- Holodance 1.5 ... at last! - 18 August 2024
Hi, I'm back! In March 2021, Andy from Ramen VR asked me if I could help port the VR MMO Zenith: The Last City to PSVR (1 on PS4). With Holodance never quite breaking through and both narayana games and I running low on funds ... my journey took a thrilling detour. And what a ride it's been! Working with the Ramen team on the massive world of Zenith was incredible — from the PSVR port to PS VR2, and everything in between. Console porting was fun, but as any indie dev will tell you, in small teams, you end up doing a bit of everything! After all, "specialization is for insects," as Robert Heinlein famously said. Apologies for not making a formal announcement back in the day (just a message on our public Discord and later, a brief note here on the forums): Within one quick week, my life had changed from being 100% dedicated to Holodance and Beat the Rhythm to being 120% dedicated to helpi…
- Holodance - Steam Winter Sale Discount: 50% off! - 23 December 2020
Merry Christmas to everyone! Holodance is participating in the Steam Winter Sale 2020. If you or your friends still don't have Holodance, this is a great opportunity to get this awesome game at 50% off! And in case you missed it: We have recently had a pretty big update - check out the Release Notes!
- Holodance 1.4 is here! - 1 December 2020
While still primarily working on the upcoming beatmap editor, we have fixed a few things, added a few things and it's time to push these things to the default channel for everyone to play with! EDIT 2020-12-05: Just a tiny hotfix (1.4.1) because using finger pointing to control the YUR watch was broken; this is now fixed: You can control the YUR watch using your index finger tip but we needed to change how clicking works in the general UI because we needed drag'n'drop to work much better than it did for the beatmap editor (which is still WIP and not included in this build). That change broke finger pointing. EDIT 2020-12-06: Another tiny hotfix (1.4.2): The scrollbars e.g. in Streamer Mode jumped when clicking. They no longer do. Also, opening Streamer Mode in VR threw exceptions in the logs until Streamer Mode was activated via the checkbox. No more exceptions are being thrown in that…
- Holodance 1.3.3: Story Mode, Level 2 ... and comfort - 24 July 2020
Patch Notes Story Mode, Level 2: Due to a recurring Unity bug, Vayusah, the dragon in that level, had disappeared. What's quite annoying is that I had just fixed that specific bug quite recently - but it looks like this now breaks on every Unity update. Music Library: Fixed occasional issue where the Game Mechanic presets were rendered above/below the Music Library Info or Music Library Settings Comfort Settings: Added new comfort setting for UI animations. This is enabled by default - but you can now disable it if you don't like the panels moving down below and back up on screen switches. This could be uncomfortable especially in the Zero Distraction environment. Mutant Club: Just like Retro Clubbing, Mutant Club does have some intense flashing (in this case, of textures), so added the same warning before entering tha
- Holodance 1.3.2: Leaderboard Polishing, Challenge Me - 12 July 2020
Leaderboards One issue with the combined leaderboards was that there was no way to see which weapon another player used, and whether they played with just one hand, two hands, hands and head, or maybe even with feet. So now we have two icons in the leaderboards that make this information obvious. Here's a screenshot: Also, our calorie-based leaderboards were also "per style" which didn't really make sense, so these are now also combined. Usually, you'll want to know how a player achieved a certain burnrate, and so keeping the styles separate was really in the way. It isn't anymore. Also, in the global leaderboards, you can now click other players to see where they are with progress. Challenge Me - Finally! Aside of the beatmap editor, this is probably the feature I was yearning for myself more than any other. Finally, it's there: After playing a session, you can now click "Challenge Me"…
- Holodance 1.3.1: Finally, Popular Maps in Music Library - 10 July 2020
Section Popular in Quick Access When you enter Quick Access in the Music Library, there is now a section Popular, right on top, with three collections of beatmaps: Played by Most Players The beatmaps played by most other players. Those are the ones you want to go to to compete on the leaderboards. But be sure to pick one with a difficulty that will be entertaining for you. The first few are very easy and might be quite boring for more advanced players. But there are few around difficulty 5 to 6 that should still be fun for most. Best Challenge for You This one may not give you any maps, yet. It uses the ratings for gameplay, to avoid maps that just don't have fun gameplay, but also filters with a very rough heuristic based on your current skill level, and the skill level of other players multiplied with their challenge ratings. This will become more useful the more people actually play…
- Patch Notes since November 25, 2019 - 7 July 2020
During Early Access, each official update included a list of all the patch notes I made during development. In fact, I even often did this for the updates that only went to the alphadev and beta channels. We haven't done that in a while, and I believe most people probably actually prefer a more prose-style approach ... but I might be wrong, so let me know. As this list is a particularly long one, I'll throw in a video now and then. So it's perfectly fine to just scroll down and watch the videos if this would be too much reading. In case you missed that last big update - here's a more visual and verbal description: Holodance 1.3 is here! And still on #SteamSummerSale (50% off) For the unfiltered, chronological list of all changes since November 25, 2019 (Holodance V0.9.2: Tech and Scoring Update), continue here: Holodance 1.0 (Official release, Feb 28, 2020) So there are the changes we'v…
- Holodance 1.3 is here! - 5 July 2020
