HMXChrisCanfield’s Comments

RockBand Design Philosophies: These are the overarching design goals we had in mind while making Rock Band. At least, I think these were the design goals. Other people may have other opinions.

^ Real Rock. Nothing cliched. There is just something about waking up in a pool of your own vomit that feels cliche and fake. On the other hand, getting a 1 person motel room and sneaking the entire band and support crew in there is real. Landing a recording contract and getting rich is cliche. Getting recorded with a tiny local record company and hearing yourself on college radio for the first time is real. Writhing groupies is cliche. That one strange-but-nice guy who shows up to every gig your band plays is real. This is why you won't find The Statue of Liberty plastered across our New York venues... that's not what it is like to gig in New York.

^ Real, sometimes ugly band experiences. We want players to argue about who isn't pulling their weight, who saved who, whether they should do a gig in San Francisco instead of LA, etc. We wanted to have it all... even the nasy real-life interactions of bickering and kicking people out. Basically anything we could do to increase player interactions, we did.

Even in gameplay mechanics this was at the forefront. For example, we tried unified streaking, but with 4 players going the streaks came and went so fast that nobody had any idea what was going on. Unified score and an Overdrive multiplier achieved the same thing more effectively, while giving players something to argue / cheer about. We tried a simultaneous fate (1 person fails = everybody fails), but we got more interaction mileage out of giving players the ability to save other players. The band is one unit, but the interesting part is all about the interactions between instruments and players.

^ Deep customization of the experience. We wanted to give the players control over everything that mattered in the life of their band, from logos / signage to unified look to how they choose to go through the world. This, too, helps heighten people's investments in their band and their character.

^ Fun single player experience. If you're flying solo, you should still have a great time with the solo tour. Not all of the focus was on multiplayer. We played single player obsessively; adding solos, etc to fill out the experience. We also brought on a lot of online options to let those solo players still go on and interact with other players.

^ Grandmother effect - simple enough that a random grandmother can play it, deep enough that people can get hooked. You'll notice it is actually really difficult to fail out on Easy. We literally had testers bring in their non-game-playing parents and grandparents to come and play for us, and we learned a lot about people's abilities and thresholds.

One of my pet peeves with testing is when developers grab random people off the street for usability testing, but put them through the tutorial first. *Nobody* goes through the tutorial first in real life, especially not when everyone is sitting around the big screen after Thanksgiving. This is not to say that we didn't test the tutorials, but I made darned sure to drop a lot of clueless people in front of the game. And you know what? Once we added the pop-up help system, they did fine. Pulling people into the game should be as easy as pulling them in front of the TV.

^ Ultimately, the focus is on the music. There were a lot of mechanics that we talked about doing but didn't, because they didn't fit specifically with music making. We added solos, big rock endings, freestyle phrases, non-pitched scoring, and a bunch of other stuff because they made musical sense. We studiously avoided anything which would be too "gamey" or which would sound bad.

When it comes right down to it, it's all about the music. Here's hoping we hit that mark, we'll find out in just 8 more days.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Accessibility:

(BTW, If you're not disabled in any way or have otherwise convinced yourself that you're perfectly normal, you may still want to check the end of this blog.)

In any game you make there are going to be certain concessions that you can make to accessibility, and ones that you can't. On paper, it's not "worth" spending a lot of effort in order to reach a small number of people. But in a bigger sense, we're all human and nobody wants to leave anyone behind. Because we want everyone to be able to play together, (and because we're human) we tried to make Rock Band as accessible as possible. Sometimes we succeeded, sometimes we didn't.

Leftys: We've always tried to help the 8% of the population who is left-handed. For Rock Band, we wanted to make it even easier to flip your instrumentation left to right. One little detail you may notice about the Stratocaster is that the strap peg flips from the top to the bottom of the guitar, so that the guitar will hang well for lefties. Similarly, we moved the high frets down from the base of the neck slightly, to better match the left hand divot in the guitar body. We also put the whammy bar in a more central location to better adjust to left-handed positioning.

