The Road to GDC

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

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.