DanceStar Party Gets E3 2011 Moving

Ever since I have been attending trade shows like E3, the London Studios team has been there providing a great source of entertainment for participants and onlookers alike with SingStar and now with DanceStar Party, a dancing game played with the PlayStation Move motion controllers on PS3.

I caught up with Game Director Dave Ranyard to talk about this new social game venture, the SingStar legacy and breaking down inhibitions.

Is DanceStar Party a spiritual successor to SingStar Dance?

SingStar Dance got the team really into dancing so we hassled the senior guys at Sony to let us make a game where it was the core experience. We still have the artist videos on the screen but the dancer is at the centre.

The key project target was to make the game fun and social, so we have party modes that make it really easy to drop in and drop out, encouraging groups to play together. There are eight tracks playable here but there will be 40 on the disc when the game comes out and we’ve split that 50/50 between bang up to date music and some stuff that your mum might remember.

How does DanceStar Party stand out from some of the other dancing games out there?

Our most unique feature is ‘create your own dance’, which does exactly what you would expect. How we see this working is, if you’re having a party on Saturday night, you can create a dance that afternoon and then invite people to come along and play it. It also adds longevity – not only are the 160 dances on the disc, you can create many more.

I can tell you it can be hard to get people to pluck up the courage to play SingStar or a dancing game in front of their peers. Is it possible to break down inhibitions with programming?

I think it is. We have included a really light, simple party mode where to take everyone’s picture and then the game decides who is going to play. Some people might be a bit shy but I the fact that the game is gently pulling them in helps break down those inhibitions.

Also, a lot of people like to dance and it’s a slightly different psychological thing to singing, which is more of a performance. A lot of guys will be pretty happy about dancing in clubs as it’s a more natural thing for people to want to do.

How much of the SingStar persona are we going to see in the game, or is a totally new departure for you guys?

It’s a completely new project and it’s not even made by the same team in it’s entirety – we’ve got choreographers working with us, for example, as well as some new producers. We do have that experience with SingStar and with social games like EyeToy Play and Groove, so we’re going in with a strong pedigree. There are some technologies that we have developed specifically for this game, such as the method we use to track the Move controllers.

One of the key factors we do want to carry over from SingStar is a slick, accessible interface. We’ve designed the menus from the ground up to work with the Move controller but it’s as simple as we can make it – when you start up the game you’re dancing within five clicks.

Will your approach to DLC be similar to what you have done with the SingStore?

We’re definitely going to provide DLC, but whether we go to the levels of personalisation we do with the SingStore, I’m not sure. I think that people really want to pick particular songs to sing, so have more than 2,500 songs in the SingStore is a great opportunity. If you go to a club and are dancing, you’ll dance along to whatever is on so you don’t necessarily need such an array of choice. We’re looking to launch quite a few SongPacks but whether we go as far as doing something like the SingStore… we’ll have to see.

What do people want from a dancing game, which is a relatively new genre?

Fundamentally, it’s a party game. I take the game home and I play it with my children and my friends. I can’t get my kids to do anything when I ask them to but my two year-old will dance to LMFAO for hours. We’ve got some nice single-player modes for people who want to learn to dance and nail those routines, but we see DanceStar Party as a social experience for groups of friends.

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