PlayStation 2 Dance Game
- Game- & Routine Design
- Involvement: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
- Release: 2008
EyeToy Play: PomPom Party was the first full game that I designed from scratch and developed until it was published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) under the Sony London Studio’s banner. It was bundled with 2 physical pompoms that could be played in single player mode or 2 player co-op mode.
The original concept was called Super Cheerleader Squad and was developed by Robin Keijzer and Verena Gefferie during Playlogic’s PlayDays, an internal game jam event. I organized both PlayDays events with the goal to combine our ability to quickly prototype ideas using an in-house developed visual programming tool called Logix and to generate ideas we could pitch to Sony as our previous projects were about to end. These PlayDays helped Playlogic pen several contracts with Sony, one of which was PomPom Party.
Super Cheerleader Squad used color tracking to identify 2 different objects (pompoms) with which we could play. Although never confirmed, I feel that the color tracking technology has -at the very least- influenced the development of the PlayStation Move Controller. The original concept was developed in under 48 hours and convinced Sony to let us develop a demo and improve the technology to a stable-enough level.
The demo was developed in a month and included 1 song and on-screen interaction prompts in the rhythm of the track. Not only did we manage to impress Sony with out stable color tracking, the were also impressed that we create a fun level using unique interaction and we granted to continue the development of the game.
Our demo, my design and a presentation from Sony’s internal designers got the concept approved for further development. What opened my eyes at the time was the pragmatic uses of a simple powerpoint to get the game through the Sony committee. Sony was much more investigative towards their audience and they seemed to have a clear picture in mind what our audience (girls 8-12) would like. A term they kept using was “aspirational”, combining aspiration and inspirational for the way we should look at our game. Girls that age look up to girls that are a few years older. Which is why our character roster consists out of girls that are around 16 and go out dancing.
We included 25 original songs in 3 difficulty settings, which meant that we had to create 75 unique routines. To help me and the other designers to create these, I designed a routine editor that allowed all available dance-moves to be stacked in sequence and to the rhythm of the music. The editor exported to a simple text file format which exported the correct dance-moves with certain timings in milliseconds. The editor proved to be a huge time saver and was easy enough for external designers to help me out with the work.
The pompoms allowed for some unique gameplay where the player was asked to turn around their axis, shake their pompoms on certain locations and follow patterns with increased precision. Other cool features allowed performances (videos and screenshots) to be recoreded and saved to memory card and tracks and customes to be unlocked.
During development we learned that EyeToy Play: PomPom Party would be released during the Christmas period and that it was a counter part of Eyetoy Play: Hero, a game aimed at boys of the same age. The game was sold in 3 bundles: The game with pompom, the game with pompoms and an EyeToy camera, and a PlayStation 2 bundle, with camera, game and pompoms.
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