Guitar Hero and Band Hero

The final few months at Underground were extremely frustrating for everybody as we went from potential project to potential project. During that time we worked on many demos for products within the Guitar Hero or Band Hero franchise. This post contains a lot of the work done in that time.

Guitar Hero 7

Of all the things we did at Underground (Z-Axis) this demo is probably the work that I’m most proud of. My directive for this was to come up with a visual look for a Guitar Hero game that would breathe fresh life into the franchise without requiring us to re-do all of the work that was done before (like all the Create a Rocker costumes), and was something we could easily replicate for as much as 80 songs on a tight deadline and a tiny staff. What you see here was done in a month completely in-game except for two notable After Effects ‘paint overs’.

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Band Hero

When we started work on Band Hero I was told that the company wanted this product to have a distinct look that separated it from the Guitar Hero line. They were looking for something a little less edgy and more family friendly. With that in mind we went after everything from characters to environments, fonts to UI. These videos show where we ended up after about two months of solid, directed work.

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Another clip, this one with no audio:

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And one more (larger but with more compression) with no audio:

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And this was a demo we created trying to prove out the concept of doing Music Video venues as a change of pace to the regular stage shows.

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And here are a few samples of the concept work we did in that time.

A few turntable animations of the 3d characters.

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Back to Guitar Hero

Here is a very rough animatic for a Guitar Hero intro sequence. One of the things I really wanted to do with this product is go back to really celebrating the core cast of characters and since we were thinking of adding some very light RPG meta game elements we thought that we could weave the core cast into the players story.

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Guitar Hero Van Halen

Regardless of how I feel about how the end product came out I’m still proud of what we were able to achieve at Underground; four SKU’s in 10 months, starting with an art group of four (including myself!), and only three dedicated engineers. In the course of 10 months we hired like crazy (ending up with a staff of 18), we had to learn a completely new engine, and deal with a company that didn’t really know what kind of game they wanted from us. It wasn’t until we were well into alpha that they could even tell us what the title was! Oh yeah, we didn’t even know that we were doing the PS2 and wii versions of the game until about two months prior to alpha. On top of all that we were also shackled by the fact that the company didn’t want us to do any movies for the game and the band didn’t want us to include any interviews and videos of themselves, something that we knew was going to kill us with the press.

It wasn’t all bad though we had some great help from the Toys for Bob group that mostly tackled the art needs for the wii, our Central Art group who helped us generate some of our early band models, and Neversoft for being so easy to work with. We also ended up hiring some amazing people.

At the end of the day I can say that I’m satisfied with how the game ended up looking.

*Images and Vidoes Coming Soon*

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