A Tale of Two Bands

During the last week of February, right before we went to the Game Developers Conference, we hit enlightenment when one of us proposed the idea to theme our "casualcore" project into a game about bands. Once we agreed that we needed to do this and Bandology was born, it became a game about forming bands, touring around the world playing gigs, gaining fans in every venue, and having leader boards (the charts) to compare against other bands. We also had the idea that players made money along the way to buy new clothes and accessories to wear, and that they could also get achievements we called Patches.

Today, our producer, Andy, bought Rock Band and we played it for a while. It's awesome; I think it's ten times better than Guitar Hero III. On the band career mode, players can create avatars, play in gigs, tour around the world, gain fans in every venue that they play, and get achievements along the way. Oh, and they can get money that can be used to customize avatars, too, and there are leader boards online as well. Sound familiar?

Oh wow. It seems that we both created pretty much the same concept, except that Rock Band is out there for the world to play and Bandology is not (we're working on it, really). The games play styles are completely different, but the themes are too similar to ignore.

However, Rock Band is not our competitor in any way. We're trying to reach a different audience at a different time span for a different purpose. Still, it's easy to be labeled a Rock Band clone even if we came up with the concept in February while Rock Band was announced on April 1, 2007 without too many details on what it would be like.

It's now time for us to think for a bit. We got a month left before we go back into full force on the project. Rock Band has given us some good ideas of what we need to do to make things work right, but also we want to do some things that Rock Band doesn't offer, or that are different from anything else people have seen out there. We're already breaking expectations by not having players play instruments, but how far can we go away from the norm before it just becomes too weird to anyone's liking?

For now, we'll keep playing Rock Band. I suggest you go out and play it, too, because it's awesome, but never forget about Bandology!