I don’t have stories from working on Rock Band. I have stories about not working on Rock Band. Back in 2006, I was working for the Activision studio Vicarious Visions. Among other things, we did a lot of the Nintendo Wii and DS development for Activision titles headed elsewhere.

I had a number of old friends and colleagues at Harmonix, and the previous year they had come out with Guitar Hero, to huge success. So, when Activision acquired Red Octane (Guitar Hero’s publisher) I indulged myself in some hope that I might get to work with those guys. That, of course, was not fated to happen that way.

I did end up working on the fringes of Guitar Hero. In addition to managing the design group at VV during most of the Guitar Hero years there, I was producer on the team that prototyped Mii Freestyle Mode in Guitar Hero World Tour, and did design on another prototype that never made it. I remember a lot of animosity among fans between Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and I expect some developers must have felt that way too. But all I ever percieved personally was responsibility. I had accidentally ended up with the people who were in charge of Harmonix’s baby, and I wanted to take good care of it. Let it be done well, and let someone else worry about sibling rivalry.

Fast forward to today. I am working with those old friends now, at Harmonix. I’m not working on Rock Band, and never did. But my involvement with carrying their baton was one of the things that gave me the mad confidence to be here. And just as when Activision closed down their music business, the end of new Rock Band content at Harmonix has got me looking back on these stories that put me where I am today.

Why does anybody choose a life in entertainment? The song goes “I knew, if I had my chance, that I could make those people dance, and maybe they’d be happy for a while.” When I go home at the end of the day, all I can hope is that I’ve done something to bring people some joy.

So, bye bye. Harmonix isn’t telling yet what we’re offering people next. But maybe they’ll be happy with it, for a while.

That is all.

Flash Point: Fire Rescue is a new cooperative boardgame by Kevin Lanzing. Players take on the role of firefighters, and must collaborate to rescue trapped victims from a burning building. The Urban Structures expansion provides a new double-sided game board, including the High Rise, the most challenging building in the game. Having pulled out a victory on this board after a couple of false starts, I posted my strategy as an article on BoardGameGeek.com, which I’m cross-posting in its entirety here:

That High-Rise is Coming Down a Lot Faster Than You Think

The High Rise board presents a lot of problems beyond the obvious one of limited access to the building. Check out all those little offices, and the hallway surrounding the elevators and bathrooms. Sure, all those enclosures help to prevent flashovers. But they also mean that explosions have much less room to spread, and an explosion that doesn’t spread means structural damage. You need to treat the whole place as being in serious danger of collapse from the word “go.”

Assume that most if not all of the locked office doors are either going to be blasted down, or need to be chopped down. The latter is painful, but once there’s a fire inside an office, you probably can’t afford to conserve one damage cube at the risk of placing four later. Once you write off most of those walls, your supply of damage cubes is down from the usual 24 to more like 17. That’s a severe disadvantage!

For that reason, the Structural Engineer is an essential team member in the only solution I’ve come up with yet. Every damage marker he can return to the supply will be a great comfort to you later, I promise. Everyone else should be dedicated to aggressive fire suppression (to prevent explosions, and let the Engineer use his abilities) and HazMat disposal. Explosions are your enemy, which is always true, but more so here than ever.

Keep the hallway clear, and drag victims away from the fire when you must, but I don’t think you can afford a Paramedic or Rescue Specialist until you deal authoritatively with the building. Those victims are just going to have to wait a bit.

Your first goal is to get the blaze down to just isolated pockets, and mostly smoke, with few if any hotspots. Then the Structural Engineer’s job is done, and he (along with maybe one of your fire suppression team) can grab the elevator with the first batch of victims (you are planning on taking them down in batches and not one at a time, I hope) and switch to rescue roles.

If you can reach this point, you’re not quite out of the woods. You’re probably down to a very small number of damage markers, despite your best efforts. So you now have a goal of zero additional explosions, while the rescuers do their work. Without individual fires big enough for the talents of the CAFS Specialist or Driver/Operator, your best bet here is sheer legwork using the Generalist and Fire Captain. Don’t be afraid of having your rescuers suppress isolated fires and break up chains of smoke, if they get the opportunity. Remember, zero explosions, and they can’t rescue people if the building comes down.

Good luck! The High Rise is a challenging board, and you can take pride in mastering it.

No single one of these things has turned into a project that was quite enough to write about. Either that, or I’m just having trouble writing lately. Could be both!

I could pretend that I just whipped up a full-size Salta board today, but I won’t. This move was announced some time ago, so I had most of the graphic design ready to pull the trigger on.

The Spiel Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides boardgame bundles to children’s hospitals and senior centers. If you plan to be in Dallas for BoardGameGeek Con next week, it may still be possible to register for their Spiel-a-thon team trivia fundraiser event. In addition to financial support, they also are looking for tips on games to include in the program, as well as volunteers to find beneficiary institutions.

