Extra week of prototyping, to get our idea fully on point. To start of again, Questions!:

• What was our game missing?
• What would be the best way for us to create and rig our characters?
• Will our level work is it too big?
• How many sound effects, music, particles would be to much?
• How could we make the beat clear to all the players during the game?
• How can we map the beat to a song?
• How long should one match last?
• How could we give the players more of goal during gameplay.
• Can we give players more reasons to use all the dance moves, instead of focusing on a single move

Luckily we found some answers

• We made each move stronger or weaker to another and created a rock-paper-scissor system with our 3 current moves.
• The first thing our game was missing was sound. Because what would a dance battle game be without any sound. We did however fix this by prototyping how the game would feel and play under music and with sound effects giving the prototype a lot more energy to it.
• For our characters we've come up with a great style which is rather adjustable to make a few different characters. For the rigging part of it we we're able to use the tools of maya to its full potential to ease the work time on the rigs.
• For the level we further planned out a blockout.

Our progress this week was certainly great!

• The blockout level feels a lot better
• New meshes where imported
• The game became a lot more immersive with effects, the floor that changes color on the beat 
• we added the music
• the game feels a lot more alive!

Some more answers to the questions we found!

• we found a way to get the beat from the background music
• the music gives good feedback to the players on the beat.
• During prototyping we decided on adding a pulse effect over the screen. We also made the floor change color on the beat and made the player automatically move on the beat. Adding controller rumble gave it the finishing touch.
• We tried two ways of achieving this. We tried real time beat detection. This was sadly to inconsistent to use for the gameplay, but maybe we can use it to add some visuals effects related to the beat. Our second approach was getting the bpm from a song online this was very easy and gave good results. We implemented this.
• We decided to make it last the duration of one song.
• To add a more clear goal during gameplay we decided to spawn the score pickups in batches so the players would fight over these.