University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Bardcore!

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Bardcore!

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Content Bardcore!
A USC Thesis Paper
By
James Hughes
Master of Fine Arts
Interactive Media & Games Division
School of Cinematic Arts
University of Southern California
August 9, 2016

Bardcore! Page 2 of 9

Table of Contents
Why Bardcore!? 2
Science Behind Call and Response 4
Development 5
Simplicity in Design, Minimalist Game Design 6
Too Long Didn’t Read Version 7
WHAT IS BARDCORE!? 7
MUSIC THAT WORKS BEST 8
INTERACTION BETWEEN PLAYERS 8
Works Cited 9

Why Bardcore!?:
As a gamer I’ve steadily become more and more interested in multiplayer experiences, in
particular, cooperative multiplayer experiences. I was never a great conversationalist growing up,
so playing games with my friends and family helped me interact and bond with people. Before
coming to USC I had designed a few Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, Dungeon Mastered
them and so forth, but upon my arrival I really wanted to go digital, as those were the games that
really sucked me in first.
So I spent time developing my skill set and diversifying my design craft. I didn’t get
around to cooperative multiplayer much, and for my thesis, seeing as I was so passionate about

Bardcore! Page 3 of 9

it, I wanted to take the last of my time at USC to explore that space. For my last semester before
thesis year I got to make a game exploring my grandfather’s time in World War 2, and because I
wanted to convey the sense of futility, helplessness and loss felt by the soldiers, I finally had an
opportunity to make a multiplayer game. I made a game where four players swim across a river
trying to escape from the Russians. One at a time each player gets shot and dies until there is
only one character left, my grandfather, Peter Fiek. I loved dipping my toe into this multiplayer
space, and it also informed my design decisions going forward on my thesis. I realized I didn’t
just want the players playing the same game together, I actively wanted the players interacting
with each other.
Thinking about active interaction got me thinking about a game called Chrono Trigger.
Chrono Trigger is only single player, but the player controls three characters at a time. These
characters can then attack individually or they can wait for other characters to be ready and
combine their attacks. It was these kind of interactions that I wanted to base the interactions in
my game off of. One player lights another player’s sword on fire, and the other player attacks
with it. A sort of set and spike to use volleyball terms. I felt like these would be meaningful
enough interactions to make the players feel like they weren’t just playing beside each other, but
with each other.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles allowed combining of spells in real time, if two players
cast Ice at the same time it becomes Ice 2. I thought this mechanic was a great deal of fun, but I
felt like the game didn’t do enough to help the players time it together correctly. I got to thinking
about timing in games and how sound effects can be linked to certain actions. This sort of led to
thinking about Pavlovian conditioning and if musicality can be employed to create a sort of

Bardcore! Page 4 of 9

chain of stimulus. Ultimately to allow progression in the music I didn’t resort to a trained sound,
but rather let the language of the musicality give predictability to the timing.
So I looked into what makes music “catchy”, why we can remember it, why certain songs
get stuck in our heads. Certainly there are memorable hooks, sweet guitar licks and so and so
forth, but one thing that caught my attention was the musical practice of call and response. Songs
such as Carly Rae Jepson’s Call Me Maybe employs it, having the violins respond to the lyrics.
Jazz musicians improvise around it, having one musician make a musical statement then the
other musician responds in their own musical statement.

Science Behind Call and Response:
As I approached designing my game I wanted to know why certain songs were more catchy than
others. My research led me to understand there were different causes for it, but one way to create
catchy music was to employ call and response.
“When processing information, brain cells called neurons communicate with each other
through a cascade of electrochemical reactions referred to as firing. If you focus and
concentrate on something sufficiently, the brain will fire neurons in new patterns. This
neural pathway is the beginning of a new memory.
Connecting call and response with rhythm or chanting helps neurons fire and wire
together. The rhythm becomes permanently associated with and connected to what is
being remembered, making the information easier to retrieve.” (Hammond)

Bardcore! Page 5 of 9

Development:
So in regards to how development broke down, first semester I spent a lot of time
experimenting with new things, and this led to a bit of a problem. So going in I was excited to do
away with health bars and have the whole game run on a physics engine, sort of a crush of the
crowd experience, getting pushed around a mosh pit. The enemies would try to push you off and
you would try to push them off. The idea was the better you worked with your teammate, the
more powerful your push. I came up with a decent feeling prototype for just the pushing around
of the enemies, but I was working solo with my own limited engineering abilities, so that
prototype ultimately wasn’t able to have sound because the physics were taxing enough to make
the game slow down below a steady framerate, thus desynching my jury rigged beat detection
system. A prototype without sound for a thesis about sound is only so useful. Fortunately I was
able to take lessons I learned first semester and carry them forth to second semester which went a
lot smoother.
Second semester I realized I alone would not be enough to finish this project, so I set
about recruiting a team, and much to my good fortune, Thomas Lu was able to come to my
rescue and take on Lead Engineer duties. Along with Patrick Quah helping to produce and design
(Thomas also designed), and Guayo Llach, Christina Orcutt and Martzi Campos on art, things
started to get underway. We started having Prashanth Srinivas GS compose music and things
started to feel a little better on the production side. Unfortunately we did that thing that happens
when a bunch of game designers start working on a project, we all had a bunch of really fun
ideas and immediately went way out of scope. This put strain on Thomas to keep adding things
to the game so we weren’t able to lock down a mechanic early on.