The Jack Vasel Memorial Fund was founded a little under a year ago in the wake of the untimely passing of the infant Jack Vasel. The Fund’s mission is to help members of the gaming community in times of personal hardship. In addition to giving directly, you can participate in their fundraising auction, currently underway on BoardGameGeek.com.

Also, lest I neglect Veterans’ Day/Armistice Day fast approaching, I’m interested in organizations sending care packages to service members. I’m woefully uninformed on that score, however, and open to recommendations.

It has been a good exercise, though, working yet more muscles that I hadn’t had a chance to stretch in a while.

Once upon a time, a game like this might have come out as shareware with a free demo. You get a certain amount of content to try out, and if you like it and want to continue, you pay for the registered version of the game. This model still exists to some extent with games like the iPhone version of Guitar Hero, which ships cheaply with a sample selection of songs, and includes in in-app store for fuller content. And, of course, many apps have free “demo” and paid “pro” versions, but I want to focus here on in-app transactions.

A more contemporary approach is the current freemium model, where the game is free to play, but you pay for some sort of advantage, customization, or convenience. All too often, this takes the form of a one-size-fits-all “energy” mechanism that rations the amount of gameplay you get in any unit time, and hits you up to buy more of this energy. I say “all too often” because one-size-fits-all solutions are generally lazy, and because the energy model in particular trades on the player’s frustration. Now, frustration certainly has a place in motivating the player, but being frustrated in one’s attempts to achieve is different from being frustrated with the functionality of the product itself.

Wind-Up Knight isn’t exactly doing any of these things. Instead, it has an in-game currency, and as usual this can be earned via in-game action and spent on useful things, or purchased as a convenience. But while most freemium games try to tie currency as strictly as possible to labor, Wind-Up Knight is aggressively skill-based. It is definitely not trying to be a pastime, but a challenge. So they tie currency strongly to performance, not just effort.

More interestingly, they hybridize the pay-for-content and pay-for-convenience approaches. The progression model is pay-for-content, but you pay with the in-game currency. So, the better you are at the game (or the longer you work at it) the more levels you can progress through, but if you don’t care about needing top performance on one level before moving to the next, you can use actual money to bypass that requirement (pay-for-convenience).

It’s an inventive synthesis of old-school and contemporary approaches, and one that I find more respectful of the player than many other free-to-play games. Let’s hope they’re rewarded.

You can find Robot Invader’s post discussing the Wind-Up Knight business model on their blog.

This strategy is certainly not foolproof, but usually when it goes awry it’s because the old path to the parking space has become blocked. The system can detect that and rethink its approach. This is not one of those cases.

Check out the 1 of Suns in this board position. It’s got a good clear path home; it just needs to drive a little bit around the opposing 1 of stars. Yeah, oops. Because as soon as it tries to do that, it’s forced to jump right back to where it started. The AI as far as version 1.0.1 is content to stay on that ride indefinitely. It’ll just zoom around in circles until something breaks the trap.

Now, this isn’t as likely to happen as you might think. The position of both the Green 1 of Moons and the Red 2 of Stars is important, because otherwise it’ll be the Red 1 of Stars that is forced to jump (when the moving Green piece pulls in front of it). Also, there are simple things that Green could do to keep this from happening, if only it could think of them.

So, that was part of yesterday’s work on the project. You don’t even have to make Green understand the consequences of the forced jump, you just have to tell it that the space to the lower left of the 1 of Stars should be considered blocked. Now, what the AI will do in this case is:

• Start moving with the 1 of Suns as it did before
• Pull the 2 of moons down into the space it just vacated. Hey, look: no more forced jump!
• Continue parking the 1 of Suns.

It’s interesting to note that I didn’t even have that solution to the problem in mind when I did the code fix. I thought maybe it’d use its 1 of Moons to force a jump on the Red 1 of Stars. But, of course, its actual solution is considerably better. So this strategy of defusing a forced jump by back-filling its landing square is therefore an example of an emergent behavior. So was the original bug of moving around and around in circles.

You get this stuff a lot in AI. In fact, on some level it’s what makes a system look more “intelligent” than simply well-regulated, at least when the emergent behavior is successful. It’s said that asking whether a computer can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim. If it’s not thinking when it produces a solution via emergence, it’s certainly at least doing whatever it is a submarine does.

New in this version:

• Scoring Changes:
  • Tutorial robot pops up to explain when scoring has begun.
  • Removed (deceptive) score display until scoring phases.
  • “Hint” button changes to “Auto” button (to hand play off to the AI) during final scoring.
• (Re)added scaling effect when player picks up a piece or computer jumps with one.
• Added alternate sounds for piece movement.
• Player can choose to take green or red at start of each new game.
• Replaced default grey style for message dialogs with something more appropriate.