Development
Activision purchased RedOctane in 2006 for $100 million to achieve "an early leadership position in music-based gaming". In September of that year, MTV acquired Harmonix, the developer of all Guitar Hero games up to that point; this purchase would later lead to the development of the competing music-game series, Rock Band. Without Harmonix's availability, Activision selected Neversoft Entertainment to develop Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. Neversoft president Joel Jewett stated his company was asked to develop the game because of a conversation that Jewett had with RedOctane's founders Kai and Charles Huang at the 2006 E3 Convention, in which Jewett mentioned how the first Guitar Hero game helped reduce the stress in the Neversoft offices during their development of Tony Hawk's Project 8. Several months later, Jewett was contacted by the Huangs, asking if Neversoft wanted to work on Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. Dusty Welch, head of publishing at RedOctane, recognized Neversoft had a "10-year track record of launching a game every single year and being in the top of the charts" and felt that the development group "brought a better and deeper sense of music sensibilities" to the series. Despite the experience from the previous games, Alan Flores, head of development at Neversoft, commented that the game was "deceptively simple" and that it took much work for their 30-person team to recreate the gameplay for Guitar Hero III. Though they "wanted to take the Guitar Hero experience to the next level" by adding additional instruments in the same manner as Rock Band, they opted to focus on perfecting the guitar gameplay. In 2010, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick stated that they believed Neversoft would help them to develop great games for the series, but has since come to regret their failure to seek Harmonix for further development responsibility and believed this would have been a better move for both companies.
The note tracks, on-stage motions of the band, and stage lighting and effect synchronization were created by the same team of developers who were all musicians and had previous experience in note tracking either from other music video games or from MIDI tracking. The note tracks were developed by placing notes in time with the song; for sections that had difficult parts to track within the game's engine, they opted to use sequences of notes that would seem to the match the music but still be playable. Hammer-ons and pull-offs ("HOPOs") for the previous Guitar Hero games were automatically placed by the software; in this iteration, the engine was designed to allow manual placement of HOPOs to make it easier to create certain effects in songs, such as sustained string bends. Character animations were selected from several made available by the animation team, while stage lighting and effects were selected to mimic those used in live performances from YouTube or from concert appearances. A separate team came up with the concepts for the various stages and arenas in the game. The team wanted keep the same art style as the previous Guitar Hero games but add "a certain spark" to improve upon previous designs. Once a stage idea was brainstormed, the team sought visual references from real stages to expand upon, and a 2D drawing of the envisioned stage was prepared for review and to remain a constant goal of the stage design. From that, a "pop up" three dimensional version of the stage was created, and elements from the 2D concept art were added to determine the appropriate placement of set decorations. This team worked with the animation department to place the band members, stage lighting, and other effects in the game before the final 3D version of the stage was completed. The final stages included several animated elements to help further bring the stage to life.
For the game's characters, the developers intended to keep the comical looks from the previous games, but they decided to update their appearances with realistic materials and textures to take advantage of the more powerful level of graphics capabilities of seventh-generation consoles. The designers first drew character sketches to determine the characters' looks and clothing, creating a main and an alternate outfit for each character, which were then made into reference artwork. Afterward, low-level meshes for each character were created, with details added with Zbrush, resulting in characters that, before being scaled down for the game environment, had more than six million polygons. Textures and pixel shaders were added using the team's previous work on Tony Hawk's Project 8 to match the style of earlier Guitar Hero games. Unlike the Tony Hawk games, each character in the game was given a unique skeleton to match their variations in sizes and shapes, allowing the animators to create unique moves for individual characters. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock introduces three new characters modeled after real-life musicians. Slash, Tom Morello, and Bret Michaels, each performing one or more songs from their past recordings. All three were brought into the game using motion capture from the Motion Analysis Corporation.
Read more about this topic: Guitar Hero III: Legends Of Rock
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