Smoke Alarm Rhythm Game
It’s soon to be the 2 year anniversary of the Circuit Bent Smoke Alarms – Ringtone Collection and to celebrate I’ve decided to release a limited edition which includes a bonus Stepmania rhythm game level. If you want to give it a go you can download it HERE.
You will need Stepmania, an open source rhythm game engine clone of Dance Dance Revolution. It’s available for Mac Windows and Linux. and available here (you can download loads of other song packs (simfiles) here.
Make your own Stepmania Levels
If you want to try making your own stepfiles there are a few options. At first I tried to take the easy road and tried a few different auto generators – programs that you feed a song into and they pump out a step chart. These gave some interesting results but at the end of the day I think I’ve made more satisfying levels by manually putting in the steps one by one.
Step file editors
- The Stepmania inbuilt song editor
General Guides
Here is a good general guide for making levels.
For custom background images the size is 640 x 480 and the banner size should be 256 x 80 . To add background and banner images, you put them into the song folder with the MP3 and edit the .sm file in a text editor to specify the image . You can add a video background too by editing the .sm file and and simply adding the video file name instead of an image, though i found the video / audio sync was pretty inconsistent.
Auto Generators
There are a few different programs available online to auto generate stepfiles. I tried:
- Dance Dance Convolution *
- AutoStepper
- Dancing Monkeys
- DeepSM
- I also made my own using Pure Data but it’s not very good. . .
*Dance Dance Convolution – This is an online program that uses machine learning to generate random stepfiles for stepmania. The online version didn’t seem to be working when i tried but you download the source code on github , and run it locally or via Docker labs.
To do this: sign in ->Add New Instance -> Type:
docker run -it -p 8080:80 chrisdonahue/ddc:latest
Then open port 8080 (or click on the 8080 button at the top of the screen).
