Blog - Freetar and Frets on Fire
Wednesday, March 19, 2008As a big fan of the Guitar Hero games and an internet junkie, I inevitably discovered the homebrew GH clones out there on the web: Freetar and Frets on Fire.
Both allow the user to make new levels for the game based off music in their collection.
(An idea that perhaps inspired current titles like Phase and Audiosurf?)
Of course, both Phase and Audiosurf do the work of translating your music into game levels for you.
With Freetar and FoF, you have to do it manually, which takes some time and skill.
However, you have more control over the final result, which I enjoy.
I like to make tracks for these games, as it provides some experience working with unique tool sets and adjusting difficulty levels.
I've talked before to some people behind some of the Guitar Hero games about how they establish their difficulty curve between songs and try to implement them into my track designs.
I've been twiddling with this stuff again as I've got time now that it's spring break, so it's been on my mind.
Now, one thing I mentioned in the above paragraph is tools.
Between Freetar and FoF there is an interesting contrast in tools.
Freetar has an amazingly well crafted track editing tool that is a real pleasure to work with. There's only one thing that I wish I could do in it that I can't: you can't click and drag out a selection rectangle to select notes, which would speed up editing quite a bit. That, however, is a pretty minor thing to be the only thing wrong with the tools that the creator (Anton Struyk) built.
Ironically though, Mr. Struyk never actually got to finish building the game itself, before getting hired by Vicarious Visions, which caused him to stop developing the project. So, the game itself remains as a semi-playable prototype, but with an absolutely beautiful track creation tool.
Frets on Fire, on the other hand, has a much more playable, more finalized game.
However, I find their tools completely unusable.
Fortunately, someone out there created a solution I've found nigh-perfect: A tool that lets you convert Freetar tracks and port them over to FoF.
The only problems are that you usually have to override the default bpm and put in your own value, and also FoF doesn't handle hammer-ons and pull-offs nearly as elegantly as Freetar does.
In Freetar and its tools, the track creator manually sets which notes have to be strummed and which can be played with a hammer-on/pull-off technique.
FoF just detects how close a non-identical note is to the previous note, and if they're close enough, automatically makes it into a note that does not have to be strummed.
I can't find a good way to control how large this threshold is either. There are parts I definitely intend the user to have to strum but have no control over it when porting to FoF and I don't get my way. Alas.
So, if anyone is especially good at programming tools, hey, there's a project for you. ;)
Also, I mentioned above that I use my tracks for these games as an experiment in difficulty curve creation, trying to make the perfect build up of challenge between all four levels of difficulty for that track.
It's a tricky thing.
I find it easiest to start with the expert version, transcribing every note of the source song faithfully into the track data, and then as I descend down to easier difficulty levels I slowly whittle the notes away down to their core. In other words, reduce the songs into the bare minimum of notes where one can play it and still feel like they're playing the song. So even though half the notes are gone, the essence of that song is still there.
The problem with this is that this constantly makes you as the track designer want to overestimate the easy player's skills, as you have to constantly make the call as to whether a newbie to the game could actually be able to hit any given note before you decide to delete it or leave it.
From talking to people who worked on Guitar Hero I was told that they kept finding that even when they thought they had dumbed down the easy level songs all they could, testers still complained they were too hard and they had to dumb them down even more.
As such, if there's ever a doubt whether or not I should cut a note that might be too hard for an easy/medium level track, I usually air on the side of cutting it, and of dumbing the song down.
It's just a hard thing to keep in mind when you've seen every note before in the expert version, and seem to be whittling the song into nothing.
Hmm, I still have to get around to fixing up my design page and finally putting the tracks I've done up there...
Labels: design, Freetar/FoF
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:01 PM
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