on guitar (and with a friend on drums), and jump straight into tour challenges.

My first choice is to select the difficulty of the challenges that I want to play at. Since it's my first time, I only have the first tier of difficulty available to me: "Local Upstart". Jumping in, I see all of the "Local Upstart" challenges that are unlocked by default

Since I haven't played anything yet, I have four options available to
me:
* "Band Warmups" - which is the 3 best easy band songs in the game
* "Fender Warmups" - which is the 3 best easy guitar songs in the game
* "Drum Warmups" - ...3 best easy drum songs...

* "Vocal Warmups" - ...noticing a pattern here?

There are also some locked ones that we'll see more of in a minute.

Now, since I have a guitar and drum band, it means I can't play the "Vocal Warmups", since I need a vocalist to play those. I can, however, play the guitar, drum, and band challenges. Yes, that means you can have a friend on drums still help you out when you're playing the "guitar-specific" challenges! Let's play the guitar challenge!

Pretty simple, right? Well, if we beat this, we'll get three more challenges! Let's do it!

Like I mentioned in my last blog, you can pause and save your progress any time. So, if you need to leave before "New Kid in School", you can just save your position in the set and come back to it later.

Not this time though - we played through and won!

Note that we unlocked three new challenges that we can play in, just by playing one challenge!
* "The Guitar Apprentice" is the next level up of the "Guitar" challenges.
* "The Bass Apprentice" is the first challenge of the "Bass" campaign! Yep, you can go through and play a full bass campaign!
* "Warmup Marathon Part 1" is the first marathon challenge, and it's for people who want to play the game the old way - if you follow the "Warmup Marathon" path, you'll play all 84 disc songs in a single path. Note that you don't have to play these at all, because Tour Challenges lets you pick and choose the songs and challenges you play to get up to the top.

If I had any easy DLC on my console, these challenges would also show up!

Oh, and hey, I've unlocked another tier! I now have 15 challenges I can choose between to decide how I'm going to progress. They aren't just instrument based, either. Take this screenshot from a few blogs back...

* "'00s Hits" are the 5 best songs from the '00s in one challenge. Playing this unlocks...
* "Infinite '00s Challenge". This is EVERY song that was released this decade, regardless of whether it was on disc or DLC.

The cool thing about this is that it grows and shrinks with your library. If I beat this challenge, then buy "Girls Who Play Guitars" by Maximo Park, the challenge acts as if I saved and resumed just before that song was added. Essentially, I can re-complete this challenge just by playing that song.

This same system also applies for genre - you could have a "New Wave Challenge" that opens up into an "Infinite New Wave Challenge".

* "Touring Harmonix Bands Challenge" is one of the three challenges that the Harmonix Bands are in in Tour Challenges. We've broken them up into three categories: Breaking (which includes bands like Speck), Touring (which includes bands that are on tour right now, like Bang Camaro), and Impossible (which includes the abolutely ridiculous song "Visions" by Abnormality).

* "The Who Challenge" is a DLC artist challenge. This appeared because I have some Who DLC on my Xbox (which, frankly, you all should have).
New DLC challenges show up in this order:
- If you've purchased three or more songs from an album, an album challenge shows up ("Screaming For Vengeance Album Challenge")
- If you've purchased three or more songs from an artist, an artist challenge shows up ("The Nine Inch Nails Challenge")
- If you've purchased a pack of multiple different artists, a pack challenge shows up ("(Arguably) Punk Pack 01 Challenge")

* "Harmonix Rock Band Tracks Challenge" is a challenge comprised of all the Harmonix bands from the Rock Band 1 disc. When you export your Rock Band 1 disc, challenges are added into Rock Band 2 for those songs, based on the groupings that they had in Rock Band 1.

Oh, and one last thing - Tour Challenges give away "Ultimate" outfits if you play a specific path all the way to the end. These outfits are things that are so amazing, that we couldn't attach a price to them or justify selling them in the store.

One that we've talked about is the live snake, which you get for beating one of the Impossible Tour Challenges:

One that we haven't talked about is the assless chaps. I won't spoil what you get this for.

(rockband.com) Early Blog this week!

2008-08-20T20:50:00.000-07:00

By popular forum request, I present some interesting Rock Band 2 song
statistics! Hooray!