Small or limited mobility hands: Lots of people have small hands. Some of these people are young. Some have hand injuries that prevent them from spreading their fingers. Some people are just petite. For these people, we kept the high frets accessible during regular gameplay. If the regular fret spacing is giving you problems, try the high frets.

Short / Tall people: After making some adjustments to the leg lengths, we tested our drums with a range of people from 7' to 4' tall. They play well for everyone within that range, and we're pretty sure they would play well with people even shorter or taller.

Color blindness: About 1% of the population is color-blind. We've actually done color studies of our user interface to make sure that, if not ideal, it wouldn't completely be unusable by color blind people. The contrasts had to be high enough for differentiation by people with various types of colorblindness. Thankfully, photoshop filters exist to make the detection process much simpler, but once we did find issues we had to go through a time-consuming process of re-balancing our colors.

Tone deaf people: Not really a disease, but we did keep easy-level singing generous enough that anyone, no matter how tone-deaf, should be able to play by eye.

Unfortunately, there are always some people you can't reach, and Rock Band is no exception.

Photosensitive Epilepsy: Sadly, we ran out of time to do anything for the .01% of the population with Photosensitive Epilepsy. When we looked into it, our systems were just too entangled and hard-coded to change in such a fashion without slipping our release date. Hopefully we can do something on our next project.

Blind: We've kicked around the idea of having menu options narrated for blind players, but getting it done right would be a huge amount of effort. Plus, except for singing the actual gameplay would still be inaccessible. We did try to make everything as visible as possible to help people with bad vision, but that helps everyone else too.

Similarly, we've thought about how to make music games for the deaf, but this was not destined to be that project.

Really, we'd like to reach everyone out there, but in some cases it just isn't possible, and in others it isn't feasible without shipping much later. Hopefully we've struck the right balance of helping in as many people as possible, and still getting onto shelves. Two weeks, people! Just two weeks!

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Two weeks to burn, eigh? So unless you have an iPod, it's time for another Games-you-need-to-play. These are all (very strange) flash games, so surf on over and enjoy.

[link="http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/"]Portal Flash Game[/link]. A flash version of everyone's favorite cake game. The full version of Portal is short but comes highly recommended. Play the flash version until the full one is done downloading.

[link="http://www.secrettechnology.com/gamegame/gamegame.html"]Game, Game, Game, and Again Game[/link] - Whether or not games can be high art, they definitely can be modern art. Strange.

[link="http://www.vivalagames.com/play/streamline/"]Beat Streamline[/link] - Music, Dancing, Cannonballs? Weird, frustrating, and awesome.

[link="http://www.secrettechnology.com/zombie/lovesickzombie6.html"]Alarmingly, These Are Not Lovesick Zombies[/link]. Another gem(?) by the author of Game, Game, Game, and Again Game.

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

I thought I'd take a minute to talk about little details of what will soon be your drums. I apologize for the quality of the photos: the iPhone camera just isn't an SLR.

See these gaps? These are impact absorbers. They let some of the crazier players hit drums really, really hard and yet not cause the other drums around them to think they've been hit. Believe it or not, they work really well. You should see how hard a repressed housewife will wail on these things.

The drums have tiny rims. Hopefully you won't need to notice this little touch, but these rims are as small as we could possibly make them, in order to help reduce rim hits on the drum sets. We started with a realistic rim height and size, and pulled way back from there. Rim hits are as enjoyable on drums as de-tuned strings are on guitar. We're also generous and count rim hits. While we almost always went with the authentic musician experience, in this case less realism was just more enjoyable.

Slide-out stick holders. These push in, in case you don't need to use them. On stage people generally rock out with stick bags on their throne, but so many people were jamming sticks into the little hold in the middle that we added these.

Speaking of sticks, there are no cheap plastic chopsticks here. These are real wood drumsticks, and I'm not talking about particle board. Going with wood really does make a difference in the feel of the rebound. We wanted to keep things as affordable as possible, but we'd be damned if we were going to ship plastic sticks.

