Just Dance wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I pictured my game development career. But it turned out to be one of the more demanding projects I worked on… and a genuinely fun one.
I joined as a Gameplay Programmer UI on the Wii U version, which was the lead platform, then ported and adapted the work across Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, PS4 and Xbox One. Six platforms, one year, one engine switch.
My main responsibility was the gameplay UI: the race line, a real-time display showing each player’s score as a set of progressing bars racing against each other, the scoring system, feedback elements, menus, transitions between screens. This work sits right at the intersection of gameplay and interface: invisible when it works, immediately noticeable when it doesn’t. On a game where the entire experience depends on split-second visual feedback, getting that layer right mattered.
Recreating everything from scratch
The team was transitioning to a new engine for the 2014 edition. In practice, that meant rebuilding the game from the ground up in under a year. On top of the UI, I was responsible for completely recreating the sweat mode from scratch, a feature that tracks player movement and estimates calories burned, which sounds simple until you’re the one making it feel accurate and responsive across six different input systems.
The timeline was brutal. A lot of overtime, a lot of Red Bull, and the particular satisfaction that comes from shipping something you weren’t sure was possible.
What I took away
Working on a franchise that sells tens of millions of copies, across that many platforms simultaneously, teaches you things about robustness and scope that few projects can. Just Dance has a fanbase that buys every entry, compares it to the previous one, and expects it to be better. That weight is real. You’re not shipping into a vacuum, you’re shipping to people who genuinely care, and disappointing them is not an option. There’s also something to be said for finding the interesting engineering problem inside a project that, on the surface, seems straightforward.
Just Dance 2014 shipped on time. All six versions.
