For the past several months I have been working on a major overhaul of the Rock Band website, which has just gone live. This was a uniquely rewarding project, mainly because the team with whom I worked was given an unprecedented degree of freedom to design a site that both reflects the excitement of the in-game experience and extends the world of the game with useful tools and features. Sites like this tend to get emasculated early and often by executive mincing and short-mindedness. The innovative and captivating features that cultivate internal excitement about a project are regularly blowtorched by thick-browed men in glass offices who are crippled by their desire to protect and preserve the bottom line. Harmonix, on the other hand, stepped back and allowed us to make our own decisions about the site experience.
Once condition: we had to create an amazing, groundbreaking site that supports hundreds of thousands of users in about four months, concept to completion.
Given the time resource constraints, we had to make some quick decisions about what fans of the game would most like to see on the web. Topping the list was a method for users to link their game data to their site account, enabling them to create custom pictures of the characters they created in Rock Band. We also wanted to create a comprehensive library of all the songs available for in-game play, a catalog that would include difficulty ratings, gameplay tips, and trivia from the developers. We also wanted to support some of the new gameplay features in Rock Band 2 such as Battle of the Bands.
I’m partial, though, to the blog section of the site, which we dubbed ‘The ‘Zine’. This section of the site features, in addition to the weekly announcements of new downloadable tracks that users can play in Rock Band, a weekly series on how to make it as a real rock band, from the moment that a kid picks up her first guitar and feels that desire weigh down upon her soul to the difficulties of scheduling a tour and the glory of canonization into the annals of rock history. I’ve written the first installment of another section in the ‘Zine called ‘Sketchbook’ – this is a weekly post showcasing the work of the artists and developers at Harmonix that make the game what it is. The first installment focuses on a single garment created by Steven Kimura, the ‘Beast of Burden’, an unlockable outfit Kimura imagined might be worn by a Norwegian Black Metal vocalist. Several illustrations are included in the post, from Kimura’s initial thumbnail sketch to the orthographic projection that brought the outfit to life as a playable element in the game.
I have no idea whether I’ll be able to write more of these Sketchbook posts. If you like the one that’s live, please feel free to place comments such as, ‘This is a fine article,’ or ‘This is an acceptable post,’ or ‘I would rather read this than do something else.’
