Games and Grog, once a month

For the February Boston Post Mortem, we will be featuring Chris Foster, Senior Designer at Harmonix, who will be doing a practice run of his GDC talk, “Your Music Is the Game: Designing PHASE, the Other Project at Harmonix.” This month’s meeting is sponsored: Harmonix will be providing food and drink tickets, so you’ll all be on your own tabs again for any other stuff, much like last month.

Also note that this is on a Wednesday, not a Tuesday, it was the only day that the Skellig was free. Apologies to those of you who can only make it on Tuesdays. (We also managed to avoid scheduling this one on Valentine’s day, which has been a problem in years past.)

Talk description:

Harmonix has established a successful series of “beatmatch” games, where players tap buttons or strum on plastic guitars to “match” the musical “beats” of a series of pre-recorded songs. Their new iPod game, PHASE, faced unique challenges: beats would not be authored by tech-savvy musicians, but would instead be algorithmically generated, and the game would lack the dedicated peripherals that were critical to the success of the GUITAR HERO series. This lecture presents a case study of adapting a proven design to new set of constraints. The presenter pries apart the company’s standard beatmatch design, and explores how each element had to evolve, or be discarded, in order to make the new project a success. Special attention is devoted to: developing procedural gameplay algorithms; embrancing the iPod’s unique input mechanics; and triaging unexpected changes in scope and schedule.