Join the DDR Encore Team!

Hey Everyone Myst Here! It is our two year anniversary for our website DDR Encore. A lot has happened this year with us reaching 120 songs and having our biggest Sporktoberfest tournament yet. We hope to make it bigger this year but first we need to announce that we need to jump start our team again. So as such we are welcoming new team members.

Right now we are searching for Step Artists and Graphic Artists (persons who are a combination of both will also be accepted). If you are interested in regularly contributing volentarly in a ongoing collection of high quality Stepmania simfiles and support the dance game community then we love to have you join the team. Remember this is about showing your talents of creating step charts to songs players will love to listen and dance to and/or showing your skills in providing high quality graphics towards our website and projects.

If you are interested in joining us as a stepper. Here are some things that will be expected of you if you make the team.

• You will be required to provide on a regular basis new songs that have been stepped ready to be playtested. Below is our typical submission guidelines.
• You will be required to awknowledge constructive feedback provided by other steppers and work with your teammates to improve your file as it is playtested until it is approved to be posted on the site.
• You will need to regularly provide playtesting feedback on all other Step artists newest songs that have not cleared playtesting. This pretty well means being extremely active in making sure we work as a team so that every songs counts. This especially means providng constructive feedback and point out what is not working in someone else's file.

If you are interested in joining us a graphic artist. We expect you to accept assignments to create a wide variety of graphics for songfiles, coursefiles, future Stepmania themes, web page graphics, and more as we need them.

As either a graphic artist or a stepper we also expect you to the following whenever you can. You will be expected to help moderate the DDR Encore Forums as you browse them. You will be expected to help promote the project to all dance gamers and work with your local arcades to help improve and expand the dance game community. This includes providing news from the music game industry, making new friends at arcades and expanding the interest of Stepmania to dance gamers.

So you want to join? Here is what we need to know from you:

Your Name – We don't expect you to post your real name on the forums so your common nickname will do. Just be something people will identify you with when you make your work. We'll get your real name once we get to know you. Heck I still can't get the real names down to half of the current team mates so don't worry about that.

Where do you live? - Just your City, State, Nation will do.

Give us a little bit about yourself – Tell us anything you want. What sort of games you play, what sort of music you like the best, your beliefs. Be yourself. Try to give at least a paragraph or two if you can.

What are your favorite music games? - Tell us which of the different kind of music games out there you like the best and which ones you want to try next and tell us how each game influences your works. Once again at least a paragraph or two.

Favorite Saying – It can be a quote, something you made up, or whatever? Give give a little something that other people will think about.

Now if you want to be a Step Artist for DDR Encore we need some of your works now to see if you got the stuff. Basically we need three different simfiles for us to test out to see how you shape up. Here are the rules for each simfile you send us.

Each file should be cleaned up and presentable as if it was downloaded from our site. This means you should provide the Stepfile (.sm for sure .dwi is optional) and the Music file (.mp3 or .ogg formats only). Avoid sending any .old files. You may provide a Lyric (.lrc) file and one readme file (.txt format only), and if you can make them create your image (.png format only) files for your banner graphic and background graphic. There is not much need for any CD title images as you will receive your own CD title if you make the team. Also you may submit a video file if you can properly cut the video and it is directly related to the song.

Each stepfile must have Beginner, Light (Basic), Standard (Difficult), and Heavy (Expert) Single Style Charts AND Light, Standard, and Heavy Double Style charts. You may include a Challenge chart if you feel the song is challenging enough to have a difficulty higher than Heavy. If you do provide a Challenge chart you must have a Challenge chart for both Single and Double play styles. All charts should have no mines, hands, roll arrows, secret, healing, or poison arrows in the main charts (but are allowed in personal edit charts outside of the official charts). This also means making sure your Challenge charts does not play to a DDR X Shock Arrow style. You may provide any other charts such as Solo, Pump It Up, ParaParaParadise, Edit Charts, etc. but they will not directly influence our review.

Your music choices should be very different amongst your three songs. This means picking from different genre for each song. Your music should be appropriately cut to length anywhere from 1 minute 25 seconds to 2 minutes 15 seconds give or takes. Overall the idea time is 1 minute 45 seconds. Your music should be presented in a high quality frequency. Your music choices should be appropriate for anyone to listen to. This means the music should have no vulgar word useage, racist comments, promotion of drugs, tobacco, alcohol, violence, weapons of mass destruction or spam. Your music may not come from a movie, tv show (INCLUDING ANIME), video game theme (unless it is a Konami published video game). Foreign songs are welcomed however we cannot help express extreme caution of choosing one as they rarely make approval.

If you want to become a graphic artist simply create three different graphics to show us. The first two should be the banner and background graphic of a simfile. A standard sized banner graphic is 256 x 80 pixels and a standard sized background graphic is 640 x 480 pixels. The graphics you make can be for any simfile even one that already exists with its own graphics or one that doesn't exist at all. We just need to see something really, The third graphic can be anything you want but should showcase any and all skills you have in graphic art including text manipluation, photo manipluation, vector graphics, layering, and more. We really welcome Photoshop (.psd) files so we can get under the hood of your works.

With that said if you have what it takes then join today! Check out our “Team Member Application Forum” and post a new topic to show your stuff. Yeah you gotta be registered on the forums to apply. We look forward to hearing from you. If you have questions reply to this topic in this forum and we will get back as soon as possible.