Advice to Kinect developers from Dance Central 3 Devs

Today's post is an interesting advice piece from someone doing some real Kinect development (sure it's for the XBox 360 and Kinect for XBox, but adivce there very likely applies to the Kinect for Windows too.)

New Dance Central 3 Videos + Advice To Kinect Developers

Harmonix have released a new Dance Central 3 trailer comprised of the intro to the game which you can watch above and a “Characters & Crews” developer diary which you can watch below:

Also, in an interview with Kotaku, Dance Central 3′s project director Matt Boch talked about designing Kinect games, including the need to test the games with a lot of people during development to make sure they work properly for everybody...

Project Information URL: http://123kinect.com/new-dance-central-3-videos-advice-to-kinect-developers/37587/

Dance Central 3 Designer: Kinect Developers Need to Do Better Than “Oh, It Works”

Whatever you may think of Harmonix and the Dance Central games, there's no denying that they're the cream of the crop of the games available for Microsoft's motion-sensing peripheral. From the very first entry, Dance Central has been able to home in on fun, easy-to-implement game mechanics that anyone can jump in front of and play.

"Kinect experiences change depending on people's awareness of their own movements and you need to tune for that," Boch elaborated. "You can't just take a standard game concept and bolt it onto Kinect. Embrace what Kinect can do." He cited Double Fine Happy Action Theater as a game that does that well, remarking that the game asks for big, wacky gestures because they're easier to input.

You can look at Kinect the same way as people once did at touchscreens, Boch said. "Touchscreen tech has been around a while but we're only now getting to a standardized vocabulary of user input." As more motion-gesture games come out, Boch essentially believes that the knowledge base of what works and what doesn't will reach a critical mass that makes for better experiences. And designers will be able to do more fun things with the device's capabilities.

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Project Information URL: http://kotaku.com/5937398/dance-central-3-designer-kinect-developers-need-to-do-better-than-oh-it-works