DANCE CENTRAL (Xbox 360)
Dance Central is an Xbox 360 dancing game made by Harmonix and one of the first titles to utilize the Kinect.
Competitive Analysis
During the inception of Dance Central, I played a number of competing titles and wrote up over one hundred pages of documentation to highlight important takeaways, features, patterns and areas for improvement. Ultimately, this documentation influenced many major systems of the game and helped mold Dance Central into its final form.
Additionally, I repeated this process for the introduction cinematic. I shared notes and references with the art team to help them solidify their approach.
UI Development
During gameplay, flashcards appear off to the side of the screen, containing outlines of a human body striking a pose. These flashcards were designed to help players remember which moves come next in sequence.
I worked closely with the UI team to help develop the visual rules for these flashcards. Some of our final rules include:
- The Flashcard image represents the first big pose of the move. For example, if a move requires the player to fist-pump their right hand and then left hand, the flashcard will display the outline of a person pumping their right hand, since that’s the first big pose of the move.
- If a move is too complicated, we split it up into two images side by side on a single flashcard. Two images per flashcard is the maximum.
- We fill-in specific body parts in the outline that are critical to the move. For example, in the aforementioned fist-pump move, the outline’s right fist would be filled in, as that is the most critical and scoring-relevant part of the move.
Balancing and Song Order
I was part of the team responsible for ensuring that songs were balanced and in the correct order of difficulty.
Song difficulty factors include:
- How many unique moves does a song have?
- How complex are the individual moves?
- How physically exhausting are the moves to perform?
We tested these metrics against songs on their hardest difficulty to determine the order.
Additionally, I worked with our internal tools to balance out individual songs. If I felt a move was too difficult to hit for example, I might take one of the following approaches:
- Extend out the range of acceptable movement for a specific limb
- Decrease the score value for less-essential limbs