First Songs
* For all but vocals, the first song in the game is "Eye of the Tiger".
This is because it is awesome.
* For vocals, it's "Pretend We're Dead".
* The easiest Harmonix song is "Conventional Lover" by Speck. Honestly
though, it's not about how easy it is, it's how you play it.

Final Songs
* "Painkiller" is the final band and guitar song by difficulty.
* "Panic Attack" is the final drum and bass song by difficulty.
* "Tangled Up in Blue" is the final vocal song by difficulty.
* The hardest Harmonix song is "Visions" by Abnormality.

Full Ranking List
* ...is going to be coming out through the gaming press very soon. Stay
tuned!

Other Stats
* The shortest song is "Hello There" by Cheap Trick, with a running
time of 1:37. Coincidentally, it was also the most played song at E3.
* While "Teen Age Riot" has the most guitar notes at 3,316 notes, the
majority are chords. "Panic Attack" has the most individually strummed
or HOPO'ed notes, with 2,767 - "Teen Age Riot" only has 1,824.
* As of right now the highest scoring band in Rock Band 2 is "Dogs of
the A.M.S.", a band comprised of OXM reviewers. Nice work, OXM!
* The band with the highest amount of fans, however, is "Empty
Theatrics", a band comprised of GameInformer reviewers. Do I sense an
impending Battle of the Bands face-off?

And finally, to the people in the NeoGAF thread who were wondering why I
don't post there - I'd love to post on your forum, but the admins
haven't approved me to post. If you have any questions, you can post
them here in the meantime and I'll try and work them into some blog
posts.

Next week, PAX!

(rockband.com) Q&A, part 2

2008-08-16T20:50:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this short blog from home, since I'm taking some vacation time this week. Is this a good sign for how close Rock Band 2 is to completion? Maybe!

Besides sitting at home relaxing to the Penny Arcade game, Braid and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, I'm also preparing for a bunch of external stuff leading up to Rock Band 2's release:

* A bunch of us will be at the Boston Gameloop next weekend, talking about Rock Band 2 development. Unfortunately the first one is industry-only, but hopefully a good turnout will open it up for everyone else in Boston. If you're in the industry, you should definitely show up and hear us ramble about the game.

* Another bunch of us are going to Leipzig. Good for those people! If you're able to go, you should go!

* The more attractive and awesome people are going to PAX! We're going to have a similar setup for Rock Band 2 to what we had last year, but the cool thing is that we've been given a 90 minute panel to talk about Harmonix and everything we've done in the last 12 years or so. We'll have a wide spread of people there (me included) so if you have any questions to ask us that we've been avoiding on the forums, this is the place to ask! If you can't make it but have questions that you want me to try and slip whoever is MC'ing, then post in the comments and I'll see what I can do. We may even have a special announcement or two!

* A bunch of us may or may not be hanging out on the night of release to say hello to fans. We're still figuring out what retailers are doing what, but it's a safe bet that if there's a store near Boston that's doing a midnight release, we'll be there. More details soon...

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More Q&A:

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Q: "How does the autocalibrate work for surround sound systems? Or will it work by putting the
guitar up to any one of the 6 speakers?"

A: Ideally, you'd hold it up to one of the front speakers just to be safe, but yeah - just hold it up to the speaker and press the green fret, and you're done!

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Q: "so you can play [automatically generated] Challenges, without having all the songs in the Challenge, ie The Who Challenge, without the entire pack (But why would you not have the entire pack?)"

A: That's right! There's a bunch of reasons why you might not have all of the songs by an artist that have been released:
* You might have bought them as singles instead of a big pack (for example, you buy 4 Who tracks instead of the 12-pack, then buy another track)
* They might be mixed across multiple sources (for example, you could have a Rush Challenge with "Tom Sawyer" from RB1, "The Trees" from RB2, and "Working Man" as a DLC track)

Basically, the setlist for the challenge will be automatically determined by the songs that you have on your console. You add more songs for that category, artist, or album, and they'll be added to the challenge!

-----

Q: "Is there going to be a way to see who owns what songs on the song list in RB2? It's a pain sometimes when you find out that you've bought a song, and one of your other/2/3 friend[s] doesn't have this song. You don't know who to yell at and force them to download songs outside of their genre and belittle them."

