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SmallWorlds Blog
Shake your Booty at Smallworlds
November 13th, 2008 - Hilary Jackson

If you’ve yet to really get out there and shake your booty in-world, we’re here to get you out there and swingin’ it!

To help you out, we thought we’d share a site that the SmallWorlds staff often refer to for inspiration when designing moves for our own avatars (it feels a little like  sharing our secret weapon…). The hilarious Zefrank, and his online ‘dance demos’. You can lean how to dance properly (http://www.zefrank.com/invite/swfs/index2.html ), and then move up to take his advanced class (http://www.zefrank.com/dance2/navigation.html ). We expect to see some seriously impressive moves out there in-world as a result of sharing this rare dance up-skilling opportunity!
 

The Development of the Dance Studio
We managed to wrest one of our developers,  Andrew Higgins, away from his SmallWorlds ministrations to ask a few questions about the creation of the  dance studio. 



“The most challenging part of building the Dance Studio was coming up with a way to create unique dance moves that could be played using our existing animation system.  The method and tools used by our artists to create animations is fairly complicated, so we decided to simplify it by allowing the user to select from a variety of predefined poses for different areas of the body.  The most fun part of creating the Dance Studio had to be testing all the different moves – especially when they didn’t quite work as expected!”

You’ll be pleased to know that the Dance Studio is set to evolve…  “as we add new frames to the avatar, the number of possible combinations increases.  Certain combinations can then be selected to create new dance poses“.

Andrew also shared a little known fact. Most of the available poses are directly based on the real-life moves of SmallWorlds staff, many of whom are very accomplished dancers.   In fact, the default avatar dance was originally performed and choreographed by co-founder Mitch at an early Dance Studio meeting before being carefully digitized – he wanted to get it just right.

The dance studio is easy to use and enables you to some up with some pretty complex routines. Ready with some great moves? We’d like to show you a few places in-world to go show off your stuff.

Dance Clubs

Club Trey
A great club set up by Trey Mista. First up there’s a great mission that gets you from lining up outside the club, paying to get in and then dancing on the dancefloor. Trey lives in Australia, and he’s often hanging out in his club, so go make his acquaintance. Trey tells us about his club: “on the dj decks its mainly R’n'B and Hip Hop but then I purchased a seeqpod stereo; anyone that comes into my club can add more songs to it. I’ve had the club maxed out quite a few times, it’s a popular club ”



He enjoys knowing that people can come and enjoy the space… “ have a good time, play pool… its what its there for… to enjoy ”. Trey runs a mega pool competition with 1st prize of 9723 tokens - other prizes too.

Visit this Space http://www.smallworlds.com/home/treymista1/

The Jungle NightClub
Big Dawg runs the Jungle Nightclub - he’s got all the things you’d expect from any great real life dance club; state of the art sound system, two bars, pool tables, video games, dance floors and food and drinks at cost. “We try to make it a place to showcase the players hard work in creating one-of-a-kind dance moves and be justly rewarded for their efforts”.



Big Dawg runs regular dance-offs, as well as bi-weekly pool tournaments with mega token payouts. BD also hosts the Mr & Mrs SmallWorlds competitions, rumoured to be happening monthly!

Visit this Space http://www.smallworlds.com/space/050667180e002efadd11ac4909c8625b/

The Movers
Now you know where to dance, lets meet two keen in-world dancers. Again we  drew a few more names out of the growing SmallWorlds hat – lets meet a few who got the moves!

Ocean Waves & ‘The Ocean Motion’
Ocean does a very cute little shimmy that is simple yet really effective!  “My dance was has been referred to as ‘Ocean Motion’ and I’ve even had a song dedicated to my dance, ‘Shake It’ by MetroStation – I’d say that is the best compliment of all. My most favourite place to “shake it” has to be in peoples rooms during weekend dance parties. That is where you meet the coolest people and see the greatest dances.”



Ocean was kind enough to give us the formula for her Shimmy, so you can go out and recreate it (or build on it) for yourself. “You alternate between two positions: 1) Head Half Left, Walk 3, Arms Relaxed, 90 degree angle and 2) Head Half Right, Walk 1, Arms Relaxed, 0 degree angle.  Pause is set to 2, so it would alternate fast. 1,2,1,2,1,2“.

Soup Sung - Spun Out!

Soup is a helper here on SmallWorlds, so look out for him in his cool blue cape  ( http://blog.smallworlds.com/2008/11/05/o-sainted-moderator/ ) marked with an “H”.  We asked Soup about his dance –  “I created it when I went to a party. I started dancing and then everybody started to copy me. I felt totally powerful! (laughs)” One of Soups initial dance creations saw  his body rotating underneath a still head - “some people said ‘Soup, you look like a beater; aren’t you getting dizzy? are you digging?!’” We hear he’s made some interesting modifications to these early moves – go find Soup for a dance-off!



The SmallWorlds dance studio & dance clubs! - yet another very cool feature of our ever expanding exciting world, providing you and your friends with a great place to hang out and dance the night away!