December 3, 2008

Rocking Hard with Ultimate Band's Development Team
By Louis Bedigian

“Ultimate Band itself,  the whole idea behind it was to encapsulate the physicality of playing ... The performance side comes from what you can actually do with the Wiimote and the Nunchuk.”

Guitar Hero's popularity has had a profound effect on the game industry. Everywhere you turn, new music games are cropping up. One of them is Ultimate Band, the Fall Line Studio-developed and Disney Interactive Studios-published title created exclusively for the Wii and DS platforms. The developers say that the basic idea was to create a music game for a younger boy (tween) demographic, and make it entirely peripheral-free. "Remember that when we pitched this, there was no such thing as Rock Band and the Wii was still called the Revolution," laughs Tim Huntsman, Senior Producer.

"Ultimate Band itself,  the whole idea behind it was to encapsulate the physicality of playing. Not just playing to a certain rhythm or certain beat, which of course we do because that's where the rhythm side comes from. The performance side comes from what you can actually do with the Wiimote and the Nunchuk. We spent a lot of time, we got a lot of talented people that have been in this industry for a long time and have worked on a variety of genres and different types of games. We put our heads together and kind of picked through good ideas, what would work and what wouldn't. Coming up with the instruments that we came up with, again, coming up with the performance aspect. Because we're Disney, we decided to actually put a story into it.

"Of course, one of the things users really like is a robust create-a-player system. We tied that with the story and that goes back to the male/female vocals we recorded for both sides of your band in the game. We do have some head-to-head play modes, and if you own the DS and Wii versions, you can connect the two and essentially play on an instrument on the DS side and mini-games in freeplay."

Ultimate Modes

"There's a lot going on," says Huntsman, regarding Ultimate Band's various game modes. "We have the single-player experience. Multiplayer co-op and multiplayer head-to-head. We have the Wii-to-DS connectivity. But going through the actual gameplay itself there are a lot of different elements to it. Playing the instruments, it's not simply strumming along. We have performance gestures, which are mixed in. We have a trick system called Performance where you hit the D-pad or thumbstick and shake the controller. You get points for doing that. We also have a Grand Stand meter where, if you fill this meter up by playing successfully, it kind of takes you through a hot potato of mini-games that you can bust through really fast and get bonus points for and stuff."

That Excited Guy on Stage

Huntsman says that the vocal-free frontman gameplay came from the development team's goal to avoid any form of karaoke. "We kicked it around and thought, since we're going for the performance thing, and one of our internal guidelines was getting people up off the couch and play," he says. "We wanted to embrace the physicality of the Wii, in a real way, not just make it so you can sit there in a chair and wave the Wii remote back and forth. You actually have to do these different gestures, and we spent months working on that system. So the idea of the frontman was, you're not singing but you're out there pumping up the crowd.

"Initially we wanted you out there slapping hands, stage-diving, climbing on the stage and doing all this crazy stuff. That turned into an issue because we're on the Wii. We didn't have access to the kind of capabilities for what we wanted to do. So we changed our focus. We started thinking, what does the frontman do? He's out there, he's clapping, he's waving, he's pumping up the crowd. He's doing these dance gestures and jumping up and down. That kind of stuff. We spent a lot of time on that. It's probably the most aerobic and physical side [of the game]. I know the last couple months of development, the designer doing most of the frontman stuff was the first to come down with  carpal tunnel syndrome. [Laughs] I'm kidding! But it was a lot of work."

Male vs. Female

Most players were surprised to learn that Ultimate Band contains both male and female vocals for every song. "That really came out of the character creator," Huntsman revealed. "We wanted the player to have a choice in how they customize their band and feel a degree of ownership. 'Hey, this is my band.' We kind of took that thought through a series of logical conclusions. We thought, well, if you can have a male or female band, I don't want to play a band where my singer is female and I'm hearing a guy up there. That wouldn't sound right, so we decided to have male and female versions. Then we took it one step further with the story mode and the cinematics. Honestly if we had a microphone we wouldn't have done anything 'cause it's your voice, not the gender of the person in the game. So that's why we went that way."