This is a little touch I'm personally fond of. These latches secure the top of the drum set tightly to the legs. Originally, these rotated down to latch shut, and rotated up to open. Unfortunately, when unnoticed people them left them down, and instead of gripping the tube securely in place the drum set would wobble precariously on top of the latches. Flipping these the other way ensures that the toggles default to open and lets the kit sit as deep as it can, with extra stability coming from securing things properly. It's not a big thing, but little touches like that can really make something a pleasure to use or a nightmare to fight with.

The pedal is textured and with an orange bar to match the orange kick gems. The pedal hooks over the feet of the kit to avoid sliding, with two positions for short or long legs. (In the picture above the pen is going through the second position) You'll also notice it sticks out just a little bit... there is a little platform for your heel that helps keep everything stationary.

We went through a lot of different switches before we found one that could reliably hold up under a massive pounding. We haven't had one break since. Similarly, we've repeatedly beefed up the pedal until it could take a constant beating without snapping in half or throwing an axle. These things shouldn't break unless you've got a couple of people jumping on them (please don't try).

If you've got a table near your screen, you'll want coffee-table mode. Just pull out the leg bars, and put the top array directly into the feet. Originally we were worried this might be a bit of a gimmick, but we quickly found that A: it plays well and B: lots of people have tables in front of their TV's. Who knew? Plus, in tabletop form the kit fits nicely into closets.

The feet of the drum set are symmetrical. This is just one little touch that helps people get this thing assembled and working faster. We kept this simplicity mantra wherever possible; Nothing is worse than having something 3/4ths of the way assembled only to discover that a little plastic bit is flared the wrong way.

You'll also notice once you get these home that there really aren't many parts. Everything we could put together ahead of time, we did. Again, this keeps things simple and easy.

All of this is probably more info than you will ever need or use. And really, that's the point; We thought a lot about the details of the drum set so that you wouldn't have to. Hopefully your first hour will be spent jamming out, rather than sticking tab A into slot B. Once you've been playing for a while, take a moment to notice all the little touches to the hardware that makes it nice to use. We put a lot of sweat into every decision, and hopefully it shows.

( Sorry, I'm in love with the style of Phoenix Wright at the moment. )

BTW, if you're looking for credits to games, check out Mobygames.com. They're not perfect, but they're how us developer types get credit for our work. It's like digital IMDB. If you have a game that you really like, please take the time to add the credits to the database... this is really the way that us game developers get credit for our work. I think all of the Harmonix games are in there already, but other developers could use the recognition.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Most character creators have traditionally been based around the mechanical process of creating models. Grab a control point, and move it around. Select a patch of skin, and recolor it. Eventually you give the file a name and save it. Lame.

We've been trying to go in another direction for some time. How does a writer create a character? First they figure out a list of adjectives and aspects representing the person, "A tense man with dark hands pulled a cigarette out of a wrinkled Galliano overcoat." This is why the first step of character creation here is naming your person, then filling in their hometown, attitude, size, etc. Rather than controlling the model, we try to give control over the characterization.

You'll notice that once you've created your character, they are still sporting default duds. Your character isn't the clothes: they can put on any outfit they feel like in the morning. But try at they might, they can't wake up in the morning and suddenly make themselves taller or less Canadian. That humanizing distinction helps give characters more "meat," and helps keep them from feeling disposable or cookie-cutter like so many games before.

One of the overarching themes we try to promote is teaching the unwashed masses about rock. To that end, (and because the list would be otherwise really, really long) we broke the clothing out by genre. You can mix and match, of course, but if you stick with one genre your outfit probably won't look awful.

We also try to make character creation as fast as possible. When you've got 4 people all arguing about whether lime PVC pants match an Aqua-tipped mohawk, it takes some time. We tried to pull out any of the stuff that might detract from that like loading different shops, or saving every few seconds, or making players pick out clothing before their band is formed. You can still annoy your band mates and waste a ton of time here, but at least most of that should be the fun stuff.

