StepMania

The primary game type features the following game play: as arrows scroll upwards (or downwards if the player has selected the "Reverse" scroll modifier) on the screen, they meet a normally stationary set of target arrows. When they do, the player presses the corresponding arrows on their keyboard or dance mat. The moving arrows meet the targets based on the beat of the song. The game is scored based upon how accurately the player can trigger the arrows in time to the beat of the song.

The player's efforts are given a letter grade and a number score that tell how well they have done. 0225 seconds under official settings) and avoided all mines and completed all hold (freeze) arrows. An E indicates failure for a player to survive the length of the song without completely draining their life gauge. Default scoring and grading for StepMania is similar to scoring in Dance Dance Revolution; however, timing and scoring settings can easily be changed.

StepMania was originally developed as an open-source clone of Konami's arcade game series Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). During the first three major versions, the Interface was based heavily on DDR's. 9 in 2005. In 2010, after almost 5 years of work without a stable release, StepMania creator Chris Danford forked a 2006 build of StepMania, paused development on the bleeding edge branch, and labeled the new branch StepMania 4 beta.

A separate development team called the Spinal Shark Collective forked the bleeding-edge branch and continued work on it, branding it sm-ssc. 0. 1, has gone cold over the past few years after a couple of betas were released over at GitHub. 1 codebase originally planned to reintegrate in StepMania; however, further in development, it was decided to become an independent project due to its larger scope of goals while still sharing codebase improvements to future versions of StepMania.

StepMania became a quite popular free software game; the game was downloaded alone over SourceForge between 2001 and May 2017 over 6.3 million times.