Its build-in music is composed and produced specifically for this VR experience using binaural audio. Holodance also supports loading osu! beatmaps which gives players access to almost 12,000 perfectly beatmapped songs, some with varying difficulties for an overall 45,000+ beatmaps. The 14+ environments you can play in are designed to perfectly match the sound to give you:
A spatial, rhythmic, audio-visual experience of pure ecstatic joy!
Think of Holodance as a music video that you can enter and play with. But it's not just a 2D video - it's an actual reality that touches hearing and seeing and hopefully your heart! The game has both a free-mode (just a pure rhythm game) and a story-mode (in development) where a group of dragons returns to planet Earth to find out: Are you ready to write a new history for the future?
See also: Official Website, Steam Community Forum, Holodance Vimeo Group
The standard version of Holodance will come with 12 songs in the EDM / trance style. However, most likely over time there will be other musical styles added (if you're an artist and want to have your music on Holodance: contact us!) Each song has several tracks, like a bassdrum, the hihat, a bassline or some synth playing a melody. As these tracks have different rhythms and complexities, there's a natural progression of difficulty within each song. Once you have touched a minimum of notes per track, the next more difficult track within the song becomes available. Once you have all tracks of a song completed, the next song becomes available which will be longer and more difficult.
Holodance is only available for Virtual Reality because it is fully controlled with motion tracked controllers: There are different ways of "touching" notes that match the instrument of a given track. For percussive instruments like drums, the notes come flying towards you in the form of orbs that you just need to touch with the right timing. Notes for sustained instruments come as paths that you need to follow with just the right pace. Finally, there will also be stationary orbs that you can tap in any sequence - you just need to get the rhythm right.
Holodance will get a collaborative multiplayer mode where you can play songs together with friends or strangers (who will then become friends). The score is added up, so the more people you have in a session, the more maximum score is available. There will be up to four players per session.
Munich, Germany, December 26, 2017: Virtual Reality rhythm game Holodance has just received a new mode that lets players experience all of the game's environments in a very different kind of visual appearance: As a Christmas present to its players, Psychedelic Mode has been added to the game just today.
Psychedelic Mode is activated via the game's settings under Style / Psychedelic Settings. There are currently Color Effects, Time Dilation and Strobe Lights, each with a few options to adapt the effects the player's likes.
Color Effects first links the current combo with the saturation: Before the player catches the first orb, it's all black and white. Then, gradually, with each orb that is caught without missing one, the game goes over normal into a fairly over-saturated look until players has caught 48 orbs, which also gives them the 4x combo multiplier. This event is combined with Time Dilation, causing the game to go into a bullet time like state for the player to catch the important orb. Right after that, the Strobe Lights flash for a few seconds.
And this is where the real psychedelic experience starts: Now, each orb that is caught shifts the hue a little bit, completely mixing up the colors. Depending on the environment, this effect can be kind of subtle, mostly just changing the colors of the orbs a little bit - or really dramatic.
When players keep catching every orb, successfully tracing every Slider and spinning every Spinner, eventually a Long Combo is achieved - and now that color cycling moves on its own.
Finally, players that master any one of the almost 60,000 beatmaps for almost 12,000 songs and not miss a single orb will get to the final bullet time slow down so the can finish that last note with their coolest move.
While the Holodance Avatar system is just an option for players that want to use it for creating videos, it certainly helps make gameplay videos more entertaining.
About narayana games
narayana games is an independent game development studio focussing on VR, AR and multiplayer and was founded exactly 6 years ago, 2011-11-22. Based near Munich at Lake Ammer (Ammersee), Germany, the game studio has an international team collaborating all over the world. The current project, Holodance, is a Virtual Reality rhythm game released on Steam into Early Access on April 5th, 2016, which evolved from "Dancing with Dragons" into "Virtual Clubbing with osu! beatmaps" within roughly one year and keeps on evolving based both on player feedback and the companies own creative flow.
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