We found on previous systems that colors never quite matched, or that there just weren't enough options. Have you ever put on a shirt and pants, only to find that they weren't the same shade of black? Well, I'm glad to tell you, we put in a TON of color options here. We've got some solid tech under the hood to let us recolor stuff, and the outfits show this nicely. Most pieces have between five and fifty colors associated with them. Even with this overwhelming sea of colors, we still hand-pick each one to make sure they're all rock. Or kind of rock... The teal and pink got in through glam.

Then there is the art maker stuff. A lot of the clothes will let you throw on a band logo once you've bought them, like leather jackets or blank t-shirts. We wanted to get this in as many places as possible, to really give some expression to players.

Throw on some shades, maybe a couple of wrist spikes, and you're done.

One more thing. A lot of other character creators / customization shops are about buying and owning everything. Not here. Most things are cheap enough that you can change your outfit around every few songs. You could collect every clothing piece in the game if you're obsessive, but that's not the point. The point is splurging on the drum set that best fits your musician, rather than buying every single one in the store. Certain other things like hairstyles cost you every time you want to change them. What, a stylist is going to do your hair again for free just because you had it that way two weeks ago?

And more or less that's it. Here are a couple of you guys quickly made in-game, at the other end of the character creation process. I'll let you all figure out who they are supposed to be.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

No Rock Band news this week, to help build up anticipation for spraynwipe's next post. So instead of boring you all with another rant on design simplicity, it's time for some tough love: What to do if you're artistic soul is floating through the heavens while your decidedly non-artistic body grumbles about a lack of food.

Musician:

1. If you can't sell out every seat in the house, just sell out! Commercial jingles pay handsomely, are easy to make, and get you a great studio to do your real recordings at night. This message brought to you by mennen.

2. Music / audio for games. Most game companies have at least one of these people in-house. This mostly consists of recording hundreds of clips of people screaming and then playing them back randomly.

That describes a lot of the bands I listen to.

3. Digital downloads. While there are still no rags to riches stories from purely iTunes, eMusic, and Amazon bands, you can at least go from rags to slightly less dirty rags.

4. Foley artist. If you have an ear for music, you've probably got a great mental picture of what a 747 sounds like when superman folds it in half.

5. Produce / remix other people's music. Get desperate kids to come to you, so that you can add poppy sound effects and randomly feed people through a vocoder.

6. Event planning - If music is the seedy underbelly of society, concert promotion is the lint-filled belly button. And it's an innie. Get bands booked at tiny little clubs near your side of town or work your way up and get them booked at tiny little clubs on the other side of town.

Video Gamer

So you love video gaming, eigh? Don't worry, there is a life for you yet.

1. Write about games - I'll be straight with you, writing about video games is the literary equivalent of taking photographs of kittens and adding amusing captions. If you happen to love kittens, this could be a great job.

2. Sports gaming promoter / event planner - Sports gaming is currently a wide open proposition, with blue-sky possibilities. Which means that nobody knows it exists.

3. Help out at game company - Love games but don't feel that artistic spark? Help a game company man phones, organize production facilities, or any one of a hundred other boring things that companies need. I've got some dirty socks that could use washing,

4. Restore arcade games - get out that old soldering gun and some varnish. Buy low, sell high. Just remember that while you may know that Caveman Ninja was the best game ever, try not to let your soul get crushed under the orders for MS Pac Man.

5. Sell custom console paint jobs - Nothing says "I enjoy life" like a Nintendo

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Sean's not the only one who has been doing some touring this past week. I had the good fortune to sit on a Pop Montreal panel with Lenny Kaye (Guitarist for Patti Smith), Sandy Pearlman (Legendary Producer of more acts than I can remember, coined the term "heavy metal music") Dan Levitin (also a famous producer and professor), and upcoming digital studies professor Dominic Arseneault (who brought a PAX bag). I have to say, Sandy Pearlman was every bit a character as Christopher Walken portrayed him to be in the SNL Reaper sketch. One of the first words out of his mouth were "You know, there really wasn't that much cowbell." I sensed he wanted more.