A: Yep! If you select the song in the song select list, you'll be given a list of players that don't have the song so you can guilt them into purchasing more songs.

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Q: "Another small question, but I won't ask this one every time, but if and when you go over Battle of the Bands I just want to know if most if not all challenges you will be able to do by yourself. Like if you have a solo band, will you be able to take your solo singer and do challenges like Any Way You Sing It, and then go to your solo guitaristand do the Ace of Spades Streak Battle."

A: Yep - we'll have battles geared all the way from full-band family friendly to single instrument hardcore rock-offs. On top of that, we have different metrics besides score that we can use to level the playing field regardless of skill level or number of players. Also, any character can play any instrument, so your solo singer can also be a solo guitarist just by changing your controller.

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Q: HMX does RB2 have a high score list for any given song. Local I mean; not like a leaderboard.

A: It sure does! RB2 will record your scores both locally and online, with the added bonus that it will update your online scores with your offline local scores when you reconnect to Rock Central.

(rockband.com) Rock Band 2 Small Stuff

2008-08-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

We've got a bunch of really good "big" things coming up through the
press, but I realised today that nobody has talked about the little
things that make Rock Band 2 a really polished and fun experience! So,
let's check out some of the small stuff that most reviewers will miss:

New Manual Calibration

Sure, our new autocalibration is great and means that you don't have to
do anything to get a perfect number besides "hold up your guitar", but
what if you don't want to buy the new Fender Stratocaster? Well, we've
made revisions for you too!

There's no more trying to line up a click with a target - just strum
when you hear clicks, then strum when the metronome hits the ends, and
you'll have an accurate number. It's definitely simpler than Rock Band's
system, and it produces far more accurate results, although I still
highly recommend autocalibrating since it'll give you a perfect number.

Matchmaking
We've completely overhauled Matchmaking to "party safe" the game as well
as support some cool things for online world tour.

The biggest win is that you can't just mash into a slot and past
matchmaking, or mash out of matchmaking. When you're able to progress,
you need to press START to continue past the matchmaking screen. Hitting
Green will just help you make a noise to annoy those around you. Plus,
if you're mashing back, you'll be required to confirm that you want to
leave the session and kick everyone out.

The cooler part of this is that in Online World Tour, people can join your band
whenever you're preparing to rock! So, if you're in the Rock Shop and
your friend wants to join, you don't have to do anything - they'll just
select your band name and instantly join your session, without you
having to go back to Matchmaking and send an invite.

Tour Challenge Pausing and Resuming
We'll be talking more about the Tour Challenges incredibly soon, but
there's one cool feature that most people will miss when they're playing
through the first time.

Say I'm in the middle of a five song set, but I can't finish the third
song. Or, even worse, I can finish it but I have to leave the house!
Whatever shall I do?!

Well, you can save your progress in the set and come back to it later!
You'll be able to tell which sets you're in progress with a subtle
finish that we add to those albums:

This also applies to any dynamic challenges, like "The Who Challenge" in
this screenshot that exists because of my purchasing of some Who tracks.
In this screenshot I've finished the challenge, but if I was to then
purchase a new The Who song, this challenge would change to "In
Progress" and I'd need to play the new song to finish it again!

In this screenshot, see if you can pick out any of the other Tour
Challenge stuff that we'll talk about more later! There's at least two
things that you may not have already known.

Stand-Ins

One of the biggest feature requests we recieved was asking for the
ability to assign the people that played on stage with you when you
weren't playing in a full band. We've added this to Rock Band 2, and
called them "Stand-Ins".

Take this screenshot here. "Bikini Tiny Little Monkeys" is my band that
I'm using to play through on Rock Band 2 right now, and I've created a
bandmate called "Megan" that I play with. However, I wanted to make
another character that is always on vocals, since I don't like it when
my vocalist always changes.

So, I created "Carrie", then assigned her as my Stand-in vocalist! Now,
whenever I play, both Megan and Carrie are on stage rocking out
together! If someone wanted to come and sing with me for real, Carrie
would take a back seat to the new band member.

