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?"

"Casey Malone" RBN Source Files

Hi!

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



I was not proud.

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

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

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

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

Download here!

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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