Originally, the plan was to have Dan Levitin play "Don't Fear the Reaper" on Rock Band while Lenny Kaye played it on a real guitar and the "Don't Fear the Reaper" sketch looped in the background. Unfortunately I had brought two wrong builds. After 5 hours of trying, and some tenacious over-the-phone help from Alex Rossi in QA, that just didn't happen. But Lenny really stepped up to the plate and figured out how to play Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" in the course of 5 minutes, then proceeded to rock it down live (versus Levitin on Rock Band). It was awesome. Lenny stole a solo before the authored one in-game, and on quite a few occasions traded back and forth with the game as if they were both live instruments. I even caught him cheating a few times, watching the Rock Band screen to see upcoming changes in the music. Total Pro.

The discussion panel after the pony show was mostly complaining about the state of music licensing, Apparently Patti Smith couldn't afford to license her own music back from her label, and had to cut out most of the concert footage from a documentary about her life. Sandy complained bitterly about this band or that label, and how he did things differently back in the day when he managed Black Sabbath. There was also a lot of talk of Rock Band, and how music games (especially paired with digital distribution methods) have started real long-tail alternative revenue streams for budding artists. We talked about how Rock Band is a stepping stone between listening on the radio and gigging with a band, and how Apple's Garage Band is kind of like that too. Rick Karr (of NPR fame) kept the discussion sharp and on point. I felt a little bad after the Q&A session at the end... all of the audience questions were about Rock Band, and none of these other real rock stars on stage were getting any attention. But it was a great gig, and it was nice to feel the love from our frozen neighbors.

One last word of warning. Montreal is full of "helpful" city maps everywhere. They're a trap! They're each rotated differently, scaled arbitrarily, and centered on different random locations. They're the navigational equivalent of playing miniature golf. Bring a GPS, I say.

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

This will be a short blog this week... I'm off to join a panel at the Pop and Policy music conference in Montreal. With legendary producers Sandy Pearlman and Dan Levitin, Lenny Kaye of The Patti Smith Band, NPR's Rick Karr, and a special showing of our game, this should be one interesting event. I'll post notes about everything that happens.

In the mean time: Things you can do while waiting for black Friday:

Buy a practice pad and go nuts.

Figure out 40 witty character names that won't trigger online censors.

Take singing lessons. Please.

Watch Tommy, School of Rock, Easy Rider, everything Jack Black has done, This is Spinal Tap (of course), the 1986 Transformers Movie, Scratch, The Wizard of Oz, The Doors, and High Fidelity. At once.

[cheesy plug] Loan money to third-world sustainable development VIA Kiva.org [/cheesy plug] Hey, gratuitous benefit concerts are rock!

Finish Halo. Come on, you know you're going to.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

So I wanted to take a quick moment and mention something about the drum set. The drums you'll be getting aren't the ones that we started out with. You're getting far, far better ones. When we started developing the game, we ripped apart some professional electronic drum sets and played with a bunch of configurations. Some were S shaped, some U-shaped, some only had 3 pads. Ultimately we settled on the 4-pad upside-down u that we all know and love.

We called in Jonathan Hayes, who oversaw the design of both the Sidewinder joystick and the Xbox 360, to help us out with creating a practical, manufacturable shape for the drums. Once we had a design in place and a couple of prototypes built, we playtested the heck out of them.

What did we try? We tried putting quick releases everywhere, and putting them nowhere. We made the pads bigger and smaller. We whacked the drums and pads as hard as we could for as long as we could, and we fixed anything that broke. We shortened the kick travel, made the pressure about the same as a real drum set, and made it bomb proof. We added stick holders at the top, because people kept jamming them into the hole in the middle of the set. We found clever ways to make the drums stronger, quieter, and easier to put into the closet when you're not using them. And don't get me started on the color arguments.

