| Round | Song | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | James Hannigan - Soviet March (Red Alert 3) | There is so much good video game music. I really wasn't sure what to pick or how songs would be judged, so I looked at the Stamina Showcase criteria, which has a category for how much value the chart adds to the community. Since this might be the only Red Army Choir style song that isn't a nightmare to sync, I figured it'd be pretty valuable to have a chart for it. It also helps that it has sheet music, since I'm pretty slow at charting so any shortcut is welcome if I want to make a chart in a week. Patterning is unfortunately a bit dubious: some of the XOs are just there because I wanted two candles in a row. I would probably use jumps instead if I recharted it, since that's about the only tech that can be used to accent several similarly intense sounds in a row. I'm weirdly happy with how the chart feels to play, despite the questionable choices, probably because I just really like the song and any chart would have done. Goal for this round: submit a chart. Success! |
| 2 | Dimmu Borgir - Puritania | I was thinking about how to accent and add flavor without adding more tech notation, and I got inspired by an older chart that used BGCHANGES2="white flash", which is basically also what the band uses in their live performances. Perfect! ... Except I didn't think about photosensitivity until the very end, when I had to come up with an alias and figured a warning might be the best use of my two words. Oops! As for the chart, I'm not too happy with it since the song is a bit too repetitive, which was partly intentional since I wanted an easy chart that I could finish within time constraints. The vocals aren't really on-sync and were hard to chart, so I dropped them in the later half and used jumps to match the intesity. Hard-to-sync vocals worry me, since I'm not experienced enough with FA or charting to know how much I can simplify timings wtihout it feeling bad for people with a better sense of rhythm. Thus, it wasn't as easy to chart as I'd have liked. I think I got zero dimobux in the first round, so my goal for the rest of the event was to get at least one buck. Karl with a K gave my 3 bucks here, so I immediately hit my goal. Goal for this round: get a buck. Success! |
| 3 | 2 Mello - Noise Investigation | I was pretty bummed out about the late change in round theme, since I had already found a collab partner and decided on a song. At first, I picked a different 2 Mello song without much thought, since I wanted to save time, but the chart was so bad I couldn't submit it. (It was a slow song where I tried to use holds to force some overly clever DS/XO tech. I learned that this doesn't work partly because holds are very easy to cheat, and that I don't like those kind of charts anyway since my brain instinctively ignores the hold if the patterning becomes too unintuitive.) In the end, I picked something very easy to chart, and I'm really happy with the results. The intended way to avoid the mines is to lean on foot on the hold, thus adding emphasis to the hold. The second half of the chart contains the first few brackets I've ever charted. Also, to cut the song as I did, I had to hunt down the sample 2 Mello used. It's from "The Indistructible Man" (1956), starting around 31:50. Also, the collab I had arranged still worked out: we made a good chart together that got accepted into wrsw's Virtual Youtuber Pad Pack 2, and I got to know another new charter a bit better. |
| 4 | rA2 productions - Man Machine (Vocaloids Mix) | I didn't have much time for this round, so I figured I should chart something legitimately easy where the vocals are definitely on-sync. Time to chart a Vocaloid song! It ended up being relatively hard to chart anyway. The vocals are the centerpiece of the song, but they aren't dense enough to make it interesting. One thing I tried, which I think is universally a bad idea: do stream style patterning to the vocals (like long mono for held vocals), but with the background rhythm (i.e., not a constant 16th stream). Playtesting this, it ended up being very unsatisfying, since no matter if you focus on the background or the vocals, it feels bad. In the end, I ended up just placing steps to the sparse vocals, since I always imagine my target audience being someone who likes the song, and I think this is what they'd have wanted. My goal for the round thus became to see how the other participants feel about this kind of "undercharting". It ended up being painful to watch people play it on stream. The overlap of people who like Kraftwerk and people who participate in dimocracy seems to be small. |