Profile Changes

Just a couple of quick things:

We now track a Career Score (which is disc only), and a Total Score
(which includes DLC)

We also want to encourage as people creating band logos as possible,
since they represent your band in modes like Battle of the Bands. What
better way than achievement points!

While we're on achievments: Yes, we know that the Tug of War and Score
Duel streak achievements are a pain to get. We've drastically changed
how we're handling this in Rock Band 2. Maybe we'll be talking about the
rest of our achievements very soon somewhere?

-DanT

Oh, and one more thing:

(rockband.com) E3 Round-up

2008-07-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

Last week, a troupe of Harmonix staff descended on the LA Convention Center to show everyone Rock Band 2. Frankly, we were blown away by the response - we were nominated for a swath of "Best of Show" awards, which is insane considering the strength of titles that I'll be lining up for on Day 1 like Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead.

(Derek Enos, Harware Engineer, shows off our nominee badges from IGN)

Unfortunately, you couldn't make it. That's okay though, I'll summarise the half-hour presentation that we gave to press during E3!

* We showed off the new Quickplay interface that I detailed out last week.

* We also detailed out the hardware options. While we've covered a lot of the big features in the instruments (autocalibration in the new guitars, expandability in the new drums), there were some specifics that came up during our demos:
- You can plug in three additional cymbals and an additional pedal to give you the same amount of inputs as a real drum kit.
- For those of you who've moved kits around, the kick pedal no longer falls off when you move the kit!
- There are also guidelines engraved onto the drum legs to help you perfectly balance your kit.
- The ION kit uses standard 1/4in jacks to plug into the Rock Band brains that come with the kit. This means that you can plug these surfaces into any other real drum gear, like the Alesis DM5 that we had on stage at E3.

* Battle of the Bands is our flagship feature in Rock Band 2. This isn't just 4v4 - in the words of PR Coordinator John Drake, "four versus four is what I like to call a band sissyfight in the parking lot after a gig". Instead, this is your band battling against your entire friends list, then once you're the #1 friend, the entire world!
- We're going to be adding new content to Battle of the Bands daily.
- Battles are only up for a certain amount of time - from a few hours up to multiple weeks.
- We have different ways to judge battles, like "longest streak" or "highest star count"
- We have full control of special rules like "No Overdrive" or "No Saviors"
- When you're playing, we show a meter kind of like the Tug of War meter that shows who's winning at any moment in time.
- If a friend's band beats you while you're offline, rockband.com will send you an email letting you know that you've been beaten and that you need to reclaim your position!
- I'm going to write a blog post about this later on. Stay tuned!

(The members of "Friendly Sword Masters" prepare to battle against our evil nemesis "Spaaaaaace Hooker!")

* We talked about Tour Challenges but, again, I'm saving a lot of the details for another blog post.

* World Tour has a bunch of changes for Rock Band 2
- You can now hire staff to help your band! For example, you can hire an accountant to get more money or pay a street team to get you more fans!
- We've added a new feature called "Opportunity Gigs". Did you see the footage of Everlong with the trippy colors going off in the background? This was an Opportunity Gig where a music video director came up to the band and asked to record a music video with the band for more fans!
- You can now play it with 1-4 players, where any of those players is local or online
- You can choose the lineup of your band members that aren't playing. Want to make the ultimate nerd-metal band? Just make three characters and assign them to your band, and they'll show up even when you're the only one playing!
- Again, there's a bunch of big tweaky stuff that I'll save for another blog post, but the one I'll sneak out now to keep everyone happy - we've reworked how the fan system operates. There are no more times where you'll be blocked from getting fans, for example!

* We touched on the Drum Trainer and Jukebox Mode, but, yet again, bigger blog material.

* We have a new screen called "Game Modifiers". This screen has a bunch of options that allow you to change your game experience! The ones that were revealed at E3 were:
- "No Fail Mode". This disables failing out of a game, in case you want to play with people who aren't skilled enough to beat easy yet. Since we don't want it to be an exploit online, we also disable saving and achievements.
- "Breakneck Speed". By popular demand, we've added an option that increases the scroll speed of all tracks. Since we consider this a personal taste issue and not a game-changing exploit, we don't disable anything.

It was a pretty gruelling three days of interviews and parties, but the sheer amount of excitement from everyone who checked out the game was overwhelming. Now, we just need to finish the game!

