...wow what a year

One of the best years I think I've ever had.  I'll have some new posts coming soon.  Stuff to come:

- Pics from the last few months
- Q&A with Dean Tate (Senior Designer at Harmonix)
- Best of 2009 posts

...Fugazi will be here all week

Amazing link for Fugazi fans - here.

...DFA...

I miss this band...


death from above 1979

K A W A N | MySpace Video

...for 10 years

I just realized last night I've been making games for 10 years this month!

...Harmonix on Jeopardy

...Harmonix voted #3 place to work in the Globe 100

...Daily Show

This segment was awesome last night:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/13/daily-show-destroys-cnn-f_n_318295.html

...RIP Ron

1999-2009

...P-town

Went to Provincetown in Cape Cod with Allison this weekend. What a cool place. She found an awesome room with a fireplace in the middle of town for really cheap.

...and I had lobster mac n' cheese.

...Director's Cut Pics

By request:

...Amsterdam and Berlin pics

It was a pain in the ass getting there but it was worth it! Here's some pics from Amsterdam and Berlin:

Yummy...I ate a lot...

I tried to make my best "Bro" face...

I work with one of the 2 guys in this band. I saw the poster at the huge flea market in Berlin.

This bear gets around...

Actual piece of the wall with recreated art...

If I lived in Berlin I'd go here ALL THE TIME.

...and then I'd wind up here.

This guy stood up quite a bit on our bus trip around Berlin. I was determined to take more interesting pics than he did by getting him in my shots...



Mom and Sis walking the streets of Amsterdam...

...More Beatles press

Possibly the most positive review I've read for a game, and definitely the best for a game I made:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/arts/television/06schi.html?_r=2&hp

(btw - Amsterdam Berlin pics coming soon)

...I am a Jelly Donut

In Berlin now...pics to come when I get back...

...whoa, John Hughes ruled...

http://wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com/2009/08/sincerely-john-hughes.html

...It's been an awesome summer so far

Just got back from roller skating and then berry picking...I've done so many cool things these last few months:

• Clambake on George's Island
  
• Much house parties
• AC/DC in Gillette Stadium for Free!
  
• Going to see the Red Sox
• Mike Runy's Wedding in NC
  

See the pics below. I go to Amsterdam soon for two weeks! And in one month, The Beatles: Rock Band.

...Cheaper Beatles: Rock Band

Friends, here's a relatively cheap way to get The Beatles: Rock Band. Hurry only a couple days left:

- Trade in $50 worth of games
- Get a 50% coupon
- Use both to get the bundle for cheap

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_84701651_1?ie=UTF8&docId=1000395991&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=right-2&pf_rd_r=0JRDXK5EMQEGKQRBWYKZ&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=482460011&pf_rd_i=979418011

...Reviews for 2009

Here's a running list of what stuff I'm checking out this year. Recommended items in Bold.

Music:
The Beatles The Beatles in Mono (Box Set)
LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Legacy - Beyond Hurt Beyond Hell
Public Image Ltd. - The Flowers of Romance
Pissed Jeans - King of Jeans
Future of the Left - Travels With Myself and Another
Yob - The Great Cessation
Zu - Carboniferous
Coalesce - Give Them Rope She Said V2.0
Michael Jackson - Off the Wall (Special Edition)
Coalesce - Ox
Sonic Youth - The Eternal
Tweak Bird - Reservations
The Horrors - Primary Colours
Isis - Wavering Radiant
Fever Ray - Fever Ray
Gallows - Grey Britain
Japandroids - Post-Nothing
Graf Orlock - Destination Time Today
Trash Talk - Trash Talk
Death - ...For the Whole World to See
Ladyfinger(ne) - Dusk
Kylesa - Static Tensions
Mastodon - Crack the Skye
Tears for Fears - Songs From the Big Chair
Rumplestiltskin Grinder - Living for Death, Destroying the Rest
Megasus - Megasus
Portishead - Third
The Lonely Island - Incredibad
The Swell - Tonnage
Sleep - Sleep's Holy Mountain
The Bronx - The Bronx 3

