So in case you missed it over New Year's Eve (boo! you suck dick), I streamed a whole bunch of WIP features and charts from my vaporware series of Guitar Hero custom discs called marfGH. I've been practicing, readying charts, and working my ass off to get it as presentable as it could be for the stream for about a month before the stream...and then I drank! And thus sucked at the game. It was a lot of fun, and I super enjoyed it, and so did everyone else.

It's all led to a small resurgence of excitement in myself for rhythm games and modding them, and I have a good feeling I can finally release a disc this year for people to play and enjoy themselves. 2025 has me still in a small pocket of total clarity, which will probably wear off, but right now, everything feels so fresh and full of potential, and that includes my mod work. While we enjoy the slowest Thursday ever recorded by scientists here at work, here's a journal entry for what all I'd like to do with it next.

Market research

It might seem funny to start off "here are my plans for this project" with something other than working on it, but it's true. marfGH is only partially my charting work—the other half of each setlist is curation, and you can only curate as good a setlist as your knowledge of rhythm games will allow, and unfortunately, mine is a little lacking. My own charts are definitely a lot of fun, but I want to seal the deal with well-done ports of songs recognizable to the Guitar Hero and Rock Band communities.

I have my guitar now, and that means I can go back and replay all the PS2 plastic instrument games—my childhood copies of Rock Band and its Track Packs, downloaded copies of the rest of them, Guitar Hero III (which I haven't played since I was a little kid), and Aerosmith (which I never played at all). (I could play most of the later GH games as well, but by World Tour, I remember the PS2 backports not being very good, and I just have no real interest in those right now anyway.) By my estimation, I have available to me about 500 songs I can play right now, maybe 350 of those never having been in the GH2 engine specifically. (Although it'd take a port job to play any of them, all 6,000+ Rock Band DLC and Network tracks are also up for grabs by me. I can have it all!)

I want to find the fun charts and hidden gems—and not just that, I want new songs to play myself! This year, I do want to play more games and just enjoy and absorb things, and of course that means revisiting Amplitude, FreQuency, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band on actual console, all games I love a lot and have deeply influenced my music taste and what I like in games. Even if I don't like GH3 any better as a game (I feel like I probably would look on it more kindly now), at least that's a whole setlist of songs to either steal outright or rechart, and a lot of people have major GH3 nostalgia, so it's an outright ace in the hole. If I do like it more as a game now? Gravy. Cammy has fun with a new game.

Shoring up my existing customs

Obviously, my methods and knowledge of the game and implementation of the new features I've added have changed over time. Sometimes, a mix doesn't come out sounding right, or it's a particularly old custom and I didn't know how to get the volume right without incurring distortion. Sometimes, I'm too lazy to add in some minor feature I need for my goal of a fully-featured chart. My lead/rhythm songs need bass in singleplayer, because my old way of doing it (two mix charts, lead-heavy and rhythm-heavy) led to some really bizarre and stupid charts.

If there's one thing I'll do more immediately with marfGH, it's go back through everything I've finished and make sure it's all as I'd like it to be. I did a bit of this the day of the stream, actually—my custom of "Very Ape" by Nirvana was missing camera cuts, I thought the lighting was weak, and I thought the mix was quiet and weird (it came from the original unmastered 24-track master tape and I never quite figured out how to tame it), so I quickly fixed it up in about an hour and a half. I figured, it was such a fun chart, I couldn't just have bits of it I wasn't pleased with with my initial public demo of the chart.

Some finished charts that need a bit of extra work that come to mind:

• Like I said, lead/rhythm stuff is a bitch. In vanilla GH2, they merge the two multiplayer guitar parts into one chart, and I'd have the second playable guitar part in singleplayer be the exact opposite of which parts are played by the normal singleplayer chart. Problem is, that means there's a "fun parts" and a "not as fun parts" chart, with guitar licks sometimes cutting off mid-lick. These songs are just better suited by having a singleplayer guitar mix chart and then bass alongside it—at least the bass is a whole part, even if it's not very fun. My port of "XLR8R" by Orbit from FreQuency and my "Ventura Highway" custom come to mind.
• My "Code Monkey" custom is from 2020, pre-DX, and I hadn't quite figured out how to mix audio for the game yet, I just knew it had to be loud. I made this one too loud, though, and it audibly distorts. Nowadays, I can always get things just about right and sounding clean on the first shot, so yeah, that one should get redone.
• Kinda combining the first two issues, my "Dear Kate" custom is a lead/rhythm track that, firstly, is too quiet in-game (I had to put the sound effects way quiet for the chart demo video), but also predates the singleplayer second-instrument play that Deluxe added, so it actually crashes DX discs like marfGH is based on for lack of a second instrument in the singleplayer channel mapping array. The tempomap for this one is also terrible (this is the last custom I tempomapped in FeedBack before switching to Moonscraper for that) and I seem to recall me feeling like a lot of my pitches and stuff were off in the chart itself, so yeah, just the whole thing should probably be redone. It's worth it, fun song, shoutout to Ben Minnotte.
• I have a port of Sunny Day Real Estate's "In Circles" that came from a Bluzer rip, and it was legitimately so obnoxious to make that I wrote a Scratchpad entry on it back in the day. (Amusing seeing how I describe the workflow back then, because it is so much quicker and more efficient now.) Nowadays, I can start from the official Rock Band Network audio and chart, which should make it a lot less icky to me than Bluzer's toyed with, second gen, wonky rip I was using.
• General punch ups here and there, very minor things that make me happy.

Menu retextures

Art is the big thing keeping you from playing a new marfGH disc next week. I don't expect anyone to be blown away by my drawings populating the GH2 menus, but I want the disc to have custom styling and theming, somewhere between "nicely rendered marfs in various styles" and "I drew bunny ears and a big mane on Edgar Allen Poe for the part select screen because it was funny to me". When I first started taking marfGH seriously in 2022, I was about five months into learning how to draw, and I was too scared of drawing ferals to illustrate much of anything, but the story is different now!

In general, I miss art. Art Fight last year took so much out of me that I don't think I have a single properly finished and lined drawing post-July. This year, for my comfort and Caby's sanity, I'll be sitting it out, but that doesn't mean I don't miss drawing my silly animal people and don't have a bunch of ways to apply it! This month, I'm really focusing on art for Caby, because it's our anniversary month and because I just feel I've neglected her a bit over the past few months and I'd like to make up for it. marf stuff will be in there, though. marf never really goes away.

More songs and ports

That one's obvious though, yeah?