Well, my posting on here has hit a bit of a lull. Overwork isn’t my excuse this time, since my last post things have been pretty crunch-free at my day job.

I think I’ve just chilled out a little more at home, not so much coding. Been actually playing games a lot more than usual; enjoying “Fallout: New Vegas” right now, and played a ton of “Dead Rising 2″ as well. To hark back to an old blog post I made here about Dead Rising; I can confidently say that Blue Castle Games did a great job on it, you guys do indeed rock!

Recently I did just move my blog to a new domain. I felt the old website name “Music To Make Games By…”, and it’s really long domain name wasn’t to my liking. The original aim for my blog was to talk a lot about the Guitar Hero games I’m working on. That sort of thing is pretty difficult to do though. For obvious reasons I can’t talk about games that aren’t announced yet. Also, to talk about anything with any sort of meaty ‘behind the scenes’ content I’d need to run it by Neversoft first. So yeah, all that fell by the wayside and I mainly ended up covering my foray into XNA and C#; with a few distractions on the way.

New Domain

So yeah, this site is sitting at ‘http://www.gavpugh.com/‘ now. Plan to continue it in the same vein, still plodding along the XNA-path when I code at home. Likewise I definitely intend to write some more articles about the more esoteric areas of C# and XNA, as I was doing previously.

Releasing the source code to “XNACPC” is still on my agenda too. A little after XNA 4.0 was officially released, I managed to get audio working in the emulator using the brilliant new DynamicSoundEffectInstance. Was really awesome to hear those old games chiming away their little 8-bit tunes. Even back when I worked on this emulator in plain C many years ago, I never got round to getting the audio working before.

So for this site, it’s pretty much business as usual then. Slightly new paintjob; shorter URL. The thing I’d really like to change next is my frequency of posts!

New Game

The last game I worked on: “Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock” was released a couple of months ago now. It did okay at retail, nothing spectacular. The sales are like night and day compared to around the time our studio started working on them. “Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock” sold numbers in a different league. Across all the SKUs it actually broke $1 billion in sales. Apparently it is the “first single game ever to surpass $1 billion in sales”, whether that is still true I’ve no idea. It has an advantage over most other titles though in that they very likely count the hardware bundles in these sales figures.

Anyway. Since that game is finished now, I’ve been working on something new.

Looking forward to Christmas, hopefully it’ll be a good time for game sales across the board. For all companies. “Black Ops”-aside it seems like we’re all hurting a bit right now.

New Book

I’ve been enjoying reading industry-related books as of late. Not technical books, but more stories from the trenches. I recently finished a very good one, it’s not specifically gaming-related though but it’s not too far off. “Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days” contains interviews with founder members of various notable startup companies. Actually there is one gaming-related reference in there; Steve Wozniak is interviewed and talks a little about his early work at Atari.

It’s very good. There’s a ridiculous span of different companies covered. From “Hot or Not” through to the guys who wrote “Visicalc” back in 1979, the very first spreadsheet app. A spreadsheet app from 1979, how is that interesting to read about? Yeah, I thought much the same. It was back to back with a chapter about “Lotus 1-2-3″ as well, I thought I was in for a bore-fest. However, it’s riveting stuff. Reading about the highs and lows of these companies as they developed through the years was surprisingly fun. What was also news to me was how incestuous the ‘regular’ tech company world is, almost to the same level as the games industry. So much cross-over where competing startup founders are ex-colleagues.

Definitely one worth picking up if you like inspiring stories. The vast majority of them are generally about coders being part of the initial startups. They detail the problems they faced in a decent bit of detail too. One common thread was scalability, that “Oh shit” moment where everything has gone a little too well and the servers aren’t coping with the demand. Usually some interesting stories on how they dealt with those periods.

There’s the odd one or two that read as “everyone else is doing the startup thing, so I thought I should to”. Which seems a pretty tenuous reason to go for it. But those from what I remember tended to be more the management-school grad types; family with connections and money. They almost read a little like it’s just a plaything, to give them something to do. If it works out that’d be cool, but they’ve got a nice parachute to escape. Been a while since I put the book down though, I think this was only isolated to just one or two stories max. Despite the glistening silver spoon, they did still have some interesting stuff in those too.

Me, a class warrior? Never.