Movies:
It Might Get Loud
District 9
Inglorious Basterds
Humpday
Moon
The Hurt Locker
Food Inc.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Public Enemies
Tokyo
Up
Tyson
The Hangover
Drag Me to Hell
Star Trek
Anvil
Crank High Voltage
I Love you Man
Watchmen
Gomorra
The Wrestler

Books:
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
The Cartoon Guide to Physics
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers
The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram Your Genes for Effortless Weight Loss, Vibrant Health, and Boundless Energy
Power of 10: The Once-A-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution
Game Feel
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Body by Science: A Research Based Program to Get the Results You Want in 12 Minutes a Week
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
Fretboard Logic
How to Win Friends & Influence People
Understanding Comics
The Road
Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health
Hip: The History

Games:
Batman Arkham Asylum
Trials HD
Peggle (Iphone)
'Splosion Man
Battlefield 1943
Ghostbusters
UFC Undisputed
Fallout 3
Resident Evil 5
Death Tank

...Harmonix Designer Emails (#2)

Dan Teasdale

Welcome to the designer email thread, Mr. Brian Chan! In honor of him joining the thread, I have a topic that he might have some idea on how to solve:

Item Hoarding


As a collector, I find myself hoarding powerful weapons and never using them "in case I need them later". I did it with airstrikes in Mercs 2, I did it with nukes in Fallout, and there's probably a bunch of games that I've repressed doing it in.


Is this good? Is this bad? How do you think designers can solve this, or at the very least balance a game where people won't use the most powerful weapons?

Brian Chan

Thanks, everyone, for presenting me with such a warm welcome. I'm looking forward to learning a great deal from all of you. And thanks, Dan, for asking me something I can actually answer (I'm still in that muddle of new terminology and culture shock that comes with switching workplaces [and cities]).


When a player finishes a game with "leftover" items, it can be either a positive or negative indication. On the positive side, the leftover items suggest that the game presents choices, with the items representing the path not taken. If players vary as to their leftover items, even better-the game presents meaningful choices and allows for alternate solutions. On the negative side, leftover items might signify poor communication to player of item utility or scarcity. That is, the player might not have used the item because he or she didn't understand its value or how common or rare it was.

The problem is summarized by the notion that, if players cannot experiment, then they cannot plan. By providing safety nets for experimentation (and failure), designers can discourage item hoarding.


I like when a game provides the player with some sort of consequence- free sandbox in which to "try before you buy." Often, games do this via gated tutorials. In a game where balancing is achieved via scarcity or resource cost, it's nice to give the player "freebies" so as to whet their appetite. And, if an item is a higher- magnitude version of another item the player is already familiar with, then this fact should be made abundantly clear to the player.

A few games solve the scarcity problem without sacrificing balancing- by basing the economics on (easily) renewable resources. In Bioshock, I don't mind testing out new plasmids because EVE is relatively plentiful. In World of Warcraft, all resources can be translated into time, which is a resource that the game's players don't seem to mind spending prodigiously.

Chris Foster

I thought I came to Harmonix after past jobs strategy games and MMO's so that I didn't HAVE to think about balancing uber items of destruction!

I can think of a few tools to balance hoarding versus wanton nuke-spamming: consequences, limitations and scarcity.

Consequences are ways to say that using a superweapon isn't all wonderfulness and smiting, but that there are potentially painful tradeoffs at work. If a super item is going to create lasting negative faction somewhere in your game, or hurt your character/base while crippling someone else's, then you can make people think more strategically about its use.