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It wasn’t until the end of March when I realized we were seriously overscoped. We had
mechanic on top of mechanic and we didn’t even have the beat detection working correctly, nor
was the music correctly implemented yet. The music was very interesting and unique, but
ultimately I needed massive revisions due to changes in how we were implementing it,
specifically I needed it to be extremely catchy and repetitive and rewritten around longer
segments so they’d be easily recognizable by the player. The changes were so massive that I
couldn’t have Prashanth do them and instead had to ask Julie Buchanan to join the team and
quickly compose some new music.
As I was quickly running out of time I realized that I need to simplify, not just for the
sake of time, but because I was veering dangerously off target. I remembered back to some of
my more successful projects that were inspired by Richard Lemarchand’s teachings on
minimalist game design and really focused on the lessons I learned making those.

Simplicity in Design, Minimalist Game Design:
“Minimalism sports several catchy slogans, such as: “less is more,” or “doing more with less,” or
“less but better.” Across all disciplines, the idea is to strip away all unnecessary components,
leaving only the parts one really needs.” (Nealen 2)
I cut away the unnecessary parts of the project and was able to focus in on finding the one
thing I wanted to address in the first place. Music as a mechanic to assist timing. The game went
from four buttons, half of which weren’t even fully designed, to a one button game about trading
attacks on the beat. Suddenly I wasn’t worrying about weird theoretical attacks that I wanted to
implement, but rather was able to just focus on making the one interaction between the players
feel good.

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The goal was to facilitate cooperation and complexity was not helping to prove my thesis.
Having players pick up the controller and after a little time learning the system and the music, be
able to interact with each other in the game was the most effective proof of the concept. I’d love
to continue to flesh out the experience, but having a working proof of concept is what was
important.
The most important lesson I learned was to innovate where you need to, not where you
want to. I had wanted to remove life bars and health points, not to prove anything, but simply
because I fancied the idea. It wasn’t helping to prove the thesis. I should not have wasted any
development time on it, and yet I did. Most games use life bars for a reason. They are simple and
they work. In a thesis project where time is short, pick your battles. Innovate to prove your
thesis, otherwise use genre conventions, embrace them.

Too Long Didn’t Read Version:
WHAT IS BARDCORE!?:
 A game that adopts the perspective of games like Gauntlet, but requires players to
interact with each other to do even the most basic of attacks.
 The attack is a projectile that flies in a straight line from the firing player. It takes two
hits to kill an enemy.
 Players take turns attacking. When one player attacks they play a musical phrase, once
that is finished, the other player has a small window to attack. They can trade back and
forth forever.
 The longer the players go without missing their turn, the bigger the projectile becomes,
the farther it goes, and the faster it travels.

Bardcore! Page 8 of 9

MUSIC THAT WORKS BEST:
 Each character needs their own identifiable sound. I had it so each player just played the
next part of the track in order to allow either player to start, and by the time I realized it
was necessary, there simply wasn’t time to have the music rewritten.
 Long enough musical phrases that there is time for a player to listen to them and respond.
 Proper cues to know when it is your turn. A gap in the music worked best for me, maybe
more advanced levels could lessen the gap between call and response

INTERACTION BETWEEN PLAYERS:
 Develop the main interaction first, and actually implement it. You can have an idea of
where you are going, but get the early stuff in and working. The simple moment to
moment needs to be satisfying and if you can’t make that work, nobody is going to play
long enough to find the depth.
 Coordinating is hard, do everything you can to facilitate it. I went in thinking music
would be enough but do not forget your visual cues. Help in any way you can.
 I had a fun idea to have different attacks, and the more powerful your attack, the longer it
would be before your partner could attack. I wish I could have implemented this.

Bardcore! Page 9 of 9

Works Cited
Hammond, Zaretta. “The Neuroscience of Call and Response.” Tolerance. Southern

Poverty Law Center, 15 Apr. 2013. Web. 11 July 2016.

Nealen, Andy. “Towards Minimalist Game Design.” Rutgers U, n.d. Web. 11 July 2016.

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The Other Half

Asset Metadata

Creator Hughes, James Peter Castle (author)

Core Title Bardcore!

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 01/11/2017

Defense Date 08/09/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cooperative,OAI-PMH Harvest,rhythm,video games

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Wixon, Dennis (committee chair), Lemarchand, Richard (committee member), Watson, Jeff (committee member)

Creator Email JamesPCHughes@gmail.com,Jphughes@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-325283

Unique identifier UC11214789

Identifier etd-HughesJame-4969.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-325283 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HughesJame-4969.pdf

Dmrecord 325283

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Hughes, James Peter Castle

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA