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Saturday, October 22, 2011

My tips of pro-ness for making good and memorable charts

Not only do these tips apply to O2Jam, it can apply to other rhythm games like IIDX.

Why am I posting it here? One, someone awesome asked me. Two, I'm getting tired of seeing weird charts.

Alright, here they are:
1. Use headphones or speakers with loud bass. This is so that you can pick up even the slightest instruments to put notes for non-keysounded charts.
2. Pitch relevancy. For some instruments, higher-pitch notes are on the right while the lower-pitch should be on the left. A good example is the quick piano stream in Bang!Bang!Bang! HX chart. IIDX charts should also follow this rule, but don't be too strict with them.
3. Play around until you get unique patterns or patterns that match the song. Making them fun and more interesting than other charts makes it memorable, other than just the song alone.
4. Copy and paste is fine, but don't overdo it. If it tends to be repetitive, it's become easily boring. A good tip is to copy and paste, and then change the patterns a little. Good examples are in my Promise and Catastrophe in Bhava-agra ~ Wonderful Heaven charts. You'll notice the small difference between each chorus and repeated sections of the songs.
5. Make sure most of your chart has a constant difficulty level. If your chart has a sudden difficulty change, it's an instant fail. My recent chart, Enemy Storm (Dark Jungle Mix) was close to that point (probably due to the speed changes lol). Giving breaks in between is fine, but sometimes necessary for those ridiculous patterns. Examples of hard charts with breaks are Black Water and Little Hearts.
6. Playtest your chart. Watching it in autoplay is not good enough. Imagine the movement of the fingers when one plays your chart. Remember: The chart you make is not for yourself only.

Another important tip that is not in the list: Have fun :D

(Note: These tips are not completely failproof. Don't heavily rely on them. Use them if your charts are weak when compared to the official charts. In addition, these are the tips I can give based on my experiences with many charts and I do not deserve full credit for tip #2 and the one after #6.)