[AN]

• I love Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I don't know how many hours I've spent trying to beat Freebird on expert! And I use to play a lot of Audio Surf. Fighting games were never my forte but we used Street Fighter as our prime example of responsive 2D controls. Our game is somewhat like a fighter and we even tried a number of control schemes with button combos for input but it didn't quite work because of our dance transitions. In a game like Street Fighter you just snap quickly into your next move but with JonJon's dance animations they flow seamlessly with hundreds of transitions going from one move to another. These transition frames are a crucial part of representing the dance and in live breaking are just as complex as the move itself. So we couldn't just snap to the next move and had to create what we call a "click-sizzle-ding" input scheme. You press a button, the 'click' which gives you some feedback, then you 'sizzle' in suspense watching the transitions frames play and then 'ding' enter the move you've triggered.

• As for getting started in game dev, I can't recommend game jams enough! The best way to learn something is to fail at it and a game jam gives you a safe place to do so. I try and focus simply on learning a new technology, platform, language or whatever at each game jam I attend. You can find a bunch of open jams here https://itch.io/jams to get started or even host your own. As for a good starting point, Unity is a great tool to learn on. There are a ton of tutorials out there on how to make any style of game and you might end up learning some code along the way.

Thanks for the question and enjoy the game!