It’s been a few months since the TrotMania V release (which I think went pretty good), so I’d like to provide some updates on things that are going on within the community, and how they apply to us, and more importantly — you.

StepMania development

During the TM V release post, you might have heard me mention that there was a new version of StepMania in development. StepMania 5.3 development is being headed by a new team, which includes various prominent members of the current StepMania community, as well as a few faces you may recognize from here (in particular, I have been involved in user experience design). Every new alpha milestone has seen the engine grow smoother over time, and there are some future changes (including mouse/touchscreen support) that are really going to be cool.

In terms of TrotMania, I do have a preview version of the TM V theme that has optimizations/integration with some of 5.3’s new theme features (i.e. judgment fonts, alternative timing windows), but I want to get a few more optimizations (now that I know how memory-intensive a few of my design decisions were) out of the way before we release it publicly.

Our future

Even though we’ve been past “peak brony” for a while now, and the fandom overall has been in a state of flux and uncertainty since the series finale, I’ve kept the possibility of another TrotMania edition open because there’s still quite a lot of new music being put out, there’s other songs we haven’t even considered yet, and, of course, we want to build something on 5.3 since it is shaping up to be a transformative moment for the entire SM community.

But yeah, the next TrotMania: I’m just going to say that you should expect more information on that very soon!

Once again, we are still open for new members to join our team; visit the #trotmania-n-rhythm-games channel on the PVFM Discord server (linked on the main navbar) and inquire with us for more information.