(Kasson Crooker, Project Lead on Rock Band 2, takes one for the team to do an interview for Fuel TV)

And the one more thing: I played the Endless Setlist 2 last week. It took us 10 hours to beat all 84 songs on Expert.

(rockband.com) Inside Rock Band 2 Quickplay

2008-07-10T20:53:00.000-07:00

We're starting off small this week and checking out the new "Select Song" screen. Compared to Battle of the Bands or Online World Tour it's a less expansive feature, but the changes to quickplay greatly improve the Quickplay experience.

Let's check out what people will be seeing at E3 this week after they've checked out awesome stuff like Battle of the Bands, Music Videos and Tour Challenges - the Quickplay Song Select Screen:

So, as you can tell, we've used the Rock Band Music Store as a basis for our new screen. We've also added a bunch of new feaures based on the feedback we've recieved, as well as our own personal wants for easy song selection in Quickplay and "Make a Setlist" in our World Tour campaign mode:

SONG INFO AND DIFFICULTY NUMBERS
As well as the nice album art and extended information about a song, we also show difficulty numbers!

This is per instrument, as well as the standard band difficulty ordering! This way, you can tell at a glance whether you'll need to drop down a difficulty level or not.

SETLIST CREATION

We actually have a bunch of different ways that you can create a setlist in Quickplay, all of them really easy to use:

The first one is a new option at the top of the setlist called "[Make a Setlist]". This works in a similar way to "Make a Setlist" in our World Tour campaign mode, however you can specify the number of songs you play!

If you just want to play some songs with one button press, we also let you play tiers as a setlist! With this, you play every song that is under that particular heading.

SHORTCUTS AND SORTING

The shortcut menu has been massively beefed up since Rock Band. If you tap the "filter" button, you'll instantly jump to the next tier. However, if you hold it down, you'll get a navigatable menu of tiers!

This is especially handy for some of our new filtering modes, like "Sort by Location". If you want to get to your new DLC as quickly as possible, you can just move instantly to the "Downloaded Songs" tier.

We still have all of the sorting categories from the original Rock Band, but they've been tuned a bit. For example, if you sort by artist, the songs inside that artist will have subheadings that sort by album - which, yes, can be selected if you want to play that album as a setlist in Quickplay.

ONLINE SUPPORT
Naturally, all of this is supported for online bands too, but we've also added a "Round Robin" selection method so that everyone playing has a chance to pick a song. No more having to deal with leaders hogging the limelight.

QUICKPLAY SPECIFIC MATCHMAKING FEATURES
We also now have a selection of "Session Musicians" that you can pick in Quickplay if you want to pick a character without spending time creating them!

This is on top of all of the other new matchmaking enhancements, which I'll cover later!

SCORING

As you may have heard, we replaced the Solo Tour in Rock Band with Tour Challenges in Rock Band 2, which is a non-linear progression campaign mode. But what if you still really want to play all 84 songs in a linear list? Or even more so, what if you want to play all 200+ songs currently released in a linear campaign?

Well, one of the ways you can do this is in Quickplay! Whenever you play a song, regardless of mode*, we'll record your highest score and show it on the quickplay screen. Even better, this score is recorded both locally and online - so if you're playing without an internet connection, you can still record your highest scores, view them in the Leaderboards section of the game, and have them upload when you reconnect to Rock Central.

* There's an exception here for some Battle of the Bands events, because of a gameplay modifier that changes how scoring, streaks and overdrive works. More on that later.

---------------------

This week's Q&A Question:

Q: "RE: DRUMS AND ANNOUNCED CYMBALS
I understand the optional cymbals are just secondary inputs for the existing pads, but what about during fills and the "drum trainer" modes? Will those two things recognize the cymbals as unique inputs or will every part of RB2 just recognize the cymbal attachments as secondary pads?" - babywolf

A: While they're mapped to the same colors for the note charts, the Drum Trainer and fills in-game treat these surfaces are unique - hitting the yellow cymbal triggers a hi-hat, and hitting the yellow pad plays a tom. Same goes for all the inputs on the Ion kit and other third-party kits in development.

