Labcoats and Design: A Clarification

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

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

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

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:

1. Many people will be drunk or asleep at 9am, making this room harder to fill
   
2. 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!

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


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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

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?