For the dev team, this was the perfect opportunity to break from
the ROCK BAND paradigm and craft a new universe of characters
and venues. We were confident that the controller-free, body
tracking, and fully immersive capabilities of Kinect made it the
right technology for our game. Further, the opportunity to work
with choreographers and dancers on a daily basis injected a new
energy into an experienced and seasoned team. However, like any
team working on a new IP, we made mistakes along the way, many
of which were important learning experiences for us. The following
is a selection of our most notable successes and missteps.
WHAT WENT RIGHT
1} KEEPING IT REAL. DANCE CENTRAL’s design started with a lofty aim - to
create a game that will teach players real dance moves. This goal served as a
compass during early prototyping, leading the team toward designs that gave
prominence to dancing above all else. We utilized the instantly recognizable
choreography from Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat” as a litmus test for potential
mechanics, throwing out a number of pose matching and gem hitting
prototypes when they didn’t stand up to the challenge of communicating
moves like the “Lean n’ Rock” or the “Supaman.” After a few months and
several iterations, we settled on our move names and flashcards approach,
which handily communicated the entirety of “Crank Dat.”
Although we had identified core gameplay mechanics that would teach
real dance, we were still unsure of the makeup of our development team. In
working on the ROCK BAND series, we’ve always considered our staff’s intimate
knowledge of rock music a vital element of the franchise. Our developers’
experience touring, playing, and writing for their bands imbues Rock Band
with an authenticity that we believe sets it apart from other music games. In
order to inject the same type of authenticity into a dance game, we felt we had
to assemble a team with a love for hip-hop, pop, and, most of all, dance.
At the dawn of the development of DANCE CENTRAL, we held company-wide tryouts to determine who would mocap the first prototype routine. We
asked each prospective choreographer to both dance the routine to “Crank
Dat” and develop a routine of his or her own design. While most Harmonix
developers ran away screaming, a handful of Harmonix artists proved to be
outstanding dancers and were promptly sent to mocap the first routines.
This choreography proved essential during prototyping, but we quickly
realized it would be critical to add professional dancers to the staff, both to
create original professional-level choreography for the game and to teach the
rest of the team how to dance.
We recruited local choreographers, eventually hiring Marcos Aguirre and
Francisca “Frenchy” Hernandez as our internal choreography team. Marcos and
Frenchy occupied various roles during development: creating choreography for
game levels, holding dance classes for the team, and consulting on everything
from voice over to song list. Their knowledge and excitement were a huge
boost for the team. Through the team-wide dance classes, our choreographers
imparted vital lessons about dance instruction, while exposing the team to the
music, language, and culture of hip-hop dance.
As we tasked our choreographers with developing the first routines
for the game, we refrained from imposing gameplay-driven choreographic
restrictions so we could better understand what made up an authentic
routine. This somewhat open approach was risky, but led to a refined focus
on the game’s core mission, as we shaped our mechanics around actual
dances rather than limiting or shoehorning routines into a rigid structure.
2} BREAK IT DOWN! Given the complexity of the choreographed routines, it
became clear that DANCE CENTRAL would require an in-depth learning mode
where players could spend hours learning more complicated combinations.
We set out to create an experience that was not only effective at delivering
instruction, but also fun to play. We knew that if it weren’t fun, no one would
play it, and therefore no one would learn.
DEVELOPER
Harmonix Music Systems
PUBLISHER
M TV Games/Microsoft
RELEASE DATE
11/4/10
PLATFORM
Kinect for Xbox 360
NUMBER OF DEVELOPERS
60 Devs
LENGTH OF DEVELOPMEN T
15 Months
LINES OF CODE
63,000 lines of script in 310 files,
515,000 lines of code in 1860 files
DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
Typical development machine:
dual core Intel Xeon 3GHz processor
4GB of RAM
nVidia Quadro FX3700 512MB of RAM
320GB hard drive
SOFTWARE
Visual Studio 2008
Motion Builder
3D Studio Max
Cubase
Bink
TECHNOLOGIES
Motion capture
Harmonix custom engine & tools
Kinect full-body tracking
GAME DEVELOPER | JANUARY 2011 24
