Avatar Boogie

Release Date: 02/21/2010
Avatar Boogie Screenshot 1

Avatar Boogie Screenshot 2

   

Description

Avatar Boogie is a fun visualizer in which you can watch Xbox Avatars dance to music. You can choose a random avatar and add up to fifty of them, or generate random avatars. The avatars can dance together or separately, and to either the music that comes with Avatar Boogie or the music on your Xbox 360 or PC.

Fun Facts

  • More Controversy!  After publishing the controversial Barf and Beer, releasing an innocent dancing app in the “Family” category is smooth sailing, right?  Well Boogie ended up being equally controversial, because it originally allowed your own avatar to take part in the dancing festivities (gasp – the horror!). It received many passing votes in peer review, but two people deemed that the avatar dance routines were too long for the avatar to be considered “under player control” and failed it for violating avatar usage rules.  Rather than fightin’ the hate, I removed player avatars from the product with a heavy heart.  Watching random avatars dance around to your music is still awesome though!  Avatar Boogie 2 supports player avatars by having a separate category of shorter dance animations for them.
  • Hot or Not: Avatar Boogie was originally going to be a hot-or-not-style avatar-rating game.  Because us ghetto-arse Indie Game developers are not allowed to use shared data storage such as leaderboards, rating data would need to be shared peer-to-peer, hence players would need to stay online while their Xbox 360s shared the data.  I thought dancing avatars would seduce them into staying online longer, but after finally figuring out motion capture and seeing it for the first time, I decided I should just scrap the technically challenging-but-not-as-rewarding rating idea and just go with dancing!  Soon after, Projector Games released Rate My Avatar, which was pretty much the product I had been working on, making me glad I chose something different!
  • Dance Skills: My friend, Achievement Whore Matt, I’ll call him (you know who you are), asked me if I performed the motion capture dance moves myself.  I find this hilarious.
  • Shadows: My buddy who made Avatar Drop kept yelling at me because the avatars had no shadows.  I had to explain to him that because the frustratingly-uneditable motion-capture animations drifted up and down the Y-axis, shadows would reveal that half the time the avatars are floating slightly above the ground!

You can see more screenshots and videos over at the Facebook page

About the Author

Danimal is the resident code monkey, artisan, musical director, and PR shill for Highbrow Games. Enjoy his ironic mustache.