Rocksmith+

Role

Senior Designer

Release

July 31, 2018

Responsibilities

Systems Design

Leadership & Contributions

On Rocksmith+, I was the feature owner for a suite of improvements to the Rocksmith series' signature Dynamic Difficulty feature: a system that took in live hit/miss data from the player's performance and adjusted the difficulty accordingly during play to better meet the player's level.

Our improvements to Dyanamic Difficulty included a two-fold approach:

1. Leverage improved note detection (the analysis of the signal coming from the player's guitar into the game) to diagnose why a player missed the note. Previous versions of Rocksmith could only tell that the note was wrong. With improved analysis, we could deduce if the issue was due to a missed fret, an incorrect chord shape, an errant strum, etc.
2. Organize topics into a curriculum similar to an RPG stats map, so players could see what skills they were aquiring and what might be next for them to try and tackle. I design our curriculum, I hired a music educator onto our team to guide the organization of skills in a way that would be beneficial and motivating for students.