I said I was gonna do a post on marfGH: Volume 0, and then I went to go see the Super Mario Galaxy movie and got distracted. Actually, I got into that frame of mind where I'd rather just work on it than talk more about it. It's finally playable end-to-end and off to my testers! Of course, anyone who's poked around on my Guitar Hero custom discs page knows that Volume 0 is an old disc, from June 2021, actually. Why the sudden reissue now?

In truth, this has been the intention for years now, for many many reasons. I'll go into it in short in the eventual announcement video, but here's the long of it for you journal readers.

My adventure's also let me step back and come back to decide what I'll do with marfGH, which was previously an "eventually" project for a long time. I've been thinking I'll repurpose the tiny ISO I was using to test charts, get a good mix of ports and my own customs in there, and release it as that marfGH demo I was intending about a year back now. Means I can also see how it runs on hardware thanks to my friends in the scene. (And mon.) Thanks, lads!

Spring 2021 meant the release of Guitar Hero II Deluxe 1.0. This was a much more conservative QOL improvement mod than what 2.0 would eventually become, and it became pretty clear that there was more "give" to Guitar Hero II's mod potential than we initially thought. jnack immediately dove back in to start work on 2.0, which would bring most of DX's true polish and biggest features (the note streak counter/FC indicator, playable drums, Free Play's guitar/guitarist/venue select being wrapped up in a nice menu instead of an awkward gauntlet of screens, the 360 HUD being ported over, all the setlists wrapped in one disc, and so on).

2.0 took a bunch of months. Scott was busy with life stuff, and it was his knowledge of data array that made jnack wait for him to get back to finish up some of the new features, especially the note streak counter. Since a lot of work towards 2.0 happened right after 1.0, though, jnack started posting these "2.0 alpha" discs, and some of us started using them as a base for our own discs. They weren't complete, they were super rough (I will never forget the "can't make BU" error that happened at the start of every single song), but it was the best we had for a while.

Yeah, none of the art's changed except for this one I hacked up with Caby art. Wild to think of a time when I just couldn't do art stuff.

Volume 0 was released in this lull. Since Guitar Hero II modding was really hot at that moment and I wanted attention and had something relevant to people, I thought to wrap up ten of the songs I had around and put it out as a demonstration of the volume discs concept, which was a little different than it is now. I went back to check for any old Scratchpad posts about it and found this from April 2020:

I'm not sure if I ever mentioned my goals for this custom disc, but here they are:

1. To act as a track pack of sorts for Guitar Hero II, replicating that "some favorites, some obscure new favorites" feel that the better GH and RB games had, but using tracks ported from a variety of sources (RB on-disc and DLC, RBN for GH1 picks, GH2 360 on-disc and DLC)
2. To port the entirety of the 360-exclusive material (on-disc stuff and maybe the DLC, depending on space) back to the PS2 version, where someone could play them with pretty minimal DTA hacking
3. Getting the feel of the disc as close to a proper Harmonix-made disc as possible, with all the polish that should come with it (including split audio)
4. Having more songs I like on an engine I like, obviously

Naturally, with 64 songs to replace, this is a pretty monumental undertaking. At the moment, I have the first three tiers done, plus seven more tracks throughout the disc. So 24 done in total. It's nowhere close to done, and this is fine—but with as much as I've talked about it, I kinda want people to be able to play some of it and also test if it works on console for me.

This is so wild to read for a bunch of reasons, just this matted mess of different intentions, a lot of which have since been realized separately. Anyway, so yeah, I initially wanted to make a big nasty 64-song disc just like the original game, and this single demo disc would become a series of demo discs, the volume sets, I could use to road test songs, show people what I was up to, release stuff more frequently, and bulk up my song library of finished songs I could then pick through for the full disc.

In the end, I dropped the 64-song disc idea. Just the idea of making everyone unlock everything yet again on another save didn't appeal to me. The volume discs became the new focus, especially since I couldn't think of much like them other than Rock Band's Track Pack discs (a big inspiration for sure). I hadn't yet dropped the "this is all for the big disc" idea with the original release of Volume 0, though, so I released it on a rough base with a lot of things unfinished and figured I'd have something better to show off sooner rather than later.

The original ten songs, if you're curious.

I didn't. It took me four-and-a-half years to release Volume 1 afterwards, and a lot had happened in that time. Aside from splitting off from MiloHax, I got a lot better at both customs and properly working with game scripts, I learned how to draw a little bit, I coded in a bunch of new features myself, and my aim for marfGH evolved. Volume 0 was still stuck in 2021 though, an unpolished early stab at a similar idea with ten random songs I had lying around, ten that I liked well enough but didn't think congealed into a coherent setlist. The idea for a couple years now has been to reissue it, expanded to a full twenty songs, with all new features, art, and rounded out into a disc that's more eclectic than schizophrenic.

I'm happy to report the final song, Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker" (a band never officially seen in a rhythm game, believe it or not!), made it into engine complete yesterday, thus the Volume 0 reissue is ready for testing. I sent it off to a bunch of people last night—dcb was sending me videos, including some with handcams, one of my testers played through the whole thing and noted some tiering and mixing things I could tweak, and no doubt some other people will give it a go in the coming days.

I'm going to let this sit for a week or so before I do anything else to wrap it up. I have basically done nothing creatively so far this year except rhythm game stuff (and the cammy.somnol refresh—more pages coming up for that soon!). I haven't touched Savannah's new book yet, and I feel bad about that.

It has been an incredibly productive time for what I have worked on, though. As for Volume 0 itself, much, much improved. I definitely feel a lot of the new songs round out some of the more oddball original ones (though some of them are just as oddball—passport.mid, anyone?). You gotta have the big tunes, "Still of the Night", "Heartbreaker", "Don't Look Back in Anger", to make it feel like a proper setlist. I've got those in there now, with all the new features and art, with much improved audio mixing, with much better lower difficulties—fuck, it's glorious. With this disc, the marfGH library of playable songs goes up to over forty songs, and that'll be sixty songs when Volume 2 comes out hopefully around Christmas. That's about six albums worth of songs! It's so much.

Easy to barrel forwards, but more and more as I've gotten older, I'm starting to look back and realize just how much I've made happen, especially this decade, and how much of it kicks ass. I sat watching songs in Jukebox Mode while I waited for the testing build to upload to send to people, and the polygon people dancing to my light show made every last day I've spent staring at a fucking MIDI events list worth it. Someday, I'll exhaust this marfGH project and be left only with what resulted, a monument to a brand of autism only I have that I'm routinely thrilled about.

Tagged under: marfgh modding