The developers at Harmonix aren't afraid to hit the reset button if something isn't working correctly. Chances are, strumming a plastic Stratocaster changed quite a bit before you ever even started playing "Creep" by Radiohead in Rock Band . Same goes for stepping to the beat of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" in Dance Central , too. That willingness to start from square one time and again? Well, it's carried through to the developer's latest Kinect title, Fantasia: Music Evolved , out now for Xbox 360 and Xbox One, as well. The team's aim, seemingly regardless of project, is for whatever you're doing in one of their titles to seem perfectly obvious and natural.
"There's a huge willingness to throw stuff away and start over," Fantasia's lead programmer Mike Fitzgerald says. "It feels like [the final product] just works, when in reality it took a long time and a ton of work to make [gameplay] invisible."
To do that this time around, Harmonix turned to the Kinect-hacking scene for its Disney-funded project. At the outset, the team was keeping a close eye on what garage-based developers (and likely a few rock stars) were doing with Microsoft's do-all sensor, using its SDK as they saw fit for all manner of things. Harmonix brought in Jason Levine. He's well-known in the Kinect community, and has done live stage performances using Redmond's camera setup to track his body position for real-time visualizer backgrounds. He seemed like a perfect fit to consult on a game that ultimately turns you into a conductor on songs ranging from "Night on Bald Mountain" to more contemporary fare like "Royals" from Lorde.
Levine's position-tracking input can be seen in the game: the silhouette at the bottom of the screen that reflects your motions back to you. That bit became one of the game's core design elements, letting you see what it was the Kinect was watching you do in real-time as a sort of positive reinforcement. "It's different from Fruit Ninja [Kinect] in that you have to manage your silhouette," lead designer Jonathan Mintz says. Meaning, it's getting the rhythm of your movements synced with the actions onscreen -- not just swiping at fruit randomly as it flies in front of you. "We don't care about positions; what we care about is timing," he adds. "We let the player find a style of motion that works for them; then they listen to the music and watch the [gesture] cues to get a sense of rhythm."
Smart Voip: James Potter
