“Ultimate Band itself, the whole idea behind it was to encapsulate the physicality of playing … The performance side comes from what you can actually do with the Wiimote and the Nunchuk.â€
Guitar Hero’s popularity has had a profound effect on the game industry. Everywhere you turn, new music games are cropping up. One of them is Ultimate Band, the Fall Line Studio-developed and Disney Interactive Studios-published title created exclusively for the Wii and DS platforms. The developers say that the basic idea was to create a music game for a younger boy (tween) demographic, and make it entirely peripheral-free. “Remember that when we pitched this, there was no such thing as Rock Band and the Wii was still called the Revolution,” laughs Tim Huntsman, Senior Producer.
“Ultimate Band itself, the whole idea behind it was to encapsulate the physicality of playing. Not just playing to a certain rhythm or certain beat, which of course we do because that’s where the rhythm side comes from. The performance side comes from what you can actually do with the Wiimote and the Nunchuk. We spent a lot of time, we got a lot of talented people that have been in this industry for a long time and have worked on a variety of genres and different types of games. We put our heads together and kind of picked through good ideas, what would work and what wouldn’t. Coming up with the instruments that we came up with, again, coming up with the performance aspect. Because we’re Disney, we decided to actually put a story into it.
“Of course, one of the things users really like is a robust create-a-player system. We tied that with the story and that goes back to the male/female vocals we recorded for both sides of your band in the game. We do have some head-to-head play modes, and if you own the DS and Wii versions, you can connect the two and essentially play on an instrument on the DS side and mini-games in freeplay.”
Ultimate Modes
“There’s a lot going on,” says Huntsman, regarding Ultimate Band’s various game modes. “We have the single-player experience. Multiplayer co-op and multiplayer head-to-head. We have the Wii-to-DS connectivity. But going through the actual gameplay itself there are a lot of different elements to it. Playing the instruments, it’s not simply strumming along. We have performance gestures, which are mixed in. We have a trick system called Performance where you hit the D-pad or thumbstick and shake the controller. You get points for doing that. We also have a Grand Stand meter where, if you fill this meter up by playing successfully, it kind of takes you through a hot potato of mini-games that you can bust through really fast and get bonus points for and stuff.”
That Excited Guy on Stage
Huntsman says that the vocal-free frontman gameplay came from the development team’s goal to avoid any form of karaoke. “We kicked it around and thought, since we’re going for the performance thing, and one of our internal guidelines was getting people up off the couch and play,” he says. “We wanted to embrace the physicality of the Wii, in a real way, not just make it so you can sit there in a chair and wave the Wii remote back and forth. You actually have to do these different gestures, and we spent months working on that system. So the idea of the frontman was, you’re not singing but you’re out there pumping up the crowd.
“Initially we wanted you out there slapping hands, stage-diving, climbing on the stage and doing all this crazy stuff. That turned into an issue because we’re on the Wii. We didn’t have access to the kind of capabilities for what we wanted to do. So we changed our focus. We started thinking, what does the frontman do? He’s out there, he’s clapping, he’s waving, he’s pumping up the crowd. He’s doing these dance gestures and jumping up and down. That kind of stuff. We spent a lot of time on that. It’s probably the most aerobic and physical side [of the game]. I know the last couple months of development, the designer doing most of the frontman stuff was the first to come down with carpal tunnel syndrome. [Laughs] I’m kidding! But it was a lot of work.”
