As you all know, I’m working on a visual novel about my great passion in life, Dancesport. After three years and all kinds of issues along the way, it’s finally getting close to being finished.
You can Wishlist it on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3693000/The_Last_Waltz/
As I’ve been working on the game, one thought has been running in the back of my mind: How am I going to explain this project to people who have never seen Dancesport?
It’s easy to explain a story about football. Even if you’re not a fan of it, you know what the sport looks like. The same thing goes for narrative genres: You can say to someone, “Hey, I’m writing a horror story,” and they’ll immediately know what kind of story you’re writing.
But dancesport is, unfortunately, niche both as a sport and a narrative topic. To get people interested in my visual novel, I needed to first explain why dancesport is interesting. Not easy to do when you’re not running with the budget for a Grand Theft Auto game.
On the plus side, dancesport is inherently nice to look at (why this is a niche sport is endlessly mystifying to me, given how wonderful it is to watch). So I landed on the idea of doing a mini-documentary to get dancers talking about who they are and why they dance. The idea being that by hearing their stories and the beauty they create through movement, I could inspire people to want to learn more about it.
I was fortunate to get two of the very top Australian professional dance couples, as well as the Under-21 national champions, to do their dances and sit down and be interviewed. Now, I have 19 wonderful clips showcasing elite standard dancesport, as well as the documentary in the making that will share their stories in-depth.
This dance is to authentic dancesport music composed specifically for the visual novel. I was lucky to work with a team of brilliant musicians who also had to learn the quirks of how music works in dancesport in a very quick time. It’s not every day a music composer gets a brief to write a new Paso Doble or Vienesse Waltz, and these things are actually hard to do, so the fact that they nailed it so perfectly is hugely impressive and inspiring.
I do think that this project gives the visual novel the best chance of finding its audience when I release it.
Also, it was fun to do, and I’m proud of the results. More than anything else I want to use this project to introduce people to something that means a lot to me, so if I can get Dancesport even one more fan, or convince someone to go to a competition or try a class for themselves, then I’ll consider this whole effort worthwhile.
