CUBE DANCER

CUBE DANCER is a VR rhythm game, that puts you in dance battles against mysterious opponents. Each with its own unique dance style. The goal is to study their moves. Hit all the cubes that are thrown at you. And become the best cube dancer of them all.

Role: Concept, Development, Artist, Game Design
Year: 2018
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Making Of

The main task for this project was to create an experience that makes someone feel a emotion. Cause there are far too many Wave Shooters and Horror games for VR out there, I decided to go for the emotion JOY. And what is more joyful then moving your body and dance?

The first step was to code the interaction mechanics and the cube spawn functions in unity. With a clear picture in mind how to set it up, a first prototype was developed very fast. For the cube spawning mechanics I used object pooling to keep things performant. To get the spawning in sync with the choreography of the dancers, timeline events were deployed.

In the process of finding the right style for the game it was clear from the beginning that it would be a very abstract and reduced approach. Coming from a Motion Designer background this is my strength. Also of course to keep the efforts in a reasonable range. Each level has a unique color scheme, corresponding to the personality of each dancer.

All objects were modeled in Cinema 4D. The different arenas were built from the same main module. Only the color and animated objects vary in each level. For the dance animation I used Motion Capture Data from mixamo.com.

A big part of the process was of course user testing. It helped me adjusting the choreography and difficulty of the levels and gave some good insights into movement patterns.