徐逸飞

Yifei Xu.

Four Years of osu! Mapping

Wed, 2021 Jan 27

The Start

About 4 years ago, I published Karyuusai as my first serious attempt at making an osu! beatmap—meaning it was a pretty bad map. It had no structure, poor rhythm choices, and fairly garbage-tier aesthetics. But I kept mapping anyway, and I like to think that I got a little better making beatmaps since. Since I’ve spent so much time on this game, I figured I’d document my journey and some of the things I learned over these past 4 years as a tribute of sorts to that beatmap.

Screenshot of Karyuusai

I was initially inspired to start mapping seriously after seeing An - Catanoph—which was featured in the osu! World Cup 2016 Grand Finals match. Maybe it was just a good song, maybe it was watching pro players play on the world stage, maybe it was just a good beatmap in general. Whatever it was, I thought it was a cool map, and so I wanted to make something just as cool.

But I was really BAD! I had zero fuckin’ idea what I was doing in the map editor. Where should I place the next slider? Should I use a circle instead of a slider? Why is my map so boring!? All I knew about Catanoph was that it was a cool map. The patterning ideas and techniques that creator used were completely unknown to me.

I didn’t learn too much aside from gaining a bit more familiarity with the editor.

osu!tech

PUMP was inspired my favourite beatmap at the time, YUC’e - Future Candy. I had been introduced to the world of tech maps. The cutstreams and SV gimmicks felt so engaging to play, and it was one of the most unique beatmaps I’d ever seen. I wanted to make something like that.

Screenshot of PUMP

Of course, I still hadn’t learned how to properly determine what made a map good. Why exactly did those SV patterns feel fun to play? Would it feel different if the sliders were repositioned? How did the beatmap represent the song effectively? Without answering these questions beforehand, I rushed head-first into the editor to work on my new beatmap. I felt quite proud of the finished product (in retrospect it is not a very good beatmap), and asked an experienced mapper for feedback.

He pointed out a few flaws in my map that I honestly can’t quite remember, but the basic idea was that I still had a lot of work to do. One thing I did learn from this experience, however, is that asking for overall feedback is more useful than receiving mods if your primary goal as a mapper is to improve. Mods are useful for pointing out inconsistencies in a map, but if the whole thing is inconsistent, modding won’t really get you anywhere. “Oh yea the whole map is bad” ok thanks xd.

After finishing PUMP, I took a bit of break from uploading maps. I played around with the editor, but I never finished anything. This was probably partially due to my time being taken up by high school wrapping up and university starting.

University of Waterloo

The first club I joined at UWaterloo was the osu! club. The club is actually quite large; its Discord server has over 300 members as of writing this. A few of the members were also similar mapping-aspirants like myself, and we mutually fed off each other’s motivation. There were was another well-established mapper—deetz—who offered a piece of advice that I feel like I probably knew at the time, but never paid much attention to.

A good beatmap defines walls for itself, and then proceeds to go nuts within those walls.

Ok, so now I need to figure out how to create “good” walls, and then figure out how to not destroy those walls.

Another thing I started doing was spending more time looking at other people’s beatmaps in the editor, not just to admire their maps, but to start analyzing what they did well that I didn’t. I started paying more attention cursor flow concepts, contrast, and aesthetics, among other mapping ideas. Ultimately, this rinse and repeat process of looking at other maps is what I’ve done up until today. In the process, I tried to solidify my grasp of mapping fundamentals.

Thinking about it now, these are the key points to keep in mind when making any beatmap:

The second point is a bit more vague. What exactly constitutes an “idea” for a beatmap? While this is a somewhat bloated definition, I guess I’d have to say that mapping ideas are the specific gameplay elements and concepts that a mapper uses to elicit a particular feeling in the player. The nebulous definition maybe implies that mapping is just like any other form of art. There is no one correct way to make a painting, but paintings that look intentional often look better than those that are a messy mish-mash of different styles.

Since OZONE, I’ve sought relatively little feedback on my beatmaps and instead tried to answer myself whether or not I made something good. I think that any mapper who understands these two fundamental points is able to critique their own maps and improve as a result.

Plans for the Future

As of writing this, I have no ranked mapsets, but I hope to change that soon! The first mapset that I forsee being ranked would be Modular Technology. My good friend Mister Zer0-G has so graciously offered to take care of the hitsounding for me, and they sound pretty good btw.

I enjoy playing very niche maps that often sit in the graveyard where most people don’t see them. My ultimate goal is to bring a little bit of extra diversity to the ranked section, so let’s see how that goes in 2021!

Screenshot of Modular Technology at AR0