Start of VRDancing World Development
After a few weeks of hosting VRDancing events the community expressed interest in a custom dancing world for VRDancing instead of making use of the PyPyDance world.
Mixie and Chatmans both expressed interest in developing such a world. Mixie primarily wanted to improve upon the UIs and improve her C# and Unity skills. While Chatmans was looking for opportunities to get into mapping and 3D work.
Together they set out to develop a world where the community would feel at home. In the first few weeks, the focus was to verify whether it was possible for Mixie to develop a UI that could potentially be more user friendly for our community’s needs. In this whitebox phase a lot was learnt about the possibilities and limitations of VRChat and its UdonSharp programming system.
Prior Unity development experience of both Mixie and Chatmans helped. But they both needed to learn a lot of VRChat specific tools and systems. Initial development was slow and cautious but both were excited and passionate to make this project come to fruition.
One of the earliest quality of life improvements that Mixie set out to implement was a way to filter videos by category to make it more easy to find specific videos.
Initial ambitions for the scenery of the VRDancing world were high. The concept was to recreate a lot of the locations that The Fitness Marshall records his videos at in VR. The first location that Chatmans started working on was the rooftop location.
However, soon they realised they we’re going to need a more basic dancing studio first before expanding to more advanced concepts like these. Chatmans started working on the studio that we all know and love to this day.
The intention was to eventually return to the idea of having different locations dynamically swap in and out. But in favour of download size, performance and user experience it was decided not to.
The first world test with the VRD community was done on a simplified version of the rooftop scene with most props removed. This test was mainly done to get feedback on the UI and to see if the videoplayer would sync properly for all participants. Unfortunately everyone’s game crashed after a while but a lot was learnt from this session!
Chatmans started creating the layout of the VRDancing building. Allowing for both a focus on dancing and spaces for the community to hang out after a workout.
Meanwhile, Mixie continued to develop the UI and setup the systems to easily allow VRD members to contribute to an online database that could be imported into the world. A lot of experimentation was done for the main database UI to learn what worked for our community.
After the first 2 months of development a clear idea was established of what the VRD community needed from a custom VRChat world. The layout of the building had been designed and Chatmans started to model each individual room one-by-one. Meanwhile, Mixie kept focusing on the back-end and developing the UI as more testers continued to provide useful feedback.
During these initial months of development, several community members worked very hard to get the VRDancing Database started. All Just Dance content and Fitness Marshall content was prepared and tagged for use in VRChat.
Testing showed that the room would soon become too small for our community to comfortably dance in. Thus, systems were developed to scale up the entire world based on how many people were on the dancefloor.
