Our team is going for a more expressive dancing party game that has players creating a dance move and passing it on to the next to create a chain of dance moves that must be remembered at every step.
(1) How do we encourage people to be silly and goofy i.e. step out of their comfort zone and dance!
Depending on the person, dancing can be seen as intimidating and embarrassing. Solving this question will help us bridge that gap and allow more people to enjoy our game. This “encouragement” can be signaled in many different ways. One way that is straightforward to prototype is how we design the physical aspects of the game (box art, font, colors, etc). Experimenting with different artistic styles will definitely help us communicate this signal, but perhaps it may not be enough to achieve what we want.
We intend to have different criteria cards that shape what move a player should make.
(2) What are relevant prompts for these cards that will make each game fun, but also different?
The game in its premise can work wonderfully, but it’s easy to imagine people getting tired of it after playing it once or twice. Using prompts to shake up what type of dance moves are done will not only be fun, but also challenging in a way that drives creativity. This can be prototyped by brainstorming as many interesting, cool, or zany ideas as possible and testing them to see what players are comfortable with. This can be easily done through paper cards with various prompts written on them. I think this prototype idea will be able to successfully answer this question.
(3) What type of “music” do people like?
You can’t dance without music, and part of the game will involve having a music played in the background. However, “music” can range greatly. For the sake of being absurd and making interesting gameplay we liked the idea of having people not just dance to music, but also to random noises and sounds. But how far is too far in this aspect? To prototype, we can compile a long playlist of random sounds and noises that can be interchanged every so often (perhaps every other person) for people to play wish and gauge their reactions, laughter, and dance moves created to determine where we draw the line. I predict this prototype will also work and help us narrow down our idea!
