Club Fantastic: Synthetic Dance 2020
As part of SF EVOLVED, I helped to create Club Fantastic, a free, non-profit dance rhythm game based on StepMania.
This page describes our first version, Club Fantastic: Synthetic Dance 2020, released in November 2020. We released our second version, Club Fantastic: Step Forward, in July 2021.
During the coronavirus pandemic, competitive dance gamers are playing at home instead of the arcade. Often, players use tracks taken from commercial games or play with unlicensed music. For personal use, this hasn't been much of a problem. However, with many players streaming on Twitch and uploading videos to YouTube, copyright issues become more complicated.
Goals
Attempting to solve these problems and more, we set out to create brand new, commercial-quality tracks with none of the copyright concerns. Our goals:
- Surprise & entertain players
- Allow people to stream and record gameplay without worry
- Pave the way toward completely legal esports events
- Establish a high standard for production quality
- Make it easy for new players to get started with StepMania
Team Output
Over a 5 month period, the Club Fantastic team accomplished the following:
- Planned the project vision starting in June 2020
- Designed a brand identity for the project
- Composed 14 original EDM tracks
- Choreographed 84 step patterns
- Created high quality cover art for each track
- Implemented in-game features and UI changes
- Packaged StepMania and Club Fantastic content into an easy-to-use installer
- Built a project website for credits, marketing, and downloads
- Produced a trailer video for the project
- Released Season 1 to community acclaim in early November 2020
- Began planning a Season 2 release for 2021
With our first release, the team succeeded in creating something meaningful for dance game culture, and we are proud of our work. Season 2 was released in Summer 2021.
The entire team deserves many thanks for devoting hundreds of hours of their spare time to this project.
Personal Involvement
My duties involved brand direction, artist relations, team organization, project management, music production, graphic design and more. Notable contributions include:
- Composition & production of Melody Mountain, a happy hardcore-styled track influenced by mid-1990s video game music
- Cover art for Melody Mountain using Photoshop and Blender
- Composition & production of Fantastic World, an electro house track inspired by the concept of dance gaming
- Cover art for COOL_EXCEPTION, a breakcore track by eclectic music producer Frums
- Announcer voiceover for the trailer video
- Artist relations, team organization and project management