------------------------

So that's the new Song Select list. You might not think it reading this blog, but this was one of the smaller features in Rock Band 2. Things like Tour Challenges and Battle of the Bands are absolutely massive, and I think you're going to be blown away by how much depth there is once you see them.

Oh, and for one more thing, here's a teaser for Tour Challenges: some art from two of the challenges you can play:

(rockband.com) Q&A Responses, Part 1

2008-07-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

I wrote up this big post and took a lot of screenshots about one of our new features, and realised that I couldn't show it just yet because it relies on songs - and we hadn't officially announced any yet when I sent this off for approval. Awk-ward.

So, NEXT week you'll see that blog post, which will be good because I will be at E3 and usually wouldn't have time to do anything but a photoblog.

In the meantime, I've gone through the questions below and answered the ones that I'm allowed to talk about. Onto the questions!

---

Q: "If your Rock Band 2 instruments are better, if I wanted to switch disc over to play Run to the Hills or something can I use the new instruments?" - quinaking

A: Yes, all Rock Band instruments work on all Rock Band games for that platform, as well as any other music games that adhere to the controller standards.

---

Q: "Will there be any improvements on vocals? Will there still be talky parts, and, if so, will they be fixed or easier to hit than they were in RB1?" - Lady Sia..

A: Yes, on multiple fronts. We've improved the balance for pitched vocals, and completely rewritten the non-pitched talky detection. Rock Band 2 has drastically more reliable talky parts.

---

Q: "Well, I'm going to go on record that this "limited time XBOX360 exclusivity" is total bull crap. Who does this benifit?" - killerew..

A: This benefits both gamers and Harmonix. Microsoft have been awesome in supporting us and have actually helped out on some of these things by visiting us and working hand-in-hand on new platform features. They've been a great partner on everything from development to marketing, and some of the features in the game would not have been possible without them.

As well as this, the other platforms are coming out really soon after the Xbox 360 launch. Trust me, if you're an other platform owner, you'll be surprised at how little you have to wait.

---

Q: "I was wondering if you could create a code or a option to shut off the vocal pitch meter? Singing the song and making it "your own" would be a great idea and make an interesting addition to the game!!" - jd506

A: I can't talk about specific features until E3, but I think you'll be very happy with one of the new features in RB2 :)

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Q: "Could you find Europe or Australia on a map? Only kidding. After the flamefest of the last European release hopefully you'll be more eager to talk about why there is a delay and such forth. So, why is there a delay and how long will it be?"

A: Trust me, I complain daily to everyone here about the release date in Australia (my home country). As soon as we can announce dates in other territories outside the US we will. Stay tuned for more info about this at E3! The window will be smaller this time around.

---

Q: "Cant wait for E3 and Harmonix's juicy details on Rock Band 2!" - Pamp

A: Me too! It means I can start posting screenshots and in-depth stuff.

As usual, if you have questions, post them below.
-DanT

Oh, and one more thing for people having issues getting gold stars: The gold star score threshold is now easier to achieve in Rock Band 2. No more cursing at impossible deploy paths!

(rockband.com) Let there be Rock Band 2!

2008-06-30T20:54:00.000-07:00

Hi rockband.com!

My name is Dan Teasdale, and I'm the lead designer on Rock Band 2. Along with Sylvain Dubrofsky (senior designer) and Casey Malone (designer), we're the design team that's slaving over a hot keyboard to get Rock Band 2 into your hands very soon.

Needless to say, we're really excited that we can finally talk about Rock Band 2. It's a true expansion of the platform, and a realisation of our goals to produce the most authentic band experience available.

A lot of the changes that we've been working on are directly influenced by the wish list that you have all been posting to. As well as improving everything in Rock Band that we felt could be improved, we've introduced some exciting features that'll have people playing as bands with their music collection in fun and new ways. I'll be talking about these over the next few weeks.

Naturally, all of your purchased Rock Band DLC will work in Rock Band 2, and all of your Rock Band instruments will still work (although you might want to buy the new instruments anyway when you see our improvements). We are totally committed to ensuring that Rock Band is a music platform that you can enjoy with friends for years to come, and not just another music game.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be talking about life during development of RB2, as well as revealing some of the details to RB2 that get glossed over in press previews. If you have anything specifically that you have questions about, please post in the comments! I can't promise I'll be able to get my answers past the kind and friendly PR and Community team, but I'll do my best!

