Hi. My name is Evan, and I am a wallflower. It can be tough being a wallflower in an XR game studio full of enthusiastic dancers, but we welcome all kinds to dance with us.
It is December, and Trip the Light is OUT IN THE WORLD!
Our game became available in early access on November 21st, and things here at Dark Arts are cheerfully chaotic. We had a party, we handed out trophies, and we got back to work. We love the game, and we know we can make it better, so that is what we are doing.
Since we are now in early access, we decided to crack the door open a little further into what we are doing here at Dark Arts Software. I have been tasked with opening that door with this weekly blog. In it, I will let you peek in at a few of the planning meetings, internal conversations, and ongoing projects as we bake Trip the Light bigger and better.
Game development contains an element of discovery, and can be full of surprises, so I am not going to make any announcements here in the dev diary. This is a place for a peek behind the curtain. I will talk about what we are doing, and an attentive reader might get some hints at our upcoming features, but we have other channels for true announcements.
This week, I was allowed to be a flower on the wall of one of our animation meetings. A lot of animation is about workflow. It’s not enough to make an animation that works; the trick is to create animations that work and will keep working even when the choreography, timing, music, and even game modes change.
This workflow idea drove the first three agenda items. For example, our developers saw a need for a kind of “default animation” to help our VR dancers have something to do at the very end of a routine. Previously, returning to the start was being handled with bespoke choreography at the end of each routine. And, we don’t hate that. We will probably keep doing that. However, we want something ”default” in place, even if it’s just an idle, because right now, if even a single fraction of a second goes unchoreographed at the end of a routine, our VR dancers tend to drive themselves into the floor like a railroad spike!
Funny as that is, we think it might break immersion a bit.
The rest of the meeting was all about a new feature that we will be announcing soon and rolling out in our next big update. I am not allowed to make announcements here (for good reason) and I am afraid I am not quite ready to give you a date for the update in question, but it will be soon™. I can say that this feature is one of those awesome, kind of invisible mechanics that make Trip the Light so cool. Any game can put a dancer in front of you and have him or her show off their moves. What makes our game so special (at least in our opinion) is the subtle, organic, un-flashy ways that our VR partners act like real humans, responding to your movements and reacting to what you do. We are so proud of our “take my hand” features, which allow the VR partners in our game to dynamically accept, let go of, and retake a player’s hand while they dance. This upcoming feature is part of that dynamic.
I am not allowed to say more. I can’t. I wouldn’t be right.
Just…
You know….
Watch your feet.
That is it for my very first Dev Diary of a Wallflower. Watch this space for regular updates about the development of Trip the Light here at Dark Arts. Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, listen for the music, keep your body moving, and if you get a chance, come dance with us!
Entry Two, Date: December XXXX
As we approach the holiday season, we remain hard at work. We love that Trip the Light is out there in the world. Anyone who wants to see the result of the last three years of development and innovation can now pick up an early access version of the game and join us on the dance floor.
One of the greatest advantages of our early access launch is the chance to see your feedback and reviews. We read every single one, and we take your feedback incredibly seriously. When we say that by joining us in this early access period, you become a partner, we really mean it. Every star, every comment, every rating means the world to us and helps us make the music that moves you.
As with last week, this week I was invited to be a flower on the wall of one of our development meetings. The subject was refining the user interface for our teaching mode.
You know, it is funny, but the name of our teaching mode has been the subject of a fair amount of internal discussion around here. Names have been an interesting point of discussion generally. When we launched the game in early access, each of the modes had the name we had been calling that mode internally, but internal naming conventions are not always the best. They evolve organically, without a lot of conscious discussion about what serves the user. They develop because they serve the developers’ biases. While every developer on our team is also a user—we all love playing the game—it falls to us to try to think outside of ourselves and come up with the names that will be the most intuitive, accessible, and convenient for you.
As a result, you can probably expect to see the names of certain features and buttons in the game change in the coming weeks.
Let me lay out an example of one quick internal discussion on this subject.
Right now, there is a mode called Salsa 101. We hope that you will see that and immediately understand that pressing that button will take you to an accessible, beginner-level mode that teaches you the very basic steps of salsa dancing. However, as the app grows, we know we are going to teach more dance styles, beyond salsa.
What we have not decided is what to do with the name. Will Salsa 101 change its name to “Dance 101,” and then Salsa 101 be underneath it, along with the other modes? Or should we call the category “teaching mode?” Sometimes we make reference, internally, to “Teaching Mode,” but one team member pointed out that “teaching” is looking at the mode from our perspective, as the game’s developers. Thus, we should probably call it “Learning Mode” since learning with what you, as the user, get out of it.
