Keiichi Yano, VP of development at Elite Beat Agents creator iNiS, is here at DICE to talk about his company's philosophy. I sincerely doubt that any brand-new information will be unveiled, but stick around for the good quotes and pics of the Power Point slides.
The second-day crowd in the DICE sessions is, as people have been remarking on all morning, thin. Everybody either got hammered last night, or left, or just decided to sleep in. So I'm a little disappointed that there aren't too many people in attendance for today's presentations. Alex's was quite entertaining and I expect this one to be, too. Stick around.
"Yeah! The Mathematics of Music and the Emotion of Game Design"
I should probably start off by saying something similar to what Alex was talking about. We're musicians and I guess I should be used to the stage, but... this is my first English speech.
I want to talk a little bit today about – unfortunately we can't talk about the success stories like Harmonix has accomplished, but I have very strong feelings about what we're doing, what we're trying to accomplish with our titles.
INiS was founded in 1997 by Masako Harada (CEO) and Keiichi Yano. We started off as a multimedia content creation company, we were pursing exotic technologies to find ways for people to interact with music in a meaningful way. We had an audio tech demo for the first Xbox called MixJuice. It had four balls in four corners and you could move an icon around with the gamepad. And you'd have four genres of music, and based on the icon's distance between the four balls it would create this wild mix of all these elements.
As I was preparing this talk, my perspective of how I approach game design, I found out that there were certain common traits in all the games we designed so far.
- Music as the primary game mechanic
- Rich story to motivate game progression
- Unique interface to take advantage of the hardware.
With Gitaroo-Man we wanted to use the analog control in a way people hadn't done before. We wanted to use the DS' touch screen for something unique that might work with music.
Why do we consistently use this combination? Music, story, and gaming are a great match! We believe in the power of music interactivity. As a musician myself, I've played in venues in front of people, and a lot of musicians describe it as "better than sex" sometimes. And getting on stage and playing in front of people is very empowering and gratifying. I would like to keep exploring this.
A little bit of musical theory. Music is created around iterations of "Tension" and "Release." Tension is dissonance. It doesn't sound good. Release is harmony, it naturally sounds good and feels good. It's not stressful. So the sounds that are chosen from the 12 notes in Western music can either create dissonance or harmony.
Harmony, scientifically, what does that mean? non-scientifically, it's pleasing to the ear. What is that mathematically? There's a Golden Ratio, 5:4:3, which makes this all work. If you pick any note from these 12, then count four notes away, then count three notes away, you'll get something that's naturally pleasing.
Breaking the golden balance is not always a bad thing. If dissonance is followed by consonant harmony, this is a good thing. It goes back to the tension and release. Dissonance creates tension, and if you follow that by release... the iterations of that are the building blocks of music.
Why does this sound familiar? If you take any classic game, like a shooting game – if the enemy approaches, there's tension. So what do you do: take a gun and shoot him. And then the enemy dies, and your tension has been released. We are iterating against tension and release constantly to build some type of experience for hte player. So music and gaming are very good together because they share the same principles of tension and release. If we can tie that together it can create something compelling.
2. Rich story to motivate game progression
How about the story? I feel that a good story, any good story, a story that motivates and moves me, has the same elements as a good song. Both are time-based media. Time is a very important aspect, especially when I design my games. I try to think of the player's emotion as something that's not cut and dry. It takes time. I tend to think about it sometimes as state-based media, going from one state to another. The player runs, the player shoots. But in our designs we think about time as a very important aspect.
You create tension in the story and then you release it, giving clues to some type of mystery, and then the mystery is solved. We try to sync all that up. It turns out that music and story in game design are a really great match. They all have the same properties. They all move within the same kind of time space, time frame. We have the time constraints of music games. But if we can sync all those elements up, that sounds like a great game to me.
To take that to the next step, how do we interface that with the player?
We try to have every time some unique interface. When we first started working on Gitaroo-Man, the PlayStation 2 was just anounced. I had originally intended it to be on Dreamcast, but we switched gears. And in doing that, we wanted to accomplish four things.
I wanted to create a music game that didnt' just focus on the rhythm. Parappa, great game, focused on the rhythm. I wanted to fuse the story and the music and the game, but rhythm wasn't enough. When there's a song that I like it just gets stuck in my head. Melody sticks in your head. I wanted to use that as my primary game mechanic in Gitaroo-Man so people can relate to it better.
I wanted to be the first to use a ballad in a video game. Ballads in rhythm games don't really work well from a design standpoint because the tempo's very slow. It's hard to get the player into it. I looked at the great storytellers and realized that great storytelling is always able to switch gears in a meaningful way.
I wanted to be the first to have a story that the player would remember. There have been other games before Gitaroo-Man that had a story that people like, but I wanted to be unique.
We wanted to create our first game. PlayStation 2 was our first console platform, and I was actually the lead programmer on it as well. I hate to say this in front of you, it's really embarrassing. But before then I'd never programmed in C, or Assembler, or anything. I read a lot of books, went to my first GDC. I was really motivated to do that. Up until then we'd been doing a lot of multimedia CD-ROM and stuff like that. We wanted to make a console game but we didn't have the chops. I felt like Christopher Columbus. I didn't know what the heck to do.
Our next game was called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. We had a couple staff who went to E3 when the DS was first announced. Oh, you have a pen, you have a screen. Pen, screen: touch. That sounds like it would lend itself well to a rhythm game.
In Gitaroo-Man we had an all original soundtrack. That had its pros and cons. We wanted to use a licensed soundtrack this time around to make the game a little bit better. With Parappa the Rapper, the teacher or the boss in the game would play the rhythm for you. You heard what you needed to play before you needed to play it. In Gitaroo-Man we didn't have that. We just said, "go."
But if you don't know the song, you don't know the melody, it's really hard. It's trial and error for the player. I wanted to use the same mechanic, so if people knew the songs, I thought they could be able to guess what the next thing should be.
I wanted to separate the action from the story. With rhythm games, you're trying to put some type of meaningful characters and stories behind the gameplay, but it's hard to see. With the two screens on DS I felt that could be a possibility.
The third thing was to do something completely Japanese. I knew, having an American education, that male cheerleaders... that could go in some circles, but probably not most. People think these characters are fictional, but this is very real fact. In Japan, guys cheer on baseball games. For the Japanese audience this is very real.
But then what do we do about the rest of the world? Elite Beat Agents has the same gameplay as Ouendan. Couple of problems: male cheerleaders. We knew from the getgo that this was not going to be a simple translation. We knew we had to completely change everything. We had to change the songs, because I designed the game knowing that people would know what the songs are.
We knew we couldn't just translate the text. We needed to translate the world to suit Western tastes. We had to change two of the three elements. The music and story were completely remade. It was a big-ass conversion project; most people would call it a sequel.
We were fairly successful into translating this concept into something people can relate to, agents in black suits, this Blues Brothersish kind of theme.
I strongly feel that this story/music/game design is a really good fit for us. I do want to continue in this vector. I know every game has a different way of implementing these elements. Inis has created games that leverage our musical expertise, we're just trying to do what we do best. Thanks!