Why a Story Mode Counts

"We wanted to give players a little bit more of the experience," said Huntsman, "a little bit more of doing something and not just a bunch of songs in a set list. I think part of what we're doing, we weren't trying to make any grand or bold statements about the music industry. We wanted to have fun with it. Part of the story is used to support the crazy venues our staff came up with. If you've seen some of the screenshots you've seen some pretty wild venues in addition to [those] grounded in reality. We wanted to tie everything together and give it continuity. We didn't go into this game saying, 'Hey, we're gonna jump on some bandwagon.'"

The Competitive Nature of Music Gaming

"Honestly we, in my opinion we have an entirely different audience," Huntsman insists, tackling the issue of competition from Rock Band and Guitar Hero. "We're peripheral-free. That was a conscious decision on the Wii. We wanted to make a game, something that was a little more accessible. When we first pitched this thing, we wanted to make a game that somebody like ourselves or a hardcore gamer could play on hard and do all the crazy stuff and have fun. At the same time you could hand the controller to your friend, nephew or mom, get 'em up off the couch, have 'em jump around on easy, do it together as a family and have a really good time. I think that's something we really capitalized on."

DLC RIP...This Time

"We would love to support downloadable tracks," Huntsman tells us. "However, by the time we found out what Nintendo's plans were in the online space we were too far down the road in development to adjust for that. We're not a 360, we're not a PS3, we're on Wii. For the first Band, we're not planning on anything like that."

"We knew that Disney wanted us to create a likeness for a character that supported a band like the Plain White T's. That was really in-depth for us. We would have liked to create more body types but that would have taken more work and we didn't have the time."—Mike Thompson, Art Director

What kinds of sounds/instruments can you play in Ultimate Band?

Tim Huntsman, Senior Producer: You play the guitar, bass, drums, and you're the frontman. When we started prototyping we started with the drums, 'cause we figured we could make it the simplest. You know, just playing the bongos, or make it the hardest using direction sensing and button combinations. We played around with it for a couple of months and came up with the version we have in the game. But the guitar and the bass, it's basically, on the hard level it's button presses on the Nunchuk and strumming with the Wiimote. But they're actually different. When you go back and look at the game too, when you look at the difficulties and see how Easy is geared toward the casual player and how Hard is geared towards more of the gamer type player, the difference isn't just the instruments being different but within the instruments themselves and the difficulty levels and the variety of play styles we designed.

Now tell us about the DS version. What will the mechanics be like?

Mark McArthur, Development Director: It's just like Tim mentioned with the Wii version, which takes advantage of the Wii controls. It's the same thing with the DS and the stylus. When you play the game it's the stylus that you strum the guitar, beat on the drums, crash on the cymbals. [You also use the D-pad] to change your chords on the guitar. We also extend that, using the stylus, to the user interface as well so you don't have a traditional menu. It's all based on the city map. That was a big part of the design, to use all the DS had to offer.

The studio mode sounds very intriguing. Can you tell us about it?

Mark McArthur: It's very cool. I go in there, lay down a few notes. You get someone like Tim [Huntsman] who's good at playing guitar and other instruments, and taking that into account, you can get in there and mess around a little bit or be as deep as you want. So we've added different layers onto it where you can choose a genre, rock, jazz or blues, and get some rhythm going, lay that down and play on that. It's really simple for kids to record pre-made loops, or if you're more advanced you can go in there, play a rhythm guitar track, record that, lay down the bass, put those together and play it together. You can also combine this with your friends, so if you have four DSes, each one can play a different instrument and record that together.

"It took a lot of time [to narrow down the song list]. We spent a lot of time on YouTube and looking at people's shared iTunes accounts. From our perspective, it wasn't enough to have this song by that band. Because of the nature of our gameplay, we needed songs that had a little more dynamic and texture to them, maybe breaks in the tempo changes, that kind of stuff."—Tim Huntsman, Senior Producer

This one is for Mike: as the art director, what kinds of visuals and/or art style did you hope to bring to Ultimate Band that hasn't been seen in other music games?

Mike Thompson, Art Director: I think you could look at it as what can we bring to the Wii? There's a full character creator with hundreds of pieces, and you can pretty much create the character that's anywhere from a nerd all the way up to a punk rocker. We covered a lot of areas in the creator, so I think kids are going to have a lot of fun there. As far as environments go, we wanted them to be a lot more involved in the gameplay sense. So each environment changes as you're playing. When you're in the haunted house, the house actually gets sucked into a vortex. There are skaters in the skatepark. In the icon level you're on top of the world, you're performing on top of a skyscraper.

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