PAX and you! (or more specifically, me)

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

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)

Rock Band 3 at E3 press

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.

(rockband.com) Welcome to Rock Band 3

(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

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

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?"