You'd be amazed at the things that people mess up during playtests. Give people a couple of parts to a drum kit, then walk out of the room. Five minutes later, they might have a drum set. They might have a scarecrow. They might have a sheepish look on their face and a shattered pile of broken plastic. With some trims and some good design, we managed to get assembly time down to roughly 45 seconds for most people, and with very few problems.

Fortunately, we've had a lot of people both internally and externally who really stepped up to the plate to help the design and production of this thing. And at the end of this all, we've got what we think is a robust and awesome drum kit that's every bit as cool as the 'Strat. I can't wait to see what you guys do with them... and what you will find to spill on them.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Making games is not easy. Let me tell you, every little tweak and touch takes up a tremendous amount of time. That little scoring tweak that you'd like to get in will take a MINIMUM of one to three days of programmer time. More moderate sized stuff may take two weeks. If you're unlucky, and anything termed a "rewrite" is required, it may take months. And don't get me started on artist time.

For example, we decided we wanted to try some more variants of the singing HUD, so we implemented four of them to put in front of the team and vote on a favorite. These weren't fully polished displays or anything, just a quickly hacked together demonstrations of the concepts. That whole process took about three weeks of an artist's time and three weeks of a programmer's time, for a total of a month and a half of development time. That's a lot of effort from two departments, and a mossillion dollars from our budget. (A mossillion is the amount required to keep Matt Moss from stoning us for our indecisiveness).

That doesn't mean you can't do anything, however. If you're clever, you can use tricks to make this workload less. For example, we use a lot of camera transitions to mask moments and changes that don't quite line up. You might in one shot have the guitarist and the singer in their normal positions, then in the next one they're leaning in and singing together. How did they walk to those spots? They didn't. But by being a little looser about positioning (like most movies are) we can create more interesting shots, and have the time to make a lot more of them than we otherwise could. The point is maximum awesomeness, not maximum consistency.

When it comes down to it, making a game isn't about coming up with great ideas; It's about juggling which ideas you have time to make. There may be 1,000 great things you may really want to do with a game, but ultimately you may only be able to implement 100 of them. You might even have 50 or so perfect, super-cheap, easy win ideas that could really add to the game, but if you implemented them all you'd never actually get the game into people's hands.

Long story short: We love the ideas that you guys post. They're insightful, they're inspirational, and they help us to know what you guys are thinking about and what you'd like to see improved. But don't feel bad if your idea isn't used directly. Chances are, your mossillion dollar idea is sitting in a queue with a hundred other wonderfully great ideas, just waiting for the developer time to free up.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Staying Quirky

Have you seen City of Lost Children? Or Army of Darkness? The jilted camera angles, the quirky dialog deliveries, the strange feel of it all... If you were to describe great acting and directing, by all accounts that would not be it. But it is exactly that slightly odd quality that makes them so fascinating to watch. Jack Nicholson wouldn't be such an engaging actor if he didn't have such a strange way of putting spaces and emphasis in the wrong place in his lines. Just a little bit of quirkiness, in other words, is endlessly entertaining.

Staying quirky can be tough in any project, as the natural instinct is to smooth everything. But staying quirky on a project of over a hundred people, all with a say in the final outcome, is downright daunting. You just don't get that individual personality by group consensus. I remember going over tutorial scripts line-by-line in a committee, and watching them degrade from interestingly townie English with a thick lower-middle class accent to something more straight and bland. Thankfully we threw out that draft very early on, but you get the point.

I feel pretty proud that we managed to keep a lot of the good quirks in Rockband. For example, early on there was a bug where you could see the arena behind the tracks. We were going to fix the problem, but we liked it so much we decided to run with it. Similarly, instead of modeling faces that matched normal ones perfectly, or people with regular people proportions, we worked very hard to create this strange and interesting look to all of the characters. They're not quite cartoony, but they're not quite played straight either.

You have to keep a lot of your game straightforward in order to ground the experience. But keeping just the right level of quirkiness can really bring forth the flavor of a title.

Friday, September 14, 2007