xO - OLTH

Beatmap link: xO - OLTH // Giygas [Nightmares of passion and longing]

I'm the osu! beatmapper formerly known as Godot. These days, I go by Giygas (pronounced 'GHEE-gus'). I want to tell you about this latest osu! beatmap I made.

But first, some background

I started osu! mapping back in 2017. Being a pubescent boy at the time, I possessed all the hallmarks of a naïve and immature work ethic. I was enamored by the idea that I could carve out a niche, separate myself from the crowd, and possibly make a name for myself. Don't get me wrong; osu! mapping was a hobby that I quite enjoyed for the sake of it, but at the time I was struggling with a desperate need for approval and recognition, something to push me over the edge and take the plunge to spend dozens of hours studying mapping techniques and struggling with the arcane and obtrusive built-in editor. And sure enough, once a couple friends of mine (some of which were mappers themselves) showed genuine enthusiasm for what I did, I started getting obsessed. pishifat's YouTube channel was gaining traction around that time, I was accepted into the mapping mentorship program, I started modding beatmaps and got mods in return. I got an easier head-start by primarily mapping western alt-progressive rock and metal, a severely underserved genre at the time. Mapping this type of music allowed you to get your foot in the door with BNs, mappers and players who were all desperate for any content matching this genre. In a way, I was able to "fast-track" myself to getting advice, feedback and guidance, simply by virtue of standing out from the endless sea of anime openings and vocaloid songs. My maps started getting more polished, and I hoped that once I pushed something towards the ranked section, someone would notice. Someone would play it, enjoy it, and walk away from it thinking "I like this map! This person sure is great at mapping." It would provide me with a sense of validation I desperately needed at the time.

And then I ranked a beatmap, for Agent Fresco's Dark Water (Destrier, Long Branch Records, 2015), and it ruined my ability to map.

In hindsight, all of it amounts to an absurd, cosmic joke. My wish came true, as dozens of favourites and positive comments rolled in from players to experienced mappers whom I looked up to and idolised. My map was featured in the 2018 Autumn Seasonal Spotlights (written by Kurokami, map selected by squirrelpascals), which led to its inclusion in the accompanying beatmap pack, which in turn brought even more exposure to my maps from medal hunters, both directly and indirectly through its inclusion in several tournament map pools. I got all I could ask for; people were talking about me and praising my work. They sent kind comments, recognised me in Discord servers. But it also felt like all eyes were trained on me, expectantly. And whether that was true or not, the mere idea crippled my creative output down to a crawl.

So, why tell you all this? Well, frankly, because I'm sick of all of it. I painted myself in a corner. I built a semblance of the reputation I wanted, and became terrified to the core of breaking that self-image through my creative output. It's all mind games, of course. Nobody was going to be deathly disappointed if my next map didn't make a splash, but I was always struggling with my own self-perception of an artist who produces only the most polished, thought-out and perfect beatmaps. This would time and time again crush my spirits. Even as I finished several other rankable maps I was happy with, I would get hung up on the low difficulties, timing, hitsounding, etc. and never complete a set so I could push them to rank. I tried mapping marathon difficulties, only to run out of "perfect" ideas. All I had were the normal ones, and they wouldn't be enough, because what I had to put on the canvas was supposed to be perfection. Everything else would no doubt be overshadowed by that towering, accursed monolith of my own making.

Song choice: OLTH - xO (fire dOve / xO, self-published, 2024)

OLTH's creative output, though scarce, immediately struck a chord with me when I first encountered it. The frenzied guitars, the nails-on-a-chalkboard vocals, the blissful and emotional interludes between periods of frenzied catharsis. It's always put me in a very specific mindset, one where I allow the pain and uncertainty to envelop me so that, in a lugubrious sort of way, I have to grapple with them and find my own comfort. I feel xO was a good pick for several reasons: the contrasting A/B structure (calm v. chaotic), the partially quantised beat (we'll circle back on this in a bit), and its short length (only 2:07 of drain time). All of it made it a pretty good map to experiment with after 4+ years of inactivity. A perfect opportunity for me to take the bull by the horns and map something. A pillow to smother my inner critic with, as to put it into a long, deep sleep. A silent protest to myself, to just put something on the playfield and finish it, even if the ideas are so-so and the execution isn't perfect. I just wanted to map something so that I could be glad I mapped it. So I did.

Song structure, concept and aesthetics

In appearance and execution, xO may as well qualify as the polar opposite of Dark Water; object placements and bezier curves are visually spaced and arranged through eyeballing. Bad overlaps and ugly blankets appear all over. The spitballed sliders are not much to look at, either. None of this was strictly by design; I didn't set out to make a map that looks as rough as this one, but I chose to permit myself to make something like this. In hindsight, it feels like the imperfect aesthetics work perfectly with the song's general feel; it too being no doubt the product of a hurried basement recording. The latter section especially is real rough; whereas most of the song was recorded with the drummer no doubt following a metronome set to 160bpm, the climax is rife with misplaced downbeats and had a very lax attitude to following the meter. When it comes to listening, I consider this a positive; the stripped-down production values add an air of emotion and authenticity to the music (garage and low-fidelity music are established subcultures for a reason!) But when it comes to mapping, it makes for an unplayable redline hell. I had wanted to use slow return sliders for certain guitar sections, though the instrumentals are so off-beat it would be impossible to time and play without taking a post-production scalpel to the audio file and quantising it by hand. I opted to °replace these sections with spinners, which I still think was a fair compromise.

