Dancing Every Night

Version française

A community rhythm game for the PS Vita, written in C11 + SDL2. Notes fly in towards two arcs of button targets; hit the right button on the beat, keep your combo, chase the S rank.

The goal is an osu!-style community: the game ships with a couple of original songs, and players create, share and download new ones.

Status: 1.1.0. The game is playable, with 3 official songs, and the in-game song library lets you browse and install community songs from the console.

Community: Discord · Song library · Online editor

For players

You need a PS Vita running custom firmware (follow https://vita.hacks.guide) with VitaShell.

1. Download DancingEveryNight-<version>.vpk from the Releases page.
2. Copy it to the Vita (VitaShell USB or FTP mode), open it in VitaShell and press Cross to install.
3. Launch Dancing Every Night from the home screen.

Vita	Action
Triangle, Circle, Cross / Up, Left, Down	Hit the notes of the matching target
L / R, or a light touch of either stick	Scratch notes (any direction)
Start	Pause (L/R in pause: audio calibration ±10 ms)
Select + Start	Quit

Saves are stored in ux0:data/dancingeverynight/.

Updates: when the Vita is online, the game reads a small file (latest.json, on the project website) at start-up and, if a newer version exists, announces it in the main menu. Nothing is downloaded or installed, and nothing about you is sent beyond the request itself. Switch it off in OPTIONS > UPDATE CHECK.

Installing a song

1. Copy the song's .zip file or extracted folder into ux0:data/dancingeverynight/import/ (VitaShell USB or FTP mode). The folder is created the first time you launch the game.
2. Launch the game: the song is installed during the loading screen, then the source ZIP or folder is deleted.
3. The song shows up in the song list (and in its pack, if it has one).

Installing a song with the same ID again replaces it and keeps your best scores. To delete a song, select it in the song list and press Triangle; you can also delete its folder in ux0:data/dancingeverynight/songs/. A ZIP or folder that cannot be installed is moved to import/failed/, with a .txt file explaining why.

Bugs and ideas: open an issue on this repository (there are forms for bugs, ideas and reporting a song) and mention the version shown at the bottom right of the title screen. See CONTRIBUTING for the other ways to help. For a crash, attach the .psp2dmp file found in ux0:data/.

On a computer

The Releases page also has PC versions, with nothing else to install:

• Windows: unzip DancingEveryNight-<version>-windows.zip and run DancingEveryNight.exe. The build is not signed: if SmartScreen warns, choose More info → Run anyway.
• macOS (11 or later, Intel or Apple Silicon): unzip and move Dancing Every Night to Applications. The app is not notarised, so macOS blocks the first launch. On macOS 15 and later: open the app once, dismiss the warning, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway (on macOS 11–14, right-click the app → Open works). If macOS says the app is "damaged", run this once in Terminal, then open it again: xattr -cr "/Applications/Dancing Every Night.app"
• Linux: extract DancingEveryNight-<version>-linux.tar.gz and run DancingEveryNight.

Keyboard: arrows / WASD, Space or J (Cross), K (Circle), U (Square), I (Triangle), Q / E (scratch), Enter (Start), Backspace (Select); a game controller works too. Songs install the same way, through an import/ folder: in the save/ folder next to the game on Windows and Linux, in ~/Library/Application Support/Dancing Every Night/save/ on macOS.

Replacing the hostess pictures and voices

Everything the hostess shows or says is a plain file you can swap. Put your own copy in a custom/ folder inside save/ (on the Vita: ux0:data/dancingeverynight/custom/), with the same path it has under assets/; the game reads custom/ first, so nothing in the game itself changes and removing your file brings the original back.

File in custom/	What it is
ui/hostess/rank_s.png, rank_a.png, rank_b.png, rank_cd.png	The hostess on the results screen for each rank (C and D share one)
ui/hostess/loading.png, pause.png	The hostess on the loading and pause screens
audio/sfx/voice_*.wav	Her voice: voice_title, voice_rank_s, voice_rank_a, voice_rank_b, voice_rank_cd (heard at the title and on the results)

Pictures: PNG with a transparent background, at most 2048 px on a side; they are drawn anchored to the bottom of the screen, so crop them there. Sounds: WAV, 16-bit, mono, 44100 Hz (ffmpeg -i in.wav -ar 44100 -ac 1 -sample_fmt s16 out.wav). Every other interface sound in audio/sfx/ can be replaced the same way.

For song creators

Online editor: https://dancing-every-night.pages.dev/editor/. Nothing to install: create a song from a music file, detect the tempo, place the notes (or start from an automatic draft) and export the .zip for the console. Start with the creator guide.

A song is one folder named after its ID, holding one .chart file per difficulty, the song audio (.ogg) and an optional background image (.jpg) or video (.h264, H.264 Baseline; older songs may use .mpg, MPEG-1):

my_song/
  easy.chart  normal.chart  hard.chart  expert.chart
  audio.ogg  background.jpg  video.h264

Each .chart starts with a header, then one note per line (times in beats):

FORMAT 1
ID my_song            # letters, digits, _ and -; the same in every difficulty
VERSION 1            # raise it when you publish an update
MAPPER your_name     # the author of the difficulties, shown to players
TITLE My Song
ARTIST Some Artist
DIFFICULTY NORMAL
ORDER 2              # optional: position among the song's difficulties (1 = first); default EASY, NORMAL, HARD, EXPERT
BPM 120
OFFSET_MS 500
AUDIO audio.ogg      # file names inside the song folder only
BACKGROUND background.jpg
END 276              # optional: when the song ends (results), in beats; default = just after the last note

4 TRIANGLE TAP
5 CIRCLE HOLD 2
6 SCRATCH CW

To share a song, zip its folder (or its files) and send the .zip. Check it first: make check MAP=my_song.zip (or ./vitagame --check my_song.zip) applies the game's own rules and lists errors (the song will not work) and warnings (worth fixing).

