Right now, over 60,000 people are congregating for the real-life event that inspired the theme of TrotMania Euphorius. Given this occasion, it’s only appropriate that we bring you something sufficiently celebratory: this is the first preview pack for it! This preview contains five of the songs we have completed so far, with a relatively balanced difficulty spread to give you a feel for how things are coming.

Note, these are beta charts. If you have any comments or concerns regarding them or other aspects (including, but not limited to, timing, flow, difficulty ratings, etc.), please let us know! The only way we can truly evaluate our work so far is to get it in the hands of others!

If you’ve come here from elsewhere, we’d also like to point out that we have ways you can join us and contribute. We’re always looking for new step artists, composers, artists, etc. to contribute. Plus, we are having an OC art contest based on the themes of Euphorius; besides other prizes, you could be featured in TrotMania Euphorius itself!

• TrotMania Euphorius Preview Pack #1

The first chapters of Embers Fall, the official companion story for TrotMania Euphorius, are coming very soon. This is going to be an almost full-on story in the TrotMania universe, which will make sense of every single little detail we have in store for Euphorius, and will be updated throughout the lifetime of the version. When did a dance game ever need a storyline? It never did. But I don’t care :>

The TrotMania arrows introduced on III have been updated. Given that StepMania 5.1 completely changes the noteskin system to begin with, might as well update them too! The arrow sprites themselves were redrawn, the explosions have extra sparkle, and they finally match up with our judgement colors (i.e. it’ll finally glow purple and blue on Magicals and Radicals instead of the white and gold of Flawlesses and Perfects).

We are still working hard behind the scenes; we might have another set of song previews coming in the next few days, so stay tuned!

The TrotMania forum has become a key resource for our community, for both our players and fans, as well as the staff (I’ve personally used it for internal recordkeeping and discussion, although we’ve increasingly used chat for that too). Recent issues with the current implementation of the forum, however, led me to wonder if we could make it even better. With that in mind, we did just that.

TrotTalk is the third generation of the TrotMania forum. It’s built on a more robust and well-known platform with a lot more functionality than the previous one (and in fact, it’s also the latest version of said platform, specifically phpBB. Shockingly, they’ve actually done a good job of reworking things under the hood. It’s smartphone-friendly too). It’s a bit more traditionally-styled, but I’m sure that you’ll grow accustomed to it over time.

Now, please note that due to the changes, you will have to reset your password. Ironically, the inability to do this correctly was one of the factors that led me towards doing this, but one of the users who had issues with it told me that they were able to get back in. If you are having difficulty (I know for a fact that anyone using a Microsoft-controlled email will have issues), inform me (preferably on the TM chat room) and we’ll try and work things out manually. Be sure to go through your settings and profile after you get in, too.

TrotMania IV will, most likely, be using StepMania 5.1 as its base. It contains some fundamental changes to how gameplay is rendered under the hood, some of which are major enough that playing certain songs will make you have a bad time. The pun is and isn’t intended; it’s easy to figure out what I’m getting at there.

But one thing that has also been worked on in 5.1 is a redesigned options screen. Of course, we’re implementing that too.

It is quite jarring in comparison to what everyone else is used to (it mainly uses sub-menus and toggle switches), but as someone who has worked with SM5 theming for quite a while, the options menus have always been a mess of legacy components that are quite tricky to work with. This one uses a new architecture that is more in line with the rest of the platform from a coding standpoint. The menu design and behaviour itself is also still being worked on upstream, so we will be sure to pass any feedback surrounding it to its developer.

Speaking of themes, an update has been released for the TM3 themes, available via the Downloads page. It fixes a few bugs and oversights in relation to non-Event Mode gameplay (including implementation of the results “recap” page, and fixing a bug that causes SM to crash on an Extra Stage under certain conditions), and has some other tweaks.

Edit: Since the original post, the upstream design of the new options menu was updated, so TM4 has been updated to match. The new design, in my opinion, is actually a major improvement as it is more obvious that some of these buttons lead to submenus or on/off switches. I closely follow SM development, especially in regards to 5.1, and have been working to ensure that nothing I need gets derped beyond recognition.