Is Dance really a must-have ?

[Gyoo]

Hello,

The question here won't be if Dance is something important in the game/gameplay, but is Dance something we really need to release a song ingame ?

From my point of view, I think that "common" instruments are guitar, bass, drums, and legacy keys. Then, the game provides also Real instruments and dance, but I think that, as real instruments aren't always charted when a song is released, dance might be this way too, since having a dancemat is just as common as having a "real" drumkit, RB PRO instruments or a MIDI synth.

By the way, not to mention that dancemats seem not to be natively profiled by the game.

Here is my POV, I want for yours, it may be time to take decisions before we get a release countdown

Gyoo.

[knapman [FD]]

as far as proper setlist songs go it should be considered important, anything outside of that doesn't really matter

setlist songs are a selection to best demonstrate what the game has to offer, they should include as many of the games features as possible, some real modes have extra complications involved so less focus is put on those (we'd still want to sort them out eventually) but dance is not effected by those complications

[sighunter]

i have a wii dance mat and I really appreciated that it worked with phase shift.
(with some manual key remapping with joy2key or what its called again).
imho its a cool addon.

unfortunately all the songs (even the easiest for dance mat on "very easy") were so insanely difficult
that i couldnt even dance 1 song to the end. even my sister (who plays dancing stage hottest party, which is similar)
said that

[knapman [FD]]

interesting, so we'll need to review the dance downcharting

you've actually tried all the songs and they are all to hard on the easiest mode?

[asskickulater]

Mar 19, 2013 12:37:43 GMT knapman [FD] said:

interesting, so we'll need to review the dance downcharting

you've actually tried all the songs and they are all to hard on the easiest mode?

knapman, this was what i was referring to when i was charting dance for judgement (I think it was judgement) that you said was to easy, using a keyboard vs dance mats is a huge difference in difficulty, I can agree that most of the dance charts for these songs are far to hard on a dance mat.

[JD2504]

I might have mentioned some of this in the past but here are my thoughts about dance mode in PS, its gonna be a text wall but please give it a read when you get the time

(as a side note i used to play the crap out of DDR in the arcade and home before i got too old for it)

1. Most of PS dance charts abuse arrow combos/chords(in PS terms) without considering if its phisically possible to hit them, mostly cases of consecutive "chords". Keeping that in mind it is not so easy to chart dance, its not just placing arrows to the rhythm with random patterns and most importantly "chords" have to be placed carefully.

2. In contrast to that, in PS single arrow sections tend to be too easy/undercharted even in expert/maniac/heavy difficulty which is meant to be really hard and only for "pros". In DDR difficulty is mostly defined by notes per second and their timing, as in series of single arrows with just a few "chords" in betwen (if any). For reference watch this video, its a classic "very hard" song even if it doesnt look so...

3. I dont blame charters for this mistakes though, charting dance takes a whole diferent breed of charters than the ones used to charting instrumental songs. A breed that is almost extinct and only cares about charting for stepmania.

3. PS uses full lenght songs which is far from ideal for dance mode, its a mode that takes a lot of energy from you in a short time, average ddr song lenght dont even reach 2 minutes, and even "long version" songs are around 3 or 4 minutes max.
Playing DDR is a healty activity, but doing so for full 5 or more minutes at once no so much.

4. Unlike in PS, in DDR you dont loose meter/break your combo by pressing arrows in empty sections, you loose meter only by missing arrows or by hitting them too early/late. This is probably why they found PS dance mode way too hard even on easy. The correct way of playing dance is by staying on arrow pads, not going back to the center like PS forces you to do(thats pretty much imposible in difficulties other than begginer)

5. Stepmania, yes it had to be its own whole point, its pretty much the perfect DDR emulator, if anyone is interested in having the full dance experience thats where they will go. DDR is a complex game with too many features and mechanics for PS to replicate(arrows dynamic speed, chart modifiers, difficulty modifiers, game modes, just to name a few) it would be like a game within a game, heck even a blitz mode would of been easier to make since it shares a lot more mechanics with rb/gh style games.


Of course this is all asuming you play dance mode with a dance mat which is the way you envisioned it. If dance mode were to be played with keyboard/gamepad all of the above would be irrelevant, but then again that wouldn't be dance, it would be more of an "Arcade mode".

