Foster, Chris (Harmonix Music Systems Inc.)

Thema: "Stone Soup: Collaboration and Communication in Game Design"

Chris Foster is a Project Director at Harmonix Music Systems, having joined the company in 2006. He was the lead designer for "The Beatles: Rock Band" and the designer and one of the programmers of the iPod game Phase.

Before coming to Harmonix Chris spent nine years at Turbine, where he worked on the original Asheron's Call and was a Lead Content Designer on The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. Chris has been designing and developing games since 1992, starting at Impressions Software and earning co-design and producer credits on Caesar II and Lords of the Realm.

Summary of presentation:

Game teams often have multiple designers, writers and playtesters overseeing a design that's implemented by dozens of other developers. In these circumstances, one of the bigger challenges for a designer is not how you shape a game, but how you maintain the relationships with the people whose code, art and audio directly define that game.

Game design may sometimes seem like the art of getting other people to paint your fence for you, but in reality it's about collaborating with others to make the best game possible. It's important to not just learn to work well with others, but to embrace the entire team as a key part of the design process.

These ideas are illustrated using anecdotes from over fifteen years of game design experience, including case studies from the development of The Beatles: Rock Band.