Pre-Production: Design Philosophies
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.
Single Player Rock Band. 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.
Posted
November 12, 2007
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