I promised a creative update today! We're getting very close to the Christmas 2025 due date I set for myself with marfGH: Volume 1, and I'm happy to report the disc is also very close. I have one last song to port over before the setlist is playable end-to-end.
I got the last custom for the disc, The Tragically Hip's biggest hit "New Orleans is Sinking", finished on Wednesday. It's a blast—possibly the most fun chart I have ever done. Blues soloing is a much different flavor than metal soloing, a lot less emphasis put on raw speed and a lot more emphasis on loopy scales and swampy repetition, and in-game, this works out to a lot of runs across the five buttons and funky fingerings. The entire song is effectively one long guitar solo. I've been just playing it for fun, honestly, because it came out that good.
This left two ports, Dinosaur Jr.'s similarly noodly "The Wagon" and Ozzy Osbourne's "Flying High Again", which is one of my favorite Ozzy tracks. Somnol's been pretty busy lately with work, school, and traveling, so in the dead of night with no one else around, after I finished up "New Orleans", I just banged out a port of "The Wagon" in about three hours, including zoneout time when I got to chat with Caby again. Ports take infinitely less time than customs because all the hard stuff is already in the chart. In the case of "The Wagon", which is DLC from the first Rock Band and thus still has a lot of GH2 leftovers in its chart format, I was able to reuse
- The tempomap and notes, of course (and this was before Rock Band moved to requiring all five buttons on all difficulties, which is something I correct for and thankfully isn't that difficult anyway, but still, one less thing to do)
- Harmonix's overdrive authoring and Face-Off phrases (these only need to be shifted to the right pitches on each difficulty)
- The Practice drum machine timekeeping notes for slower speeds (for later Rock Band ports, I have to recreate this data usually from the playable drum track)
- Drum and crash cymbals for the stage drummer from the animation notes of the playable drum part in Rock Band
- Lighting keyframes (not reused wholesale for my lighting scheme, but a good base) and verse/chorus marker events
- Section names
Where I couldn't reuse stuff, a lot of it was adaptable. I could use the playable drum gems to get the different drummer animations set up. The vocal phrases (not the actual vocal authoring, but the notes demarcating where each vocal phrase is) helps me visually see where to put the singer play/idle events. The singleplayer bassist and the notes that make his cabinet's speakers pop are a simple folddown of the playable bass part and animations. Playable bass and guitar animations are of course very adaptable to the playable bass and guitar in GH2. About the only thing I truly had to cook up from scratch was the camera and lighting. While there are directed cuts in Rock Band, they're not comparable to my custom directed cuts in GH2, unfortunately, and venue lighting is much different and expanded in Rock Band.
The end result though? Have a look:
This chart is also a lot of fun. J Mascis is a guitar god, and this isn't one of the more popular early DLC songs as far as I can tell, so hopefully having it in Volume 1 will expose how awesome this song is to more folks.
Other than the aforementioned "Flying High Again" port, what's really left is polish and art. I'm not gonna be able to retexture the whole game, so I'll leave it for later volumes and focus on a handful of screens you're gonna be seeing a lot (so main menu, "next song" screen, and setlist, mostly). There's some tweaks to the lower difficulties of each song I wanna do, making the Medium charts easier, making sure each chart has an animated drummer count-in and that the sustain gaps are up to my standards (my charts now obviously conform to this, but my older ones, ports, and other people's customs do not). I want to do a shrink pass on all the MIDIs, I want to adjust tiering possibly, and I need to generate coop_max_scores. Basically, a ton of stuff that no one but me will ever care about, but makes me feel better.
Other than that, we're really close to release. I've actually gotta start thinking about trailers and bonus videos at this stage, promotion, letting folks know it's out there. It's been a bit lonelier working on this game than I'd like since coming back, and I'm curious to see the reaction to Volume 1's release and if I can maybe rekindle a few friendships through it and maybe even make some new ones. Stuff was a lot different in January 2023, you dig?
