Dance Central 3: Parties, Menus, and Time Travel
The low-down on Kinect's ultimate dšancing fraānchise
Matt Boch, Project Lead on 澳擲幸čæ5å¼å„å·ē åå²ę„询:Dance Central 3, talks to GamesRadar about the challenges Harmonix faced throughout the entire series, and how that learning contributed to their creation of the forthcoming booty-shaker.
You guys created the Kinect-based dancing experience with Dance Central 1, and refined it further with Dance Central 2. What needed to be improved for Dance Central 3?
With 澳擲幸čæ5å¼å„å·ē åå²ę„询:Dance Central 1, we wanted to create the ultimate full-body dancing experience, and there were huge amounts of foundation laying we had to do to make that possible. With 澳擲幸čæ5å¼å„å·ē åå²ę„询:Dance Central 2, our big focus was on multiplayer and creating new experiences you could share with friends via our Dance Battle mode. We went about making DLC for Dance Central 2, and the thing that was always next... we really saw two opportunities to do big things with 澳擲幸čæ5å¼å„å·ē åå²ę„询:Dance Central 3.
One was the creation of a full-fledged story mode. We had done a lightweight story mode with Dance Central 2, but we really wanted to jump in and go whole hog on a full on campaign experience in a Kinect game, which we really hadnāt seen someone do, and we wanted to wrap that into dance culture and dance history. We also started going after huge dance crazes from the past; things like the Hustle, the Electric Slide, and more contemporary things like "Teach Me How to Boogie". We thoughź¦t itād be a great way to incorporate our intentions for a story mode and to teach people real famous choreography by creating a time travel story mode - we can get a bit more into that later.
The other thing we tried to go after was party accessibility. We saw a lot of people playing Dance Central 1 and 2 at parties in a multiplayer context, but a lot of our menu systems - and even just the general difficulty of the game - wasnāt always the perfect thing for the complete newcomer to Kinect or Dance Central. The menu system still reviewed very positively - itās always an odd thing having your menu system reviewed - but there was still something of a learning curve. So with Dance Central 3 we created two new party modes: Party Time and Crew Throwdown. In Party Time, we have very simplified gesture navigation: you swipe with your right arm to select a song, swipe with your left to change modes, and high-five to start playing. Similarly, in the Crew Challenge mode, which is more of a 澳擲幸čæ5å¼å„å·ē åå²ę„询:Mario Party kind of mode, two teašms of one to four players go up against each other and try to find who is the best š¼crew. In that experience weāve also simplified things through automatic song selection and simplified gestures.
In addition to those party modes, weāve introduced three new ways to play, and across the entire experience weāve introduced a new difficulty called Beginner. In party mode, youāre going to have a special function - if youāre playing on Easy, the game can dź§rop you down dynamically to Beginner if the choreography is a bit more difficult and youāre not doing so well. We always make sure youāre having a great time doing moves that are suited to your skill level and familiarity with the game. That Beginner difficulty fixes a long-standing problem weāve had in the Dance Central games: everyone points people to the first couple of songs when theyāre going to play for the first time. We wanted to allow every single song in the entire back catalogue to be fully playable by anyone at a party, so we created the Beginner difficulty to meet that aim.
On top of that, we have three new ways to play: one is called Make Your Move, which brings a more creative angle into the gameplay experience; something that we felt was missing from the previous Dance Central games. Weāre actually doing dynamic flashcard generation, dynamic detection, creation - you basically go back and forth and youāre creating moves with your friend, like a game of the basketball game HORSE. You do a move, your friend has to copy it, they do a move, you have to copy it, and we sequence all of that into a little routine that youāve made. Itās a blast - it brings the creativity and fun of dance to a very different level. We also have a new mode called Keep the Beat, where we&šrsquo;ve developed a brand new type of detection that can tell whether your moves are in time with the musiš³c. Itāll reward you for dancing in time, and you have to switch moves pretty often because if you get a string of moves to the beat, youāll enter a state where it can be stolen from - if the other player copies what youāre doing, theyāll get a whole bunch of points. Itās a more freestyle experience, it encourages the type of dancing people do out at clubs in the real world, and thatās a type of dancing we hadnāt really gone into in the world of Dance Central, and itās another type of accessible experience where youāre determining the difficulty of the moves youāre doing. And then we have another mode called Strike a Pose, where youāre in a frenetic battle with your friends to capture as many poses as you possibly can before the time runs out.
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We wanted to allow every single song in the entire back catalogue to beš„ fully playable by anyone at a party
So with all the modes and the wrappers around them, weāve really created a much more accessible, much more party-friendly Dance Central experience. In addition, weāve also been able to take advantage of the Xbox SmartGlass app to make it even better. In Party Time, you can be changing the difficulty of your party, turning on and off modes, creating a playlist, restricting the party to particular playlists - you can be controlling the party without interrupting the action. I can see my friend stepping up, and he really canāt play on Hard, so Iāll restrict the difficulty to Easy and weāll go from there. Or, people are playing this horrible song I dāonāt like, sāo Iām going to restrict the party to this playlist of these songs that I do like. So those are the big initiatives that we focused on, and that we saw as ways to improve on the Dance Central experience.
You mentioned the challenges of creating an intuitive interface. With Kinect essentially giving you a blank canvas, with no set rules for how to make a things intuitive and accessible, how do you guys approach such a task?
With the original Dance Central we spent almost as much time developing our menu system as we did devāeloping any other part of the game. It was a huge and important initiative - we tried everything we could possibly think of. Once we settled on something we thought was pretty decent, we put it in front of a bunch of people - very young kids, children of people who were on the development team, friends of ours, and so forth. We saw how people reacted to it, saw what their expectations were, and saw what pieces of information didnāt work, or were lacking or missing. One thing we landed on was this notion that people are generally impatient. We tried a bunch of paradigms that were more along the lines of a hover-and-hold kind of gesture, but we felt like a good interface shouldnāt keep us waiting. So when we developed the swipe gesture, we felt really good about that, because it made the act of selection a movement in and of itself, which is a great fit for a dance game. And also, it never leaves you with a feeling of āIām waiting for this action to happen when Iāve already made my selection.ā
We spent almost as much time developing our menu system as we did developing any other šøpart of the game
I think the difficulty, as weāve iteratź§ed through it through the three Dance Central games, is how do we allow that interface to grow and change within the game. Thatās always been a bit of a challenge, because thereās some core issues with the way the body is restricted and the way that Kinect works that give us some design constraints - ones wš¼eāve ultimately made for ourselves. As you point out, we were given a blank canvas, but we still need to meet expectations to some extent. So we know the swipe gesture is a pretty fun and intuitive gesture, and when you see people doing it, you can pick up on it very quickly.
I would say, ultimately, the word āintuitiveā is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to making things that are brand new. Something youāve never seen before is basically impossible to intuit, but you want the lowest acquisition time possible - how quickly will someone learn this? I think the challenges there centre around putting the right cues on the screen, and making it obvious, when someone else does it, how you can step up and do the same thing. So with our party UI, we got rid of the necessity of vertical accuracy. Youāre not moving your hand up and down to do the swipše gesture. As long as you see someone doing a swipe gesture of any kind, and youāve picked up at least that part of the experience, no matter how tipsy or intoxicated you might be, you can do a swipe and thereās no āmissedā swipe in Party Time.
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