| 5 | HAGISOPH - Cross Commander Circuit (2022 redux) | As in the previous round, I wanted to take the opportunity afforded by dimocracy to get feedback on a style of charting. Thus, I decided to do a high BPM song, to see if my intuition for stream patterning at higher BPM is good enough to produce content people would enjoy. The song ended up being very time consuming to chart, since it has a lot of step and little outright copy+paste. Since I got a dimobuck from wrsw, I consider it a success. |
| 6 | Nor - Signal of Abydos | I just wanted a simple song since I thought I'd have to find time to chart over the holidays. This was my first choice for that reason, since I like the song and there is a lot of repetition unlike the previous round's song. I ended up spending a lot of time trying to fit in XOs into the repeated motif, but I was never happy with how it turned out since the XOs "freeze" the facing direction for too long. I ended up completely scratching the idea a day before the deadline and went for pure jumps + jacks, since this is the "tech" that gives the least amount of constraints on the neighboring steps, then I added stutters to make it more flavorful and accidentally ruined the chart... I guess the lesson I learned is that jumps and jacks are nice to use when there aren't enough nearby steps to "fit" more restrictive tech. Goal for the round: to get a buck from the person who requested the chart. I thought it'd be either CondorTalon or Gpop, but I failed to get their votes anyway. |
| 7 | jun - KIMONO♥PRINCESS | I've basically not played DDR, and I'm not confident enough in my steps to believe that there is much value in me restepping an existing chart if the chart is already decent, so I asked a friend for a good DDR song that had a terrible chart. This was the song they gave me. It ended up being really difficult but interesting to chart, since there is a lot of irregular background layers to the song, and it's the kind of sounds that you stop hearing if you slow down the song. The Konami chart was so bad that it was basically useless, since they didn't even get the rhythms right, and the same was true (to a lesser extent) of the resteps I found on zenius. In the end, due to time constraints, I mostly just charted the prominent 8ths and ignored the background sounds, since I couldn't consistently chart them since I couldn't even consistently hear them. I feel like they don't make music like this for rhythm games anymore, probably for the better, but it was an interesting experience. |
| 8 | Toni M. - World is Blind | I wanted an easy to chart song since I wouldn't be able to pad test for most of the charting period, so I needed to place the steps quickly. This time, I actually managed to predict how easy it would be to chart. I quickly decided on making the last half into a mod chart to solve the pacing issues of the song, and learning stepmania lua fit nicely into my schedule for when I didn't have access to my pad. Learning stepmania lua required a lot of experimentation, since using the "easing template" is very far removed from anything with good documentation (some of the outfox/nITG documentation was still useful, though). I really went all-in here, so my goal for the round was to finally try to finish in the top half. I technically failed, but I got my first votes from two charters I really admire (BrotherMojo and Gpop), so it wasn't a bad outcome. |
| 9 | 求める者 - 終末ハ暇デスカ (This Is Not the End) | Having given my all the previous round, I kind of just wanted to get my participation trophy and be done with, so I just picked a song from an artist I admire. It ended up being a huge pain to chart. I had to stretch the intro and break because they weren't at a constant BPM. Also, building on my experience from round 4, I decided to do stream patterning to follow the drawn out vocals. The problem was that the original song doesn't quite have constant 8ths for background percussion/guitar, so I added some more percussion myself to make it so. It was a lot of effort for something that'd hopefully go unnoticed, but then Talkion mysteriously couldn't lock into the blue fantastic window when he played this on stream, and I can't help but wonder if it's because the song is slightly off. FA players are scary! |
| 10 | Kommisar - Timekiller | Another song I just charted because I wanted to. I was considering it for Round 9, but I think it fit better here. I was excited to be able to chart a longer song with more gradual build ups, but once I started charting, I cut more and more repetitive parts until it could have fit within the normal 2:30 window. I'd like to chart more long songs in the future. I couldn't do the most obvious cut due to a key change, so instead I just cut the run at the key change and pasted the "I'll finish you" sample from the previous iteration. This means that my cut is technically not "2x LSDJ" and this is not real 8bit music... Goal for the round: get Kommisar to vote for my chart. Huge success! |
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