Limitations are ways to make sure a superweapon isn't always useful in every situation. I think there are a bunch of limitations that aren't appropriate here, since if a weapon is too limited, it's by definition NOT super. I'd be more interested in limits that make the weapon harder to use but no less potent, such as a missile that is slow moving and therefore somewhat easier to avoid, or a weapon that requires prolonged manual control to hit its target in the most destructive manner possible.

Scarcity is a double-edged sword, as Brian called out. Having plentiful resources in your game, but a significant cost for the best weapons, can be a pretty potent balancing factor. You can see this in everything from Civilization to Death Tank. (And if you haven't played Death Tank multiplayer, stop reading this and play it now.)

Dan Teasdale

I'm going to channel a conversation Sylvain and I had after I sent the email, and in turn steal his thunder. Hopefully I'll misrepresent it and he can come in and make it sound more awesome.

So, the biggest problem I have isn't on the spamming end - making something less appealing to use is kinda easy. My problem is when things are so powerful in a way that's not a direct tie to my standard weapons, with the direct example being airstrikes in Mercs. I'll swap my normal weapons up to the most powerful instantly, but I'll hardly ever launch airstrikes unless:
* I've cornered myself in a save and have nothing else to use
* The game forces me as part of a mission objective

Sylvain then brought up Halo, which solves this problem so elegantly that I didn't even realise they'd solved it. Essentially, restricting you to two weapons means you can never hoard a weapon. If you get a superweapon, your incentive to use it is that you'll be able to pick up another weapon soon, so you'll happily spend the small amount of resources.

Thinking forward to Fallout 3, they end up in this weird mushy area. You have your inventory, and when it's full you'll start burning through some of the cooler things in order to make room for other cool things. The problem with that though is that there's still enough room to carry lots of weapons, so the "superweapons" you're burning are things like medical supplies and stimulants.

(As a side note: It's unnerving how many pacing and design problems Halo solved compared to how revolutionary people think of it as being - especially so considering how much designers didn't enjoy it past the first few levels (myself included). Say what you want about the level design issues in the second half or the cookie-cutter narrative, but things like balancing health for encounters rather than levels, or getting players to experience more cool things by reducing their amount of choice, these things have ended up changing how people balance all types of games.

Funnily enough, designers never give Bungie never credit for it because of the other issues in the game. At the same time, Half-Life did the exact same thing but flipped (standard mechanics, amazing narrative innovations) but it's the game that people reference in terms of the turning point of FPSes. For mechanics designers, it's mildly depressing food for thought :) )

Chris Foster

While waiting for Sylvain to take back what's rightfully his, I'll chime in with this observation.

Your Halo anecdotes remind me that good game mechanics are really like good film editing. When I studied film in college, one thing that was hammered into me is that bad editing -- like an jump-cut, or someone facing left talking across the room to someone who's supposed to be looking at them but is ALSO facing left -- immediately draws attention to itself. However, good editing is invisible editing; it works so well that no one realizes it's working, and all of its subtle emotional and psychological manipulations occur while no one is looking.

When a game mechanic does exactly what is necessary to produce fun, then it's likely that no one will notice that the mechanics are even there; they're too busy having fun. And while that can be a little tough on the designer's ego, remember that the flipside is someone calling you out for your BAD design decisions. I'll call it a fair trade.

Sylvain Dubrofsky

Thanks Dan! I realize at this late hour that the deadline for this email is tomorrow and you typed up a lot of stuff I immediately thought of from my own gaming experience so I won't have to lose too much sleep :)

I remember finishing Half-life 1 having used primarily pistol and crowbar throughout the game. I had all this ammo left over for all these cool weapons that I barely used. The same thing happened with RE 4. I must have had 30 grenades when I finished that game!

Halo had a nice natural solution for the problem. As an aside I am a fan of the series (especially Halo 1 and 3) and think the innovations the game generated are often overlooked - primarily: checkpoint saves, dedicated melee and grenade buttons, 2 weapon slots, dual wielding, regenerative health and the FPS-style driving controls.

