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!