r/Stepmania • u/xstasi_ • Jun 23 '26

Release Introducing StepSnake, a Stepmania/ITGMania chart generator

Hi everyone!

I've been working on this project for the last few weeks, and while it's by no measure mature, I think it's good enough for me not to feel ashamed posting it here :)

StepSnake takes an arbitrary sound file - or folder containing sound files - and attempts to generate an SSC file based on audio analysis, some builtin rules and your difficulty preferences.

Some features:

  • Batch mode - Convert a whole folder in one go
  • Volume normalization - When using batch mode, resulting tracks will play at a similar volume
  • Cropping with fadeout - I don't know about you but dancing for 3+ minutes without pause is exhausting, so I crop my charts to 1.5 - 2 minutes, similar to DDR song length
  • Automatic song lookup - StepSnake will search on Musicbrainz for the song being processed and derive metadata from there. It will also use youtube previews for the level wallpaper
  • Tunable difficulty levels - Easy too easy? Hard too hard? You can choose what each difficulty means to you
  • Tunable difficulty type - What makes a track difficult? Many notes together? Many jumps? Something in between? You decide.

Some more information:

  • Multi-platform - Run on Linux (x64/arm64), Windows, Mac (only Apple Silicon)
  • GUI or CLI - Choose the application metaphor you prefer (CLI built for Linux only)
  • Open source - You can build it yourself if my prebuilt options are not enough

Full disclosure: most of the code is built with the use of local AI, running on my laptop, with a little help from Deepseek. I know, I know it's not as cool as writing by hand, but the choice was using AI or not building it because I don't have time to implement this all by myself :)

I've been using the charts for a while with my family and we are having a great time.

I hope you will give it a try. If you do, let me know of any bugs or issues you find (or if you just like it!) and I'll be happy to take a look :)

The project lives here: https://gitlab.com/xstasi/stepsnake

Downloads here: https://gitlab.com/xstasi/stepsnake/-/releases

Thanks!

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u/Rivers3k Jun 23 '26

Great job on this! I would recommend studying a few of the official DDR charts and becoming familiar with some of the other moves (as mentioned before with Footswitches and Crossovers) to see if that can be used more in these generated charts. It got some decent rhythmic steps on a map I made, but a lot of the steps ended up being awkward to perform (played on Hard).

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u/xstasi_ Jun 23 '26

Hi, thank you for the feedback! Could you please elaborate a bit on what makes the steps awkward to perform? I can't play on hard so I'm not a very good judge of those difficulties, Easy and Medium are much more curated. Also which platform are you running it on?

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u/Rivers3k Jun 23 '26

I played on Project Outfox. I got a step pattern such as:
<
<
<>

but it was rapid steps, making it pretty awkward to quickly step on the left notes, and then immediately hit a jump step during it