I agree with the Brian in the previous email that I prefer getting each new weapon (or any item really) in an environment where I can freely experiment with it - AND that fact is made clear to me. Also agree with Chris that Death Tank rules :) I find if I get too many weapons in Death Tank I get overwhelmed so I tend to only concentrate on 3 or 4 powers at a time.

The biggest improvement in this area was a personal change. I've changed my tune since I was younger and started "trusting" developers more. By this I mean that I will now use my best/funnest weapons first and trust I will continue to get ammo drops such that I won't be stuck with just my pistol and melee weapon. This trust worked very well in Half-life 2 - they had very well paced ammo caches and the tension of getting low with my best weapons had a nice release when I found the next cache of ammo.

...E3 2009 Mega Post

E3 2009 was amazing. Started out by watching the Microsoft Press Conference with the other Harmonix employees in our lunch room. We all knew all the Beatles would be represented onstage and that we would have HMX employees demoing the game live. It went over really well:

http://www.thebeatlesrockband.com/launch.php

An hour later I hopped in a plane for LA and showed off the game to press and fans for 3 days straight. I have sung those 10 Beatles songs enough to last a lifetime now! And I still can't nail the low harmony in I Saw Her Standing There...Speaking of Harmonies, I'm happy to say that was one of the features I worked on. Wired has a nice writeup for how it works:

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/06/beatles-rock-band/

I also got the chance to go out a bunch with my old friend Darion (his blog is linked to the left). Thanks for the good times and letting me crash at your place for 2 nights.

I guess there's video out there on Fox news, G4, and the Xbox dashboard that people saw where I'm singing/demoing the game. But all I have today are pics!


We has parties every night after the show. Here I am on the first night playing with Giles Martin!

Got this from Joystiq.com. It's me and Nate playing with some conference attendees.

This group was awesome. I loved watching them slowly learn to harmonize.

The calm before the storm of the first day. We had 3 booths (Wii, Ps3, Xbox 360), a psp setup, and a rest area with meeting rooms. Oh yeah and a huge theater that was like Abbey Road Studio 2.

Setting things up on day 1.

We also had this huge list of all 700 Rock Band songs.

The inside of the theater where presentations were done every half hour.

We also had a Lego Booth and this area in the main hallway. This one was for the Pepsi sponsored contest where people could shoot there own videos.

That's the actual car from the movie!

Darion took me to a club called Einstein's. Unfortunately he couldn't get in with his sneakers so I went in quickly to check it out. Cool place!

In my very small amount of spare time I walked around and saw Eliza Dushku signing posters for the game Wet.

...The Beatles: Rock Band

http://www.thebeatlesrockband.com/

http://www.thebeatlesrockband.com/trailer.php

See what I've been proudly working on :)

...E3 next week

I'll be there demoing The Beatles Rock Band. I'll post some links soon :)

...a couple early reviews for Rock Band Unplugged

http://kotaku.com/5270546/rock-band-unplugged-review-its-the-frequency-kenneth

http://psp.ign.com/articles/986/986116p1.html

If you have a psp and like Rock Band you should pick it up. I'll be at E3 next week where we'll be showing this off (in addition to The Beatles!).

...some recent pics (Including GDC and Harmonix Bowling)

So I was just in San Francisco for GDC. Meet lots of friends, had great food, and enjoyed awesome weather.


Helen was thirsty at the airport.


Had some drinks with my friend Pete on top of the Marriot. How come I never did this when I lived here? Beautiful view...


Virgin Megastore is closing :(


But Virgin America airlines just started and pretty much rules. Time flies when surfing the web.



Hmx bowling day! We all made outfits in a couple hours and spent the rest of the day bowling....cool zep inspired shirt.



A couple more awesome shirts...



Mitch (on the right) was on my team - the Amazing Jason Kendallpins


Speaking of Jason Kendall...I saw his band Megasus play in Providence. If you get a chance to see them I highly recommend it.