Rock Band 2 and using Properties

Good Wednesday Everyone,

Unlike James, I did not do a good job of thinking of a topic during the last week, slightly busy and such. I did do a fair amount of Rock Band 2 playing, and I will spend a few moments summing up what the multitudes of reviews have said along with a few pet peeves. I think I will also spend a few words talking about using Properties as a method of potentially fostering easier and quicker game development.

Rock Band 2 is a fantastic expansion pack game. No really, it is more a an expansion pack with a few gameplay tweaks than it is a full sequel, however I have no problem spending 60 dollars on 80 some-odd fantastic songs along with everything else. The song list is pretty damn crazy! While there are a few songs which I am pretty “meh” about in terms of their value as a song in Rock Band (Master Exploder, Visions the sound quality isn’t that far off) in general the track list is amazing. But where I feel Rock Band 2 falls short are in the little itty-bitty details which you often notice when you play a game a lot. How come my previous scores are displayed as they are? Where are the stars I earned, or how about the percentage of the song I was able to complete? Why aren’t these options I can turn on and off? The more I am able to customize my interface, the happier I am. These are not hard things to implement. All of these fields are being stored by the game, and I should be able to tell the game which ones I want to see. Overall Rock Band 2 is very worth the money, I just wish that it was a slightly more polished presentation.

Now, on to using the paradigm of Properties to maybe help develop games quick and easier. Properties are something that I use at work. Essentially I have the ability to adjust values in my program by simply changing them in the property document, and then restarting the program rather than hard coding them in and having to constantly re-compile. What if we wrote a helper class that, at runtime, would read in a text document which had a map of values and used those when running the game? The guy is hitting too hard? Well turn down his damage and restart the game. This allows for quick and easy tweaking without having to go back to the source code. This also allows for an easy way to modify the game if someone wants to make it easier and harder.

Now the system I use at work is incredibly robust, and what I explained here is only a tiny fraction of its power. However, it was designed and written by people with much more experience than myself. I simply think that some of the ideas behind it have a lot of potential.

Anyway…until next time!
-Matt