I understand you want to support as many peripherals and their gamemodes as you can, but IMHO analizing all the pros and the cons of making a proper dance mode its just not worth it/viable. We struggle enough already to make proper charts and downcharts for core and real instruments.

I love both PS and DDR but i belive they just dont mix.

/end of textwall
(sorry i had to get that off my chest )

[knapman [FD]]

it boils down to is some improvements need to be made, i've said before when the subject has come up but i completely i disagree about the concepts not mixing, what we did was a quick test starting point and it already shows it has potential, obviously its not a fully featured mode and further tweaks are needed

as for shorter songs well theres no reason people couldn't chart dance optimised songs, and for longer songs theres potential to have the dance mode take advantage of song sections to handle more manageable chunks, not really a major problem and ties into already existing features

the biggest issue mentioned here is the overhitting dropping the meter, and i thought we already made that adjustment from the start, the subject did come up but i guess we must have missed it

the other problems really are just about getting familiar with some new methods, again seems like minor issues

Mar 19, 2013 23:49:28 GMT asskickulater said:

Mar 19, 2013 12:37:43 GMT knapman [FD] said:

interesting, so we'll need to review the dance downcharting

you've actually tried all the songs and they are all to hard on the easiest mode?

knapman, this was what i was referring to when i was charting dance for judgement (I think it was judgement) that you said was to easy, using a keyboard vs dance mats is a huge difference in difficulty, I can agree that most of the dance charts for these songs are far to hard on a dance mat.

the point was valid at the time as it was in reference to the expert chart of a high tier song, it just went from one extreme to another, until we work out some expert+ type system, expert may just have to be the keyboard play focused version, but we need more aggressive downcharting to make sure easier modes are mat friendly

try to remember this is all part of the normal process, the charts are considered beta just like the game, releasing a chart is only the first step, they are not expected to be perfect on first attempt, playtesting, feedback and experimentation is an important part of the process, hopefully at the end of it we have a good result and thats what is important

[asskickulater]

I thought PS left beta with the 1.0 release D=

[knapman [FD]]

Most people work to their own version number system these days, 1.0 doesn't need to mean anything, it might for some, it only means as much as the devs want it to mean, if you check build numbers for new games they are often greater than 1.0 on day 1

personally i think it would be pointless fudging the number system to stay below 1.0 by having a 0.100 or something

[asskickulater]

Mar 20, 2013 20:52:07 GMT knapman [FD] said:

Most people work to their own version number system these days, 1.0 doesn't need to mean anything, it might for some, it only means as much as the devs want it to mean, if you check build numbers for new games they are often greater than 1.0 on day 1

personally i think it would be pointless fudging the number system to stay below 1.0 by having a 0.100 or something

yea but.. you guys removed the "beta" label on the 1.0 release lol

[knapman [FD]]

well we assumed one of the releases soon after that would be pretty much release standard, so maybe a bit of jumping the gun, as we then ended up working on a few major changes again

really judge it by the situation and not numbers or labels lol

[asskickulater]

Mar 21, 2013 0:14:05 GMT knapman [FD] said:

well we assumed one of the releases soon after that would be pretty much release standard, so maybe a bit of jumping the gun, as we then ended up working on a few major changes again

really judge it by the situation and not numbers or labels lol

meh, I think PS is suitable to be considered non beta, it works better then most games not in beta I've seen.

but anywho, nice gun jumping

[knapman [FD]]

well yes if your talking about right now, this is basically the tipping point, we are a couple of bug fixes and a few setlist adjustments away from a solid release

setlist side we need to replace the extra bs songs with suitable alternatives, and fill in some of the missing bits for the rest of the songs, dance fixes would be part of that

the bugs we have are fairly serious ones but luckily are also rare cases. To people not affected by these issues this as a good version, but ideally you don't want game breakers lurking around even if they are rare, and some of them are tricky to identify so causes a few headaches attempting to troubleshoot.

for a good official release you want to be able to confidently promote the game to non tech savvy users, but in its current state if we did get a wave of new users we could end up flooded with tech support or people who don't even bother attempting to fix the problem so are turned away from the game, i wouldn't consider what we have right now suitable as non beta, but its very close