Guitar Hero Series (2008-2010)
Guitar Hero World Tour
The Guitar Hero series was a huge project for Neversoft. We were in non-stop production, releasing 9 titles in only 4 years. On Guitar Hero World Tour I designed and built the Music Studio together with two other designers. The Music Studio was a fully fledged note sequencer allowing you to design tracks then play them back with Guitar Hero gameplay. You could also upload your creations and download other creator’s custom tracks.
This project challenged me to learn a lot about music theory, guitar chords, note scales, and user created content. The Music Studio was also the first online networked project I worked on, so there were many unexpected networking issues to solve.
Guitar Hero 5
On Guitar Hero 5 I integrated the objective based mission system from Tony Hawk to add an extra layer of bonus challenges on top of every song. I also maintained and updated the vocals singing mode for new hardware, UI updates, and enhanced octave detection.
Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock
On Warriors of Rock I created a new Quickplay+ game mode that expanded on the previous title’s bonus challenge system. I also maintained the existing career, competitive, and GHStudio game modes. I also created an auto test system that played through songs automatically overnight and logged data to help us find bugs and identify balance issues.
We’re All Rockstars
The Guitar Hero series was an amazing time - We met Taylor Swift in the office, heard stories about Zakk Wylde’s crazy antics in our mocap studio, and saw Aerosmith and their buddies show up to Neversoft in million dollar super cars. We all had fun trying to be like the rockstars in our game, if only for a short time.