-DanT

State of the Band - Software Update Announcement

2008-03-20T20:46:00.000-07:00

Hi! I’m Dan T (HMXspraynwipe), and I’m a senior designer here at Harmonix. I’m glad to announce that the Rock Band team has finalized a software update for Rock Band on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 that not only fixes some of the common issues we’ve been reading about on rockband.com, but also introduces a cool new feature!

In this latest software update, you’ll find:

[LIST]
[*] [B] (New!) Music Store[/B]: Rock Band now has a new feature that lets you preview and purchase songs from within the game! Accessible from the main menu, the Music Store lets you view, purchase and sort all available music based on various categories, view album art, listen to song previews, and check out extended information about the song like difficulty for each instrument.

[*] [B]Revised Fan Caps[/B]: To allow Easy, Medium, and Hard players to progress further in the Band World Tour, we’ve increased the number of fans that you can earn before hitting the cap. Easy players can now travel across the Atlantic, Medium players have a wider range of venues they can play at, and Hard players on the Xbox 360 are now able to unlock the “One Million Fans” achievement.

[*] [B]More diverse songs in Band World Tour[/B]: If you’ve ever cursed about having to play “Say it Ain’t So” or a Metallica track multiple times in the same hour, then you’ll be glad to know that we’ve tracked down and fixed the issues that triggered these very repetitive moments in Band World Tour.

[*] [B] Improved phoneme recognition[/B]: We’ve improved the detection and scoring for phoneme recognition. If you had trouble on songs like “Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld” or “Blitzkrieg Bop”, you should have an easier time beating these songs now.

[*] [B]Microphone Latency on PlayStation 3 improved[/B]: Our awesome team of audio programmers has found some optimizations that reduce microphone latency on the PlayStation 3 in certain situations.

[*] [B]Xbox 360 Band Logos are now visible through Xbox LIVE[/B]: An issue with parental controls stopped band logos from being visible over Xbox LIVE. With this update, you can now view all of the awesome band logos that people around the world have created!

[*] [B]Faster loading of downloadable content[/B]: Not only is the loading speed faster, but this information is now cached so that this loading time is a “once only” wait rather than something that happens every time you turn on the game.
[/LIST]

Updating any game is something that takes a lot of effort to do – not only do engineers, artists, production and designers all have to be involved at some point, but each change has to go through a rigorous Quality Assurance pass to make sure that it doesn’t introduce any new issues (like corrupting old save data, for example). After we’re happy with the software update, we then pass it on to Microsoft and Sony, who each have their own rigorous testing and certification processes. The entire process can take months for a simple day’s worth of fixing!

Because of this, we’re very aware that there are features that the community has requested that aren’t addressed in this software update. I want to make it very clear that we’re listening to all of your requests, and actively want to get these features onto the Rock Band platform in the future – but when we do add them, we also want them to be 100% perfect, and not rushed just to make it into any specific software update.

Lastly, and most importantly, thanks for being an awesome community! There are changes in this software update that wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the well-reasoned and polite attitude that most of the members on rockband.com have, and I’m really proud not only of the work that we’ve put into Rock Band, but also of the work that HMXSean, HMXJohnlok, Apples, and the rest of the rockband.com team have put in to maintain this great place for Rock Band fans to hang out in.

Have fun!
-DanT

2007-12-06T13:30:00.000-08:00

"I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split."

Kurt Vonnegut quoted in "The War Between Writers and Reviewers," New York Times Book Review (6 January 1985).

Episodic Content soapboxing

2007-11-29T10:37:00.000-08:00

One of the email interviews I'm involved in popped the question about episodic content. I thought it was an interesting question with a very soapboxey response, so I'm republishing it here:

"As a developer in general, do you think it's difficult for video games as a popular medium to keep up with more reactionary media -TV, movies, pop music - due to lengthy development cycles? It's hard to be timely when a game takes two years to make, versus the opposite extreme, a talk show which is written, rehearsed, played out, edited and aired all in the same day."

I think a lot of the problem is people trying to make games fit into models that other media use, like TV and movies, instead of discovering the model that works for game development and design.

