Casual Mode provides a simplified StepMania experience for novice players. It seeks to get new players playing the game faster by addressing many common stumbling points.
To summarize, Casual Mode:
- restricts what song groups are available to choose from
- filters out stepcharts above a given difficulty meter
- provides a new, dedicated Select Music screen to simplify the process of choosing a song
- provides more prominent on-screen instructions throughout
- simplifies the flow of a game cycle by removing certain screens
Casual mode is currently left mostly unconfigured in Simply Spud - All groups are shown, and only stepcharts under difficulty 10 are shown. This is easily configured if you want a more fine-tuned casual mode setup, though!
By default, stepcharts with a difficulty meter greater than 10 will not appear in Casual Mode. This threshold can be configured in the operator menu under Simply Spud Options.
If all stepcharts belonging to a given song are above that threshold, that song will not appear as a choice in the group it belongs to in Casual Mode. If all stepcharts in a given group are above the threshold (I'm looking at you, Tachyon Epsilon), that entire group will not appear as a choice in Casual Mode.
Casual Mode makes use of a simple txt file to explicitly specify what song groups should be available in Casual Mode. The file is titled CasualMode-Groups.txt and is located at ./Simply-Potato-SM/Other/CasualMode-Groups.txt
Simply Potato ships with 28 no unique groups specified. For reasonable, trusted defaults, and if you are a machine operator looking for more novice content for your machine, you can start by adding these packs from stock Simply Love's group lists!
Machine operators can customize this list as needed by adding (or removing) Groups by name, one per line.
If a group name is provided in that file that does not exist in the filesystem, it will be ignored. If a group with no valid Casual Mode stepcharts is added to the list, that group will not appear as a valid choice.
If no groups are specified in this file (i.e., the file is empty), all packs with valid stepcharts will be available for play in Casual Mode.