For the past four weeks, I woke up and did art. Or I woke up and played through the entire setlist, all difficulties, both instruments. If you're a math whiz, that's twenty songs times four difficulties times two instruments, and actually slightly more. Or I woke up and hunted down bugs and did little tweaks to menus to get things as shiny and presentable as possible for tomorrow, Christmas day, aka the release date for marfGH: Volume 1 at long last. The launch video isn't public yet as of writing this, but if it's past December 25, 2025, you can watch it here and grab the disc over on mari.somnol.
I'm supremely thankful to have the Somnolians, all of whom contributed to this huge project in a big way. Caby and Savannah contributed lots of menu art, as did dcb and Trys doodles for the setlist. dcb sent me many many videos and pictures from real hardware and PCSX2 of him playing through the whole setlist, occasionally FCing stuff on Easy or Medium, which is hot and exactly what I wanted to see from all the time spent on the lower difficulties. Connor's MoriHime friend worked on a screen commission for me (and it came out super sick). I sent beta testing copies to a few people who stuck by me while I was on walkabout from the scene, hearing back a lot of good things and some good catches for things to fix and tweak.
Things to tweak didn't stop until about ten minutes ago. The bonus video was a little quiet. I noticed that in co-op, the only mode in the game to hold scores (though there's no saving on these discs), the scores and star rankings would overlap the setlist doodles, so I quickly had to rebuild the career select song menu (which has no doodles) with my new :marfpeek: "SETLIST" header so it didn't look janky. Some of the songs, I felt could've been louder, so I pumped them up a bit and re-encoded them. The main menu you see up there only got done around noon today.
Despite the crunch, I don't think I ever doubted that I'd get it out in time. I took a chance on a really neat calligraphy lining brush for the main menu and it wound up making for a first screen of the disc I'm thrilled is gonna meet people when they boot it up tomorrow. I've had the readme ready to go for a week now, the launch video three days or so now, and an additional promo FC video in between those. I was so fixated that I actually finished up a second disc, not of marfGH but of PS2 game demos and behind-the-scenes stuff, right in the middle of all this madness, and I'll be releasing it in January. That's another old project of mine, now available for download.
All this came at a cost, of course. I've basically dropped everything else I was up to in pursuit of this Christmas deadline. I haven't actually played bass in a few weeks. I still have that trip diary to finish up. I finished up my end-of-the-year mixtape and then never posted it anywhere because I wanted to have a video to go with it. Art has solely been marfGH screens this month, which is, as I talked about in my previous journal entry, actually a good sign. I've been putting this off (and putting off art in general) because I didn't want to think about how big of a project this would be, but I stepped up and the beast has been slain. Something like eighteen game screens, reworked and retextured, tons of style experimentation on my part, and a variety of artists chipping in on very short notice to help me out. I feel like I can do anything at this point. I have limitless capacity to make cool shit happen that I wish I had back when I was 14.
I'm feeling confident in saying there is no custom disc like marfGH. Deluxe has the features and new art, but no new songs. Most discs just add Clon songs with Onyx to a DX 2.0 Custom Edition disc, which is fine of course, but it's a bit more automatic than my very manual and meticulous authoring process. Who the hell other than me is putting behind-the-scenes videos in their discs? I've wrapped up eleven years of knowledge of how Guitar Hero II is put together into a tricked-out, cleaned up disc base that I can use and reuse for years to come. All the craze, the last four weeks? Thankfully, I will never need to do it again for future volumes. Just replace the songs and go. Anything I want to do with future volumes is purely optional.
I have no idea what I'll be doing now other than chilling out. I think I've had enough rhythm gaming for a while, though, and I've been feeling a little more distant from friends and life than I'd like these past few weeks (I know that sounds odd given how much they helped me out, but y'know, fixated). Thankfully, we're back down to earth once Christmas' own chaos is through. Keep an eye out for the New Year's Eve stream playing through the whole disc in a couple days, folks!