With linear short-form media like TV, it's almost compulsory to pump out content on a regular basis to keep people interested, just because it has almost no reusability. You're not going to sit down and watch the same episode of "How I Met Your Mother" every day or two with your friends, because you've sucked out the goodness on the first (or second, if you're hardcore) viewing.

With games, we have the opportunity to build these experiences that have much broader reusability. I think the real focus is making sure that developers grow these titles with content that fits, like tournaments, new features through title updates, and especially affordable or sponsored downloadable content.

For single player centric only titles, it comes down to also designing the mechanic and narrative to allow players to participate in a world rather than just crafting some linear narrative that people won't want to sit through again. Mass Effect is a great example of this, while there's a critical path there's also a big fat universe out there that people actively want to go and explore after "beating" the game.

Hard Knocks Lesson #3: Check your GM

2007-10-29T13:59:00.000-07:00

No, seriously.

Yes, even after sending out the build, get your publisher to send you a copy of the disc they're sending to get pressed. Get them to send you one of the first discs off the line as well.

There's some hilarious and not so hilarious stories, all of them dealing with a complete failure between a developer submitting the build and the publisher sending off the disc for pressing. In the last 10 years, I have yet to work on a title where this has gone off perfectly.

One of them is a PC title I can talk about, since the publisher is no longer in business.

We were doing the usual thing of finishing the US PC build first, then sorting out EFGIS a few weeks later. We ship off the US build at the start of the month, take a few days off, then get cranking on the the EFGIS build. About a couple of days before our shelf date, we get a bug from publisher QA that the EFGIS build goes out of sync in multiplayer with the US build.

This is scary. So, we check here with our US final build and our EFGIS build, and the only difference is in our localized text and audio - the exe and data is all in sync, which means there is nothing being sent that could throw either client out of sync.

After a day or so of head scratching, the project lead decides to ask the publisher for their US build, you know, just to make sure they're on the right build. They insist they're using the final build, and send us an ISO of the final disc.

After receiving it in the morning, we install it and see that it's from a week before GM. You know, the build with last minute crash bugs and without the last minute tweaks we slaved over.

We head to lunch, and bemoan the fact that our publishers are incompetent jerks who can't even manage to copy the right build onto a bloody disc. We laugh and make comments of "oh well, at least it wasn't the build two weeks before". We're sad that what people are going to play isn't perfect, but there's nothing we can do - after all, they've printed 50,000 units so far.

We get back from lunch to find that this disc was forged in the depths of hell. After getting out-of-sync issues off the same disc, we find out that:

The installer on the root of the disc is the GM minus 7 days build. This is installed by running install.exe manually.
There's a directory on the disc called "autoplay" for the autoplay code. In that directory, is another copy of the game - the GM build minus 20 days (essentially, our beta build plus two weeks). The autoplay installs this build.
GM minus 20 days is an unencrypted version of our game data
GM minus 20 days includes our in-house custom tools for data packing, localization, mesh exporting - pretty much our entire custom toolchain.

Luckily for us (and unluckily for our publisher), shipping our in-house tools is a breach of contract. Lots of calls are made. Many people who make money off other people who make money off us get mad.

Somewhere, there is a landfill that contains 50,000 copies of the frankenbuild.

Hard Knocks Lesson #2a and b: TCR/TRCs

2007-10-29T13:44:00.000-07:00

No matter how well you plan or how early you start prepping for certification, you'll always come across horrible TCR/TRC issues that require work within a month of your GM candidate. It's even odds that they'll be saving or naming issues.

The number of TCR/TRC's you'll get waived is directly proportional to how big a title you're shipping. Multiply by 3 if you're first party, Multiply by 0.3 if you're dealing with Sony.

Hard Knocks Lesson #1: Launch Screenshots

2007-10-29T13:38:00.000-07:00

No matter how many screenshots you send out after you announce your title, blogs and other press sources are guaranteed to only use the first 3-5 screenshots, even after you ship. Hell, your marketing department will probably slap them on the box if you're unlucky enough too.

Yes, even that shot, with the horrible bloom and intersecting geometry that you fixed a month after you sent it out. Yes, even though you've sent 100 other more beautiful shots since then.