Aspire V was announced in my birthday

0. Intro

COVID sucks.

At the time I started this project, I had been staying at home for around 2 months due to quarantine.

Then Aspire V came.

It’s not only a chance to kill the boredom, but also a chance to win something. I have plenty of time to execute what I want to present.

1. Strategy

The reason I pick Frums - XNOR XNOR XNOR:

I went directly to Frums’ FA profile page because IMO their songs are the best candidates for such a themed (not so clearly though) contest. Also people won’t blame me too much if I put some wild patterns in their songs.

XNOR has 9min length with a mixture of different musical styles. It’s a quite fair point why I chose it. It has enough space to put my ideas in. In order to get a place among stunning Storyboard entries, I have to come up with something different to gather voters’ eyes. Completing the map with circles is only the first step.

But still, circles have many possibilities. I have to shout out to @OliBomby and his MappingTool for giving me the chance to perform different ideas in my mind.

ARG/Puzzles/Easter Eggs/Whatever related:

From like 2 years ago I have a plan to put an ARG (alternative reality game) in osu! and I already had some different method to push it forward. Unfortunately I didn’t find a convincing motivation and proper time then.

Aspire V this year was giving me an excellent reason to make it real. It would surely stimulate people’s nerves and arouse their interest.

2. Process

A full month was taken in my life, well deserved.

2 weeks - making the 9min long map and everything related mapping

1 week - gathering ARG ideas, learning how to make ARG and hide stuff

1 week - deal with extra issues like hitsound/combo color/merging diffs

Decomposed Corpse

Using sliderator will lead to a ridiculously big amount of slider anchors and it causes huge lags whenever I need to save my map. I have to separate the whole map into different pieces to avoid the time waste caused by the laggy editor.

Making 3D effects by sliders is also a thing in my mind for years. It’s a pity I don’t know any coding otherwise I would have used it somewhere in my graveyard maps. I know it is not a proper place to put 3D sliders but: I need something gimmicky, or I will lose.  The principle is quite clear, just do like what old Aspire entries did: Keep the same position of sliderhead. The motion of different sliderbodies consists of each frame of animation. This is my method to cater the masses. From what I could spectate in earlier days, it achieved the result I expected.

However, since I don’t know code, I had to make it frame by frame. It means I need a reference to make each slider. Easily I turned to Storyboarding.

Thus, I contact @-Tochi, a well-known and quite skilled storyboarder, to ask if there’s any method to make spinning 3D elements by storyboarding. I was impressed by the videos he posted on twitter that 3D objects were spinning and they were totally made by storyboards.

Pretty cool they had a script to perform that in an easier way, but it requires a 3D model file which could be exported from modeling tools like blender.

In conclusion, for this single part, I spent 2-3 days learning blender and storybrew basics.

Dot Matrix

The picture above showing some dots is the result. But there are still problems. I need a fixed point as the common sliderhead position.

My solution is much more straightforward: finding a video on YouTube and using it as background video, then making sliders frame by frame.

The most annoying part throughout the mapping process is calculating the length of sliders. I had already expected autofails and someday I must make a debug for the whole map. I tried my best to avoid autofails in some vital parts like the beginning part and the “Earth” part.

If the whole part was done in sliders only, to avoid 2b autofail, just let those sliders end at around the same point.

Thanks to kind hearted OliBomby again for letting me know better the mechanics of how .osu files work. However I felt so ashamed because later I knew he was mapping Aspire as well… Still feel sorry for that.

So with his help, I made a working sheet as a calculator.

Working Shits

That formula in the 2nd picture is given by OliBomby. Without his help, I wouldn't have made a working sheet as a calculator. As for the first picture, it’s the destination of every single slider in the conveyor part of “Earth” part. Since I was hoping those sliders to run at the same speed, all I need to change is the ending point of each slider. Calculating just 2-3 lines is enough because the rhythm gap between each slider is equivalent. The mark “a” or “x” is for marking the sliders which follow the different pitches.

By the way, the sliderator from MappingTool also has a function for auto-calculating. It does save a lot of time for me.

Nothing much to say about anchor arts. They’re not as complex as OliBomby’s, if you have enough time you could do it either, with your mouse clicks only.

At the end of the mapping period, I spent a whole day to merge the separated diffs, manage combo colors and do hitsounds. (I consider the hitsound in that map is garbage, as it was done in a hurry.)

3. The parts beneath

a.

I love word games very much.

At very first, like years ago when I attended the first ever Aspire contest, I thought it was cool because Aspire shares 83.33% of the same characters with Inspire. By Googling it we could get a saying: Aspire to Inspire before we Expire. This sentence is not my type and I even thought it’s a bit vulgar, but we could easily get the most obvious part, and that’s also the purpose my project wants to present in this contest: Aspire to Inspire you.

With this purpose, I started the next week to open a small ARG, or could be also interpreted as putting some little Easter Eggs in my map. All I want to do is to inspire you to think any kind of related thing, in any kind of way I buried in this map. I believe there is a common connection between things we could even never have thought “similar”. Just to think about it. It’s refreshing and good for your health.

That’s also why I love word games. It connects different words with different meanings by 83.33% chance. Isn’t it amazing.

Some would say this is just another gimmick to drag eyeballs. I couldn’t deny that but I consider it as a method that kills two birds with one stone. I simply lose nothing but time. The last thing I need is time.

b.

Instructing people to find them is another interesting aspect to design such games. I’m supposed to give players a feeling of “hey! I found this first!” but I also should not bury the mystery too deep. I could rate myself as A rank for the instruction. It’s not hard, even too obvious, but it reached the effect I want. Raising others’ curiosity, motivating others to dig deeper. That is the charm I learned from making instructions.

https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sr9lpg

It’s the current sum up of people finding hidden stuff.  In case you know nothing about them when you’re reading this.

You

Don’t you ever think about why I put breakfast here. It’s obvious because you, gamers will break this puzzle very fast. Everything is meaningful in its own way. (only if you explain it well enough lol)

That’s all my hints. There's still some uncovered stuff.

I love word games very much.

4. Credits

Thanks to my gf for editing pictures. (The background you see was made by her, since the original version of the album cover is a perfect square so we extended it a bit.)

Thanks to @OliBomby and @Karoo for helping a lot of things. Much grateful.

Thanks to @-Tochi for helping me to execute a small part and giving me a chance to use blender. So much fun in using it actually.

Thanks to everyone who enjoys this song, this map, this project.

Thanks to everyone who supports me in any kind of way.

Thank you.

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