I know this seems tiny—a semantic discussion about the difference between “teaching” and “learning,”—and yet: game development, like so much else in life, is just the accumulation of thousands of these tiny little decisions. We want to make sure every decision we make builds up to a fantastic, enjoyable, intuitively easy-to-engage-with game that you can slip into any time. If we do this right, you will not have to think about the names of things at all. That way, you can just listen for the music, keep your body moving, and dance with us!
Entry Three, Date: December XXXX
The big holidays are rushing to meet us, but none of us feels any urge to relax. We know that you expect a lot from us, and we are eager to live up to your expectations. To those of you who have played the game and left ratings and reviews, we are more grateful than words can express. Know that we live for your feedback, even the constructive criticism, because we want to make this game better for you.
I got invited to be a flower on the wall of a pretty big strategic meeting this week, discussing the long-term fate of our “Learning Mode.”
The life of a developer exists in a (ideally gentle) tension between the long-term and the short-term. A major part of how we do things around here is the concept of the two-week “sprint.” Each sprint involves setting clear goals for every developer and team member with measurable results so that everyone knows what to expect and how to help one another out. However, we cannot live our lives two weeks at a time. Some goals have to be discussed in terms of a larger scope.
Hence, the meeting I got to observe, in which we talked about all the things we want to see in the learning mode as it expands, not simply in the two weeks or with the next update, but in the coming year.
I can tell you, we have big plans.
Things change in development, especially over the course of time, so you mustn’t take anything I am about to reveal as gospel, but we are looking at taking the super-basic Salsa 101 mode that is currently in the game and expanding it into a five-stage lesson (which we can then replicate to teach other styles of dance as well).
Lesson 1 – Rhythm and basic foot placement
Lesson 2 – Holds
Lesson 3 – Moves, including turns and dips
Lesson 4 – Routine, where you learn a string of steps to be performed and practiced
Lesson 5 – Practica / Freedance
Building up the mode so ti can integrate these five stages will take a while. We want to get it right. There was a lot of discussion at the meeting about getting the technical side of things right. We talked about everything from making sure your virtual teacher’s lips sync right with their instructions to whether or not we needed to build an in-game metronome and how that should work.
There are some cool short-term announcements coming. Watch our social media and store pages for those, but I get really excited when I get one of these rare chances to stand on a mountaintop for a moment, look out toward the horizon to see where this whole thing is going. I am even more excited that I get a chance to let you get a peek with me. However, while we look to the future, it will always be the present that matters most, so listen for the music, keep your body moving, and dance with us!
Entry Four, December XXXX
This is a weird week, in so many ways.
Christmas is behind us and New Year’s looms. Some of the staff are off on a well-deserved vacation for the interrum, but some of us just cannot stay away.
I mentioned last week that we break down our usual tasks into two-week “sprints.” We called an audible this week and chose to invent a special one-week sprint, just for this weird week. Our awesome producer, ALissa, called it a “Hardening Sprint”. I love the name. I actually mind of picture it like a week for “tempering” when the blacksmith hardens the metal by heating it and quenching it, and then heating it again.
Rather than attempt to add a bunch of new features or keep building things into the game in anticipation of the next update, we spent the week nailing down the corners, polishing off the burrs, and ironing out the wrinkles…I am sure I could keep mixing this metaphor if I tried, but I’ll spare you because I am a merciful soul.
I was invited to sit in on a great “Hardening” meeting this week. We sure hope you have been having fun with the “Peak Zombie” Rhythm Challenge that we recently added to the game. We are super proud of it and think it is a joy to play. However, there are still a few details in it that are not quite what we imagined.
One weird problem was the way Vironica, the virtual partner and dance leader for the challenge, fails to howl, at least, fails to howl he way we want. There is a great moment in the dance where the player is invited to howl at the moon like the dance monster we hope they are, and Vironica…just…kind of…stares. We all appreciate how attentive Vironica is to the player. We are glad her first instinct is to watch closely and make the player feel like they are the center of her attention, but we think this is a fine moment for her to throw her head back and let out her primal side.
