Designing Your Player’s First Impression

Achieving Commercial Success with Innovative Games (A Case Study of Harmonix Games' FreQuency and Amplitude)
Greg LoPiccolo

Introduction
This lecture is about the lessons learnt while designing one game, as applied to the design of a second game. Harmonix is a game design company that was spun out of MIT Media Lab in 1995. It initially focused on interactive music innovation and aimed to bring the experience of musical performance to non-musicians. It began to focus on games in 1999 with the onset of Japanese music games in the market and Harmonix realized that this was a genre that would be eminently suitable for them to explore and tune to Western tastes to provide Western game players a deeper and more satisfying game experiences. The following paragraphs will deal with how Harmonix learnt from the failure of its music game FreQuency while designing and launching its subsequent product Amplitude.

FreQuency – an introduction
Harmonix was essentially interested in producing innovative games. By "innovative", they meant that the game had to have a fundamentally new form of gameplay – either a new user interface or a new type of player interaction. Innovative games, while being new and refreshing, carry the extra burden of novelty. Since it is something that the users have never seen before, they have to be convinced of the game's value in order to spend money on the game. Harmonix created a prototype of FreQuency and pitched it to several large game companies like Microsoft and Sony, and eventually signed a deal with Sony to produce the game.

Response to FreQuency
Harmonix believes that FreQuency was a good game. It was critically successful, embraced by the developer cognoscenti, won the British BAFTA Award as one of the most innovative games in its year of release and received reviews like:

• IGN: "Run out and get this game as soon as you can, you'll thank us later." (9.0)
• Gamespot: "FreQuency claims the title of best rhythm game with ease and is a thoroughly
• enjoyable game in its own right." (8.7)
• GamePro: 4.5 (of 5)
• GameZone 9.0
• GamingAge: A-

However, the game failed to sell in the marketplace. Harmonix conducted a detailed analysis of this failure in order to come up with a better product, and some of the findings of this analysis are mentioned as follows.

Reasons for the failure of FreQuency

1. The burden of the innovative game was too much for FreQuency to bear. Game audiences aren't interested in breaking new conceptual ground; they want to be entertained. They are very risk averse to buying something new, unless they have heard about it or seen it on their friend's machine.
2. FreQuency gave inadequate attention to the first moments of gameplay. People would pick it up at a kiosk or store, play for 30 seconds and then drop it as they weren't having fun and the game didn't enable them to have fun from the moment they started playing.
3. The game had retro, Tron-like graphics, and while the designers thought this to be cool, the game's potential customers did not. Since FreQuency shipped, the aesthetic range available to developers has widened slightly and there have been instances of retro-like game graphics succeeding, but the margin of what is acceptable to consumers is still tight.
4. FreQuency wasn't immediately comprehensible to someone that started playing it. There was no player character and the player intention/action was highly abstract for the players to get on their own.
5. FreQuency wasn't nurturing enough for novices. It had a steep difficulty curve. There was a certain amount of gratuitous player abuse that the players didn't seem to like. The game also had mysterious failure conditions that irritated the players.
6. The developers were aware of all of the above issues, however they grossly underestimated their significance but didn't take them seriously enough and paid the price.

Amplitude – the response to the failure of FreQuency

Harmonix decided to focus on early player experience as it came up with different prototypes of a game to correct the problems of FreQuency. It conducted extensive rounds of testing on with players who had no idea of what the game was like and had never played anything like it before, and the game went through several rounds of iterations before it was finalized. The graphics problem was solved by pumping up the resources in the graphical domain. A lot of animation was added and tied in with the audio component of the game to make it more visually appealing. From a tunnel, the game world was opened up as a highway, and made more visually compelling. The game was made less abstract by having elements like ship and lasers which helped clarify player action. There was a 3D character or avatar (the FreQ) that represented the player that could be customized, as Amplitude was an online game for PS2. The FreQ also represented the player actions, so if the player was playing drums, he/she would see FreQ playing drums in the game. The instruments were also identified by color to make things easier. The learning curve problem was tweaked significantly. From 3 different levels, they now had 4 carefully calibrated difficulty levels, starting with an incredibly easy level and rising to more complex levels. They also added a better tutorial and a practice mode and carried out several mechanical revisions to the gameplay (such as having checkpoints, a spinning-plate mechanic, etc.)

The after-effects of Amplitude
While Amplitude might not have been hugely successful, it did manage to put Harmonix on the map, and established it as a company that could create a compelling music game. It soon had several publishers asking them to develop music games for them. After Amplitude shipped, they had an urgent call from Konami to create a music game for them called Karaoke Revolutions for the Christmas season, which they did successfully and the game sold extremely well. The design process that
Harmonix developed while making FreQuency and Amplitude (the fundamental mechanics and the process of refining them) was used effectively in the making of Karaoke Revolutions, conceptually a completely different game. They are also currently designing a big project for Sony.

Suggested Reading

1. Algorithmancy.org
2. Formal Abstract Design Tools
3. Dperry.com
4. Indiegamejam.com
5. Rules of Play (Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen, MIT Press, 2003)