Dance Dance Immolation needs theme help!

[nicoles]

Hey there bemanistyle!

I'm nicole, one of the members of Interpretive Arson. Back in 2005, me and 6 or so of my friends built this ridiculous flaming remake of Dance Dance Revolution. We called it Dance Dance Immolation. If you've never heard of it, it's just like ddr, except for the following:
a. It's huge.
b. When you play well, 20 foot tall flame jets shoot up out of the screen.
c. When you play poorly, the machine shoots you in the face with flamethrowers.

I'm completely serious. It's hilarious. If you've never seen it in action, there's videos all over youtube, and our official trailer here: Dance Dance Immolation Teaser on Vimeo

We've run it a number of times, in 2005, 2006, and 2007. We took 2008 off, since it was getting a bit tiresome, but it's time to bring it back. So we're dusting it all off, and have decided to make it *more* awesome. Better lighting, better fire, better electronics. The game itself runs off a slightly hacked up version of stepmania that's set up to interact with a relay board to handle the safety systems and flame effect controls, as well as adding in a few extra screens for things like 'arming' the system. In any case, one thing that's been missing from DDI is a really polished theme. You'd think that we'd have this figured out, but really, most of the people involved find plumbing and electrical a lot more intuitive than graphic design and BGAnimation files. So we're asking for some help. We'd like to take DDI to the next level. We'd like to have a theme that is as distinctive as the rest of the project.

Hopefully that's an interesting hook. If anyone's up for helping us out, I'll post our custom stepmania version up (it's based off 3.9) as well as our 'first' and 'second' mix themes, so you can get an idea of our aesthetic.

Thanks in advance!

~nicole aptekar
Interpretive Arson

ps. If you're in the California Bay Area, we're going to be running Dance Dance Immolation at a party on April 25th in Oakland! Check out the details here, and I'd love to set you on fire! I mean... see you there!

[uguisumode]

isn't that dangerous though?
really i do like DDR but i think that is a bit too far i mean really crazy

[nicoles]

Originally Posted by uguisumode

isn't that dangerous though?
really i do like DDR but i think that is a bit too far i mean really crazy

Quoting our website...

Is it dangerous?
Before you play, you’ll put on a full aluminized proximity suit with a forced-air respirator, gloves, fireproof hood, the whole bit. These are the suits that are used for fighting fires at airports. So, as you can see, it’s completely safe!

We’re taking a whole bunch more safety precautions too. For the gritty details, check out our complete fire safety plan.

Basically though, we've created a controlled situation that appears dangerous, but is perfectly safe.

~nicole

[uguisumode]

oh i see then
well good luck with that

[TrueFSX]

First, I'd like to see how the game looks right now.

[tweak_]

if it's still anything like the old pics i've seen, slightly modified default 3.9 theme

[AceJay]

Oh sweet, someone make this theme in 4.0, widescreen, with a bunch of 3D fire effects.

[dieKatze88]

If someone is willing to foot the 2d/3d on this, I'd be willing to write the code.

[nicoles]

Wow! Interest! Awesome!

So the original theme we made was based off "Strawberry Steps". We wanted (and still want) something high contrast, to really pop when projected huge. We added in diamond plate and caution stripes, since we've got sort of a caution-tape on metal aesthetic with the actual project (even our generators are painted black and yellow).

We pulled out the whole lifebar entirely, and replaced it with this crazy rotating pressure gauge. The idea with the pressure gauge is that it fills up when you screw up, and once it's full you get hit with a blast of fire as it resets. I'm not sure if we're going to stick with this metaphor, as I'd like to start making it more of a versus game rather than player-versus computer. There's also been talk about keeping it the way it is, but having some indicator of who's doing generally 'better' (probably whether you've been shot with fire more or less over the course of the song) and then giving that player the opportunity to press a button at the scoring screen to immolate their opponent. The pressure gauge fills up based on how long it's been since you last missed a step, rather than the same increment each time, so that whether you are playing well or poorly on any of the difficulty levels, you won't get hit more than 7-8 times per song.

The custom code is all written for 3.9, so it might be easier to stick with that? We've also got a subversion repository for our code, so if people are super-enthused about moving to 4.0, and feel like porting our changes, that would be awesome too.

I've stripped the ddi directory from most of the extraneous bullshit (source, release, movies, songs, etc) so that you can hopefully just download it and fuck around.

http://interpretivearson.com/theme/DDIGAME.zip

I'm so excited about you guys working on this, I've seen the themes that come out of this forum, and they look completely awesome. If anyone needs illustrator files for our logos and such, please ask. Also the Interpretive Arson logo has changed completely. The old one is sort of embarrassing.

A couple more things:

We've removed most of the options, so that the title screen has 1p, 2p, option, exit. For DDI, we have no use for courses, step editor, etc. Most of the time, the people playing have never played ddr, or played it only once or twice. We don't have the options for solo/double/etc, because our pads are separated from one another by like 15 feet.

Also, this build seems kind of slow. Not sure if it's a debug build or something, I'll have to ask around. Once again, if anyone wants access to the source, private message me, and we'll get you set up.

I'm excited about where this could go. We're getting a lot of interest in running fairly internationally this year, so your work could end up quite largely displayed all over the place.

Thank you all so much!

~nicoles

[nicoles]

Originally Posted by AceJay

Oh sweet, someone make this theme in 4.0, widescreen, with a bunch of 3D fire effects.

That would be so awesome. The widescreen thing maybe less-so, since our projector and screen are 4:3... I mean, we could build a new screen, but I think that's a pretty low priority compared to some of our other proposed improvements. (For instance, our pads are not in the best shape, having taken them to the desert 3 times)

[ranatalus]

also i don't imaging having them in close proximity to a lot of fire has done anything to lengthen their lifespan, hahaha

[AceJay]

Originally Posted by nicoles

download it and fuck around.

http://interpretivearson.com/theme/DDIGAME.zip

And the very next day the land was scorched.

[TrueFSX]

How are the flamethrowers controlled?

[alielmejor]

supposly with the modded source code, at the time you get a miss, the firethrowers throw fire (lol)... will my pc burn if In this stepmania i get a miss? lol

[TrueFSX]

I mean "How does StepMania operate the control hardware?"