One I never would have made years and years ago. Dark Water, as a beatmap, was bred in a laboratory. Sliders were perfected and copy-pasted, visual spacing enforced through painstakingly duplicating and rotating "guide circles". The verse sections consisted of rigid circular placements and well-defined concrete rules for when the hit objects would alternate between inner or outer circle or reverse direction. I'm not necessarily down on this way of mapping, I still employ a lot of the same techniques in xO, though the allure of geometric perfection instills a certain detrimental mindset in me. If you want to be consistent, and you use rigid concepts and methods, you have to employ those methods everywhere there is no contrast. I couldn't suddenly start eyeballing, because I didn't eyeball anything else. I couldn't put in a "filler pattern" to bridge the gap between great, stand-out segments, because everything had to be a great. This made mapping the thing take an eternity, with hundreds of playtests and inspections and hours of sitting hunched over forward inspecting the sliders and visual spacing for the slightest semblance of imperfection. I stuck to this way of mapping after Dark Water, too. And while I made some other great maps, my output was too few and far between, and the process was way too exhausting to be worth it for me.

It's not like I never looked back while mapping xO; I re-did a handful of curves, touched up a few of the most egregious visual spacing mishaps, et cetera. But for the most part, I just summoned the courage to keep going, rather than to keep polishing the little bit I had produced. My mapping knowledge and skills have come far enough that I can observe good rhythm choice, employ consistent aesthetics and create comfortable circular flow that breaks up its direction to prevent mouse drift; all without having to constantly remind myself. I think I did a pretty alright job at it; everything remains coherent and clear in its expression, in spite of the fact that I eyeballed most of the sliders and spacing, and the end result is playable and - dare I say - even a little fun. I'm happy with it.

The prestige

They say a magic trick consists out of three parts; the pledge, the turn, and finally, the prestige. So far I've taken you through the first two. So what about the third?

As is the case with any creative endeavour, meaning is sometimes only construed in hindsight. I set out to make a 2-minute map that I had fun creating, without fretting about whether every part was perfect, or if this fits with my style or self-perceived expectations. I accomplished that goal, but looking back at it in hindsight, I realise that without any conscious effort on my part, I created something beautiful. In a way, poignant.

Initially, I told myself that after I had finished mapping, I would go back and replace the ugly, unevenly-curved sliders with a more pristine and clean equivalent. I had this thought in my head until I reached a passage during the song's climax that features a °call-and-response guitar motif. As mentioned before, the percussionless parts are so out-of-rhythm that mapping them with anything but a spinner is impossible; even accounting for scorev1 slider leniency, it's just too much. For the loud guitar stabs, however, I needed something intense; a really slow slider at the edge of the screen, or a really big and fast slider. I opted for the latter, as it's more expressive and allowed me to re-use the sliders from earlier in the map. I copy-pasted a slider, upped the SV to 1.5x and scaled it up.

°That... looks rough. I continued for a bit, telling myself I would "fix it later". I took a break for a few days to tend to other matters, and when I came back, for the last call-and-response section, I used SliderStudio (by Little). It's a tool I remembered using in the past; it lets you generate sliders that use the circular curve algorithm with sliders that have more than three anchors. I deleted the slider I got out of it, but needless to say it looked extraordinarily out of place. Unlike all other weirdly-shaped sliders, these ones were pristine. Too perfect. That set me thinking, and after a little bit of deliberation I decided to forego the idea and continue scaling up sliders from earlier in the map. I was putting them on display, huge and blown up, with nothing else to distract you from their visage. Every imperfection amplified tenfold, every blemish, every blunted angle, every skewed curve shouting in your face through a loudspeaker. Telling you with demanding presence: "I don't care that it's not perfect. It's good enough, it's here, and that's what matters." Everything I had set out to do, the exact thought and emotion I wanted to capture, was expressed on the playfield. Real. Literal. Concrete. If getting a result like that out of the art you make doesn't make the process worthwhile, I don't know what would.

Conclusion

In the grand scheme of things, Dark Water was not that significant as a map, and I was not that significant as a mapper. All of my fears and anxieties were products of my own mind. Nobody pushed those expectations on me but myself. Nobody but the nagging voice in my head told me that it mattered if my future output wasn't on the same level. After a few months, most people had forgotten about it. After a year, most of everyone forgot who "Godot" was. Not that they cared all that much to begin with. I just made a level for a rhythm game that people enjoyed. That's all. And with all of that in mind, and half a decade of self-development, I think I can comfortably say that I'm pretty happy with xO. Below its many imperfections lies a pretty good, playable 2-minute beatmap with some incidental autobiographical qualities. I can already imagine some of the reactions it might get from those who play it: "It's ugly", "This difficulty spike is ridiculous", "These overlaps look terrible", among others. I think I'm fine with that, even knowing that only one out of ten thousand people that might ever play this map will ever read this post. I don't need to please anyone but myself with this one.

And that's how it should be.

What's next?

xO is going to stay in the graveyard. I have other things I would rather map and try to push to rank. The necessary investments in timing, polish, and creating low difficulties just doesn't seem worth it to me at this point in time. And I think that's fine. I'm happy with what I created, and barring a couple hitsounding changes that will hit upstream some point this month will be the final change before I move on to something new.

I hope to write more about my mapping journey in the future. I want to go a little more in-depth about the maps themselves, talking about patterns, process and inspirations etc. This first post is a special one, because I've had a lot of ground to cover. But of course, not every map I make from now will be intrinsically tied to my journey of self-actualisation.