Today's tools need the developer setup below; a no-install web editor is planned.

python3 -m venv tools/.venv
tools/.venv/bin/pip install -r tools/requirements.txt
brew install ffmpeg            # or your package manager

• make editor — graphical chart editor in the browser (http://localhost:8765), with audio/video conversion.
• make editor-site — the online version of the editor (http://localhost:8766): no server, songs are kept in the browser. Audio in another format (mp3, wav, m4a…) is converted to .ogg and videos to H.264 right in the browser (ffmpeg.wasm, about 31 MB downloaded on first use). BPM detection and the automatic draft run the same tools/mapper.py in the browser (Pyodide, about 30 MB downloaded on first use). The editor speaks English and French, and comes with a creator guide (tools/editor/guide.html). Open a song .zip, edit it (including MAPPER, LICENSE, VERSION), export the .zip for the Vita.
• make map SONG=/path/track.ogg NAME=my_song — automatic first draft from an audio file.
• make run CHART=assets/songs/my_song/normal.chart — play it on the computer.

For automatic song creation, read the generation guide: musical gestures, difficulty limits, tempo checks and deliberate travel-time choices. Generated difficulties need playtesting.

For developers

Command	What it does
make run	Build and run on the computer (macOS, Linux, WSL)
make desktop	Desktop build only
make vita	Development VPK + eboot.bin (all local assets) in build-vita/
make release	Release VPK with committed assets only, in dist/
make pc	PC package for this system (SDL2 built in, committed assets only), in dist/
make deploy	Send the build to a Vita running vitacompanion (VITA_IP in .env)
make clean	Remove build folders

Requirements: CMake, a C compiler and SDL2 (brew install cmake sdl2 or sudo apt install build-essential cmake libsdl2-dev), plus VitaSDK for Vita builds (or Docker: scripts/build-vita.sh falls back to the vitasdk/vitasdk image).

The game name, version and TITLEID are defined once, at the top of CMakeLists.txt. CLAUDE.md documents the architecture and the PS Vita constraints.

GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/builds.yml, run by hand or by pushing a v* tag) builds the Windows, macOS, Linux and Vita packages; a tag also prepares a draft GitHub Release with the four files.

Songs you add locally for testing (assets/songs/) are ignored by git and never included in make release.

Official songs and their audio. The three official songs are in assets/songs/ (charts, images, credits), but their audio files are not in this repository: the labels' terms allow distributing them inside the game, not on their own. They live in a private repository read by the CI. Without them the game runs normally and those songs are silent (a metronome plays), and make check reports the missing audio.ogg. Release builds (make release, make pc) pick the files up from assets/songs/<ID>/audio.ogg when you have them (scripts/official-audio.sh).

Use of AI

I want to be clear about where AI was used in this project, and what I think about it.

What was made with AI

Area	What	How
Code	The game (C11 + SDL2), the Python tools (automatic draft, editor, library scripts), the online editor, the CI, the tests, the documentation and its translations	Written with Claude Code (Anthropic). I set the design and the goals, play-test on a real Vita, review and decide; the model writes most of the code.
Visual identity	The logo, the hostess (mascot) and the title screen layers, plus the images derived from them: boot splash, LiveArea and icon	Generated with AI image tools (ChatGPT), then selected and edited by hand (the stained-glass look is applied by a script).
Hostess pictures	The six poses of the hostess (results, loading, pause)	Generated with AI image tools (ChatGPT), then selected and edited by hand.
Hostess voice	The title and results lines	Synthesized with Qwen3-TTS (Apache-2.0): an invented voice, no real person cloned. I chose the voice and the takes by ear and trimmed them.
Charts	The difficulties of the official songs	Start from an automatic draft (tools/mapper.py: a signal-analysis algorithm I wrote with Claude, not a generative model), then played, corrected and tuned by me.

What was not made with AI: the music (the three official songs are by their artists and used under their label's terms; the menu music is by Juhani Junkala), the fonts, the button icons, and the interface sounds (synthesized by a script; only the hostess's voice is generative audio). Community songs carry their own rights, declared by their authors.

What I think

• Graphics: a stopgap. This is a volunteer project with no budget. AI let the game have a coherent look rather than none, but it is not where I want it to stay. I would much rather work with artists, and I will replace these visuals as soon as I can collaborate with some. If you draw, animate or design interfaces and the project speaks to you, come and talk on Discord.
• Engineering: assumed. AI is how I build this game today, and I do not hide it. It is what lets one person ship a Vita game with a song editor and an online library. It does not remove responsibility: I choose what the game should be, I test it on the console, and bugs are mine to fix.

Licence

• Code: GNU GPL v3.
• Visual identity (logo, hostess, title screen, LiveArea): CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, see LICENSE-ASSETS.md.
• Credits for fonts, music and third-party code: assets/CREDITS.md.