101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

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

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.

Eyeball Pics (science!)

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!

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

(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..

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