That said, I’ve started to code a little in my free time. I got a block of time over the Christmas break and I decided to have a good go at doing some stuff with XNA and C#. Was a good experience, I feel a lot more comfortable with C# now. I’ve learnt to live with some of the annoying differences between it and C++. I code in the latter every day for my day job; for another language that’s so close to it, it takes a bit of a leap to leave the old ways behind.

So, hopefully I’ll give this blog a bit of a new lease of life soon with some tidbits from my XNA adventures. I’ve got a couple of ‘in-progress’ articles going already.

Anyway, Metallica…

The last time there was rumblings of a Metallica game was back in 2003:
http://cube.ign.com/articles/422/422960p1.html

… and I would know nothing about such a game at all of course… *whistles*

Damage Inc. [Metallica car combat title] (PC/PS2/GC/XBOX, Climax/VU Games)*

http://www.destructoid.com/surfer-girl-is-back-with-a-cancelled-game-list-50625.phtml
Seems like a very long time ago now… I’d like to say more about it, but it’s probably not a good idea.

Like Aerosmith last year, my involvement is pretty minimal; I’m working on something else right now. The Metallica game is based on the World Tour engine, so all four instruments are playable. Unlike with the Aerosmith game, where you were limited to just guitar and bass.

As per usual, with the press-situation for these sorts of things I really can’t say anything in more detail. It looks fantastic and I think the fans are going to be dead impressed with it.

So, updating this site hasn’t gone entirely to plan. Fortunately though my workload has eased up a little now, there’s a number of things I wanted to write about so hopefully I’ll get the chance now.

Speaking of workload, the last ten months or so I’ve spent working on the now announced: Guitar Hero World Tour. It’s the first Guitar Hero game I’ve been involved with properly, having previously worked on the ‘Tony Hawk’ series at the same studio. I’m really proud of what we’ve done with the new game, and I’m sure everyone’s going to enjoy it when it gets released. Really hoping we can get into that 90-100 range on Metacritic, it deserves to.

It’s a double-edged sword working on something so popular. On one hand it’s nice to read the buzz about your game on the internet, people looking forward to new tracks being announced, and seeing how much some people can’t wait for it’s release. On the other hand, there’s the ‘fanboys’. I probably shouldn’t go into it too much, but our game tends to get a bit of rough treatment by commenters on various game websites. Our competition, Harmonix makes great games and has a very loyal following.  Some people have invested heavily into their product, both finanically and emotionally. It’s a shame this clouds objectivity of what we’re offering at times.

It’s widely publicized that our guys at Neversoft used to play the first two Harmonix-developed Guitar Hero games at company parties. In fact I think one of the first times I had beers with the guys I work with now, was over a game of Guitar Hero in our warehouse. We have massive respect for what those guys did with those games, they’re a quality developer. The first game prompted me to get my first console since emigrating to the US (I left my old ones back in England). I remember lugging that PS2 and the guitar bundle a few blocks back to my apartment from the local Best Buy, in the days before I got a car.

Most of my game playing time in this country has been on Guitar Hero. I’d played a decent amount of Tony Hawk before working on those games, but only casually on a couple of games in that series. GH though is a totally different story, one of my favourite games of all time for sure. I remember excitedly bringing my PS2 and the game in my luggage to Simon’s place in Colorado, for his birthday weekend in 2006. Went down a storm. I’d never have thought in a million years that I’d end up working on it.

Dream come true.

Finally, it’s officially announced.

I didn’t really get any sort of hand in Guitar Hero III. Probably a few lines of shared engine code, and the odd bugfix shared from a game I was working on at the time: Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground.

The Aerosmith game though, I’ve done a little bit of work on. So even though like GH3, I’ll be appearing in the credits… This time I can actually feel like I deserve a mention.

It’s nice to be able to talk about this game a bit now. We had the band at our building a few times late last year. It was real cool to be able to hear them doing their mocap (they played the music when doing the capture), whilst making myself a cuppa during the day. Nothing quite beats hearing Aerosmith tracks played live whilst drinking some Tetley. Tyler even paged the entire company when he saw the game in person, to tell us what a good job we’ve been doing. Top guy!

Game does indeed look very good. But obviously I can’t really say any more than that.