It turns out the tool that translates the choreography into poses for her was so focused on what she should be doing with her hands, hips, legs, and feet that it failed to capture that joyous, primal “throw her head back and howl” moment. Fortunately, we already have a tool, developed in-house, to address this problem. Aptly and simply called the “Gaze Controller,” it is a little tool we can turn on and off at certain moments in order to fine-tune the virtual character’s head movements. We just need to get in there and use it to give Vironica her chance to howl.
This is a great example of what we are doing this week for our weird little one-week Hardening Sprint. To all those reading, I want to wish you an ever-so-slightly belated Merry Christmas, an ever-so-slightly early Happy New Year, and, as always, invite you to listen for the music, keep your body moving, and dance with us!
Entry Five, January XXXX
Happy, Happy, Happy New Year. The music is everywhere, and Trip the Light’s development is roaring.
This week has been fantastic, but it is also the source of a strange tension for me. You see…I know something you don’t know….and I cannot tell you. I just can’t.
Part of the agreement we made when I asked the developers to let me sit in on their meetings and give you guys a peek behind the curtain at what is going on here at Dark Arts Software was that I would never “scoop” the “official” marketing. I am allowed to give you guys an idea of what we are up to and even reveal tidbits about how we are thinking and what we are planning, but this dev diary is not a place for big announcements and big reveals.
I like the Dev Diary of a Wallflower’s cosy atmosphere. This is a place for gentle gossip and sneaky peeks at the development process. If you are reading this, I guess I kind of have to hope you do too. However, some weeks, keeping my mouth shut about the big stuff to which I am privy is harder than others.
You see, like most weeks, this week I was invited in to watch a development meeting as a flower on the wall. Unfortunately, the whole point of that meeting was to discuss the technical aspects of…an unannounced THING.
What is a little wallflower like me to do?
Okay, I am going to walk a very fine line here. Come watch my high-wire act.
I would definitely not be announcing anything if I said that our game, like every game in early access and many games that have already launched, puts out new content and new features in periodic updates. Right. No rules broken yet, I am just making an obvious observation about the way software releases occur.
Then, I could point out that many companies see a benefit in synchronizing the timing of those outputs with certain important dates on the calendar—holidays and such. Again, our company is no different and would definitely be inclined to leverage the potential of, say, a holiday that synergises really well with partner dancing…not that I can think of any of those coming up the next few months…say…in February.
You see: no promises broken. I have not announced anything. If you somehow got the impression that we are looking to put out some kind of major update in the next several weeks, well, that is not a surprise at all. That is literally our business model. Of course, we will add features in large updates every few weeks. As to WHEN we will put out those patches? There has been no announcement, and no one could possibly accuse me of leaking some kind of major update patch on some romance-themed holiday in February.
We are just a bunch of wallflowers here, chatting about development. As always, I invite you to to listen for the music, keep your body moving, and dance with us!
Entry Six, January XXXX
To misquote Charlie Brown: “AAAAARG!”
This is killing me.
For very good strategic reasons, we have not yet announced our next update or its major features, but I did not become a writer to NOT tell people about all the cool stuff I find out.
Okay. Okay. I can stay calm.
I got invited to be a flower on the wall of one of the big development meetings this week, as I do every week. This time the topic of discussion was…a THING…that I cannot talk about.
Well…no, that’s not entirely true. I cannot talk about WHO…but I can talk about…WHAT.
Anyone who has seen our cover art and looked at our marketing materials knows that while Vironica, charming and beautiful as she is, remains our “leading lady,” the first fully-realized dance partner in the game and the one to walk new players through learning the steps, we have always planned to bring other dancers and partners into the roster.
That was the subject of this week’s development meeting. It is time to bring in some help to give Vironica a little relief. I am so tempted to make a joke about a “backcup dancer,” but the other dancers will be so much more than that. In time, they will do everything she does: teach, lead challenges, freedance…the whole deal.
We are not there yet. As our founder, Patrick, likes to say, “We have to go slow to go fast.” We are taking our time implementing the second dancer to create the workflows and develop the best practices that will help smooth the process so we can later bring in the third and fourth all the more easily.
In the meeting, our developers discussed how to make the inputs more dynamic and responsive to the differences in body shape and height between the characters. Height, it turns out, is a big deal when it comes to matching up choreography (go figure.) Plus, we want to make sure that some of Vironica’s more bespoke tricks, like her mid-dance-floor costume change in freestyle mode, will also be available to the other dancers as we bring them in.
With a little luck, by next week, we will have made an announcement or two, and I can finally spill some beans. In the meantime, all I can do is encourage you to listen for the music, keep your body moving, and dance with us!