I'll be honest: Large updates like this are scary. It's always fun to put out new things on the alpha and beta channels where people kind of expect that sometimes, things may break. But having everyone try an official new version is a different story. Like, the first time I tried this one was right after rebooting the servers, to give them more processors (they were becoming too slow) - and both, the global leaderboard and new game progression panel that are now quite prominently in the arena selection area came up empty. Ouch. Apparently, it was just one service taking a little longer to boot but still ... SCARY!!! So just in case this update breaks something severely for you - you can always go back to previous (it's one of the "beta-channels"). But be sure to let me know, either here on the Steam forums, or Discord, or Twitter. New Teaser and New Trailer With that out of the way, her…
- Holodance Summer Sale: 50% off! - 25 June 2020
For those of you that don't own Holodance, yet, this is an awesome opportunity. As I'm in the middle of working on a pretty big update coming to Holodance in the next few days, I'll keep this unusually short: Some of the upcoming new features, like the Mutant Club upgrade are already available here on Steam via the alphadev- and beta-channels. So if you want to give those a try (and help find bugs), be sure to opt-in to either beta (that one's fairly safe but also not as hot - last update there was May 25), or alphadev (that one's bleeding edge and may sometimes break - last update there was June 23, and another one should be coming tomorrow). Don't know how? Here's how! (That guide also explains opting in to the Steam beta - skip right to Product Betas). And, as a little teaser and preparation for what's coming: In case you haven't heard about YUR, yet, well, now you have. It's an awes…
- Holodance leaving Early Access, 30% off, New Arenas - and BeatSaver-Map Support - 28 February 2020
If you have never heard of Holodance before, here's ... A Little Bit of VR Rhythm Game History When I began development of Holodance in early 2015, the original idea was to create a synesthetic Virtual Reality clubbing experience with trippy visuals, and twelve songs produced specifically for the game and its twelve "environments". While playing with the early prototypes, somehow the idea of making the game about dancing with dragons came up, and the direction shifted into what later became "Story Mode": Three dragons returning to planet earth to remind the human species of their duty of care for their planet. One of the motivations behind that was to use the new medium, VR, to take players to different places. So trippy visuals turned into a beach, desert and ice desert, three environments up in the air, at varying altitudes, and three underwater environments with dolphins, whales, and…
- Holodance V0.9.2: Tech and Scoring Update - 24 November 2019
Crash bugs are ugly. Especially when they occur all the time, while the game is starting. While we did only receive a single report for such a crashbug, the hardware of that player seemed fairly standard so it's very likely that other players were also effected. After several days of searching, it turned out that this one apparently was a Unity-bug that got fixed with Unity 2019.2. Other than that, we silently pushed a few minor feature updates since the last patch notes: Spooky Town is now an official arena of the game - you just need to have a minimum score of 3,000,000 (which is quite easy to achieve). We also added a new experimental game mechanic after a little conversation on Reddit. Here's a video: This one only works with very specific beatmaps, so use with caution. But this will eventually turn into something really exciting ;-) Also, due to player feedback, we fixed a few thin…
- Holodance Halloween Sale: 50% off! - 28 October 2019
It's that time of the year where even pacifist, vegetarian game developers that have dragons throwing friendly magical orbs at you so you could tune into the rhythm of nature and save the world suddenly start punching ghosts to gory pulp as pumpkin-headed Halloween monsters. Also, some of us throw incredibly long sentences at our players, without any punctuation, which could also be considered an act of violence, fitting the season. Such a sentence is in some ways like an insanely long slider or spinner: You just can't wait until it's finished without breaking your combo. You still here? You better be, cause here's some important news: For those of you that don't own Holodance, yet, this will be the last chance to get it at 50% off for the time being. We can't tell you when or witchwhich the next sales will be - but we'll do the next sale that we participate in after this one at 40% off…
- Holodance V0.9.1: Halloween, Modding, and all the Beta-Updates - 24 October 2019
Working a lot on our upcoming game Beat the Rhythm (and porting most of the improvements immediately to Holodance for you to play with them), I apparently got a little confused between Beat and Beta. Our last update to the default-branch that most people are playing on was ... O.M.G.! - more than a year ago, on 25 June, 2018. We still did update the alphadev and beta-branches more or less frequently but that means that all of you who don't feel like playing betas and alphas of an Early Access game have been missing out not only on major new features but also on important bugfixes. SORRY! For Halloween, we obviously want all of you to have the Spooky Town that we first released to the beta- and alphadev-branches on October 13. And we want none of you to play on a version that's more than a year old (you still could, if you wanted, on the previous-branch that we keep just in case somethin…
- Preparing for Halloween: New Build on Beta-Branch - 13 October 2019
We're about to push one of the biggest updates in the history of Holodance to the main branch before Halloween, to celebrate this spooky season with all of you! And you can already try it on the beta-branch and help us find any issues that may still be in there (in addition to the ghosts and gore we put in there intentionally). For Halloween, we'll have a completely new Arena, called Spooky Town. And spooky, it is! In that special Halloween Arena, you can punch ghosts, or slice them, or shoot them. And to make it all more fun to show off, we also completely redesigned our Avatar system and added a whole bunch of new avatars, including a few ones that fit the spooky season: A Halloween monster called Methus, a shaman rat called Peter, an ice golem called Torog, and finally, the Dark Angel some of you may have seen ages ago in our first Avatar system teasers. The new Avatar system fully s…
