The Future of Stepmania

[Arch0wl]

Here I'm going to talk about three things:

1. Why Stepmania has lost much of its activity (or keyboard Stepmania if you want to be specific)

2. What things make Stepmania active or inactive

3. How it could become more interesting, active or not. That is, what new frontiers there are to cross.

I.

There are a variety of reasons for why SM is no longer active like it used to be. But then, "Sequence", a DDR-like game by Iridium Studios, had a pretty active community even though it had a very low skill ceiling relative to Stepmania and no incentive for community participation. So obviously, something other than just "it's a music game" made Stepmania lose activity, because Sequence is a music game with a lot of fan interest and arguably less depth.

If you've kept up with my life you know that I write a lot and that I've also written a good deal of game-related content. One of my major works right now that, hopefully, will lead to consulting gigs is a manual for how to "gamify" nearly any kind of medium -- and what factors you must take into consideration when doing so.

In it, I discuss in-depth how standardization is extremely important if you want to have long-lasting incentivization. I think standardization is the #1 obstacle SM has faced throughout its history, and the main reason why it never saw any kind of serious activity.

When I say "standardization" I mean:

- agreed upon "rules of the game": what playing styles will you use, what is a good stepfile, how will the game be scored, what will you weight for a "good score" (combo? timing? miss count?), what kinds of things are impressive

- centralized authority. FFR has served this role for a while, but even on FFR there was a good deal of chaos and indecision as to what playstyles should be dominant over others. (FFR could have solved this very early on by switching to QWEIOP instead of left-down-up-right, since the former is inarguable.) By contrast, compare FFR's conundrum to how weightlifting competitions handle it: the form that you must use for your lift is standardized by the people who organize the competition.

- a clear objective for what the game is going to be. Stepmania has never been able to agree on whether it's a keyboard game or a pad game, and it tries to be both. By contrast, something like O2Jam is very clear on how it intends you to play the game.

You may be asking why O2Jam didn't succeed, since it seems to do all of these things well. O2Jam's problem was less things like this and more that it didn't monetize its model well and didn't organize its team effectively. Stepmania is a free game, but O2Jam was a game that attempted to sustain itself by making money off of in-game purchases. ("Freemium.") In addition, O2Jam had an identity crisis: it tried to be casual, but the upper echelons of gameplay were anything but casual.

One of O2Jam's errors, which I'll briefly touch upon, was in the use of keysounds. The success of non-keysounded games like Sequence and quasi-keysounded games like Guitar Hero seem to suggest that keysounds do not make a major difference in the success of a game. So even if you're a stickler for things like this, you can quasi-keysound files like Guitar Hero does and that will be sufficient. At the upper levels of difficulty, this meant that an O2Jam staff member would have spent entire days keysounding a file, when they could have been doing other things. This is an extremely inefficient use of labor for a task that produces minimal return. You can survive one inefficient allocation of labor like this, but on a large scale it will screw over your game's sustainability, and O2Jam certainly felt that on a large scale.

II.

No central Stepmania authority can exist because Stepmania itself is controlled by Stepmania.com, which is not explicitly a keyboard game.

If you wanted to make Stepmania popular again, here is what you'd have to do:

1. Make a new game entirely. You could call it Stepmania Ultimate but for the sake of this guide and hilariousness I'll call it Arch0wlmania.

2. Arch0wlmania is explicitly a keyboard game. It is not intending to imitate any kind of real-world musical equivalent, and the game's notes are considered abstractions of the music. The act of making a stepfile is closer to the act of dancing or visualizations like this one in that you are trying to get a deeper connection to the music via technology, not imitate someone playing the music. In addition, the creators have designated should be played in a row format (say, UIOP) rather than an arrow key format. You can make index files if you want, but that's not the standard.

3. The Arch0wlmania website has a defined style guide for how stepfiles are to be made. This style guide isn't that rigorous. If standards for stepfiles become too strict, you fire the strict judges and get more lenient ones. This is because after a certain point ("this file vaguely goes to the music and is synced well enough"), there are diminishing returns on stepfile standards. The time invested adhering to a very strict stepfile style guide could be better spent making more stepfiles and expanding the game's library. So nothing too intense -- sort of how O2Jam wasn't that strict with its charts.

4. The Arch0wlmania website sells an inexpensive USB controller that allows for 10-key play on a layout that is similar to Q-W-E-R-V (left hand), B-U-I-O-P (right hand), except the V and B keys will be sized more like the Backspace key. This is the standard, and no one can quibble saying that their keyboard didn't work or they're playing on a laptop or whatever. If everyone is playing on the same controller, you know exactly what factors went into getting a score.

5. The Arch0wlmania staff are very clear on what type of modes reign over others. So 10 key > 5 key (one hand) > 4 key (one hand) > 7 key > 6 key > 5 key (two hand) > 8 key > 9 key > 4 key (two hand), mostly due to traditions that have developed and how those modes are conducive to improvement on the 10 key mode. Which is to say, you will gain more reputation points (as a submitter) by making files in the staff's preferred game mode, especially since leaderboard points will be higher for files that are in the game's preferred mode. The "official" mode (that is, the preferred tournament mode) is 10 key.

6. Implement gamified incentives for player participation, and active leaderboards/hierarchies. I could write (and am writing) a book/manual on this, so I won't go vastly into detail. Needless to say, you can read the "stretch goals" part of HabitRPG's kickstarter and you will get a better idea of how this should be.

Many of these features exist in bits and parts over FFR and other music games, but it took forever for them to exist and they don't exist cohesively as part of the game's structure.

III.

There are a few areas Stepmania has not touched upon to the same degree it has touched upon 6key and 4key files:

- dedicated one-hand files (that is, [space]-I-O-P and [space]-U-I-O-P for 4-key and 5-key one handed play respectively)

- 7-key files (some exist, but not much)

- 10-key files (this is the last frontier without implementing footpedals, since this is as physically many keys as you can press at once -- any additional keys add forearm/elbow movement, but they do not actually increase the number of total finger presses)

If Stepmania were a dedicated keyboard game, instead of having the current layout that it does, it would have a feature like this:

- You enter the options mode and you're able to select the number of keys you want to play for your game mode (ranging from 4 to 10). If you select 5 or under, you specify if you want to two-hand or one-hand. If you specify one-hand, you'll be able to select left-hand or right-hand and map your thumb key, which will be a visually larger in-game note than the rest of the keys. If you select two-hand, you'll specify if you want thumb key(s) or not.

- You can store as many key layouts as you want, but only one can be activated at any given time. You can configure these at the song select screen if you wish.

- You are able to switch between the number of keys at the song select screen, as if sorting through difficulty. This is in contrast to switching between the number of keys as a "game mode."

- Stepfiles would have a connection to the database they are uploaded to. So if you get a score on that file, it uploads your score to the database with information on how you played the file, and if you change the file, that score is no longer valid.

Doing this would allow these "frontiers" to be explored more easily, since it would make competition on those particular modes less of a hassle and switching between modes very easy to do.

Closing

Unfortunately, I have neither the resources nor the skills to make all of these things happen. My talent area is bizdev primarily, not programming or graphic design. Maybe someday if I have a large amount of disposable income I could make this sort of development a reality, but until then this looks like a pipe dream.

That said, if you've ever wanted to wonder how Stepmania could change or what it could change into, I think this is a good starting point.