- Holodance V0.9.0b21 (beta): Tech Update, Mixed Reality, Bugfixes - 11 August 2019
During the last few months, I worked primarily on the in-VR beatmap editor. Unfortunately, this isn't ready for this release, yet. However, we also did quite a few technology updates and bugfixes that we silently pushed to separate branches dedicated to different Unity versions and eventually also (finally) updated to the new SteamVR Unity integration which has SteamVR Input 2.0. This lays the foundation for full Valve Index support. For now, it gives you the ability to re-bind input according to your preferences. Update Highlights LIV Mixed Reality support is finally working again Story Mode Level 1 / Paradise Beach has significantly improved performance and also looks better (the Ocean and sky in particular) Slicing OctaDrops works much better now The stats shown in Game Progression can now either use the legacy system (Steamworks), or our new server. For more details on what is chang…
- Holodance V0.9.0b19 (alphadev/beta): A *lot* of Update ;-) - 18 March 2019
So this is kind of a huge one, because the last patch update was in June 25, roughly 9 months ago. We did post some updates to the alphadev channels and also beta channels but announced them only via our Official Discord. But this current version will probably go to the default channel in a week or two, so it would be awesome if you could opt-in to the alphadev or beta channel, try it, test it and let us know what you think about it (ideally in the forum to keep things organized). This is a really long list, so here are some of the highlights: Settings / Themes / Game Mechanics / Presets This has been completely re-designed to make the different game mechanics easier to find and activate. Also, we previously had quite a few implicit changes in the settings (e.g. when you activated Laserblades or Guns) that did make sense when we originally introduced them but became pretty annoying over…
- Holodance 50% off ($9.99) in Lunar New Year Sale and Updates! - 6 February 2019
Hey everyone, just in case you missed it: Holodance takes part in the Steam Lunar New Year Sale, so if you don't have it, yet - now's a really good time to get it at a 50% discount (so that's $9.99 instead of $19.99). Please let everyone else know! ;-) And those coming in from the sale: The default branch has received no updates in the last 6 months because we've been building our own server backend ... but we have a pretty long list of changes, including the long awaited native Oculus support on the beta-branch. So, if you want to try something new, or if you use a Rift - make sure to opt-in to the beta. If you have never opted-in to a beta, check the Product Beta section in this guide. A lot of work went into the Octadrop and Guns game mechanics, so be sure to check those out! Also, we're getting new leaderboards :-) If you are really courageous, try the alphadev-branch: That's the bl…
- Update: Building Our Own Backend Server - 4 February 2019
This was (and still is) a big one! I actually knew we needed our own backend server for a very long time: One reason Holodance is still only available on Steam is because I heavily relied on the Steamworks backend for leaderboards, achievements and keeping state for players (i.e. progress in the game, mostly for Story Mode). In order to let you play with people on other platforms, like Oculus Home, Windows Store or PlayStation Network, we either need to use a third party service (there are some, like PlayFab or GameSparks, or roll our own. With our second game, Beat the Rhythm VR, we not only want cross-platform but cross-game: All the community features, like leaderboards, song and beatmap quality rankings, session streams and so forth should be consistent and shared among both games, so that we can have one (hopefully) large community for both games, instead of two smaller, isolated p…
- Holodance V0.9.0b12: Major work on Beat the Rhythm Orb Theme - 24 June 2018
When we started developing Holodance, which was originally called "Holodance Episode 1: Dancing with Dragons", after a few early prototypes, we fairly quickly moved into what is now called Story Mode and then, a lot of time went into building environments, modeling and animating dragons, voice-acting, making it all work together. Of course, we also did polish the actual gameplay mechanics, added the target grid, added various ways of showing you how your score came about and even added orb themes and orbs with different shapes and materials. But there were always a lot of other pressing things that needed to be done: Free Mode, properly handling osu! beatmaps, a music library so you could conveniently find music that you enjoy playing. Procedural mapping. More environments. Laserblades, guns ... lots of stuff a lot of people (including myself) enjoy. Long story short, for Beat the Rhyth…
- Holodance V0.9.0b11: Initial Game Progression and Accumulated Score - 18 June 2018
This is another fairly small release but it fixes one important issue and adds something fun: It's kind of common to use 32-bit integers to store scores. In fact, it is so common that this is also how they are stored in the Steam leaderboards. The problem: We keep track of an accumulated score, each session can give you up to a few million, and (this is not a problem but awesome): We have some very active players. So, currently, three players "hit the ceiling" when it comes to the accumulated score: MechanicaL, koolaide95 and liqiyang. This version changes how that score is stored internally, and also added a little hacky patch to at least display the correct score in-game, even when it's above 2,147,483,647 (maximum value a signed 32-bit integer can have). While I was at it, I also added a first version of our "Game Progression" page: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/publ…
