Thank You Scientist - Everyday Ghosts by Froslass

i got a little sad reading ur review, ur incredibly hard on urself and it hurts to see someone with such iconic status talk about their own creative process with such.. disdain? ur carrying a lot of emotional weight when talking about ur mapping like ur identity/selfworth as a person is directly tied to this game. ur kinda holding urself to an impossible standard of what a "great" map should be and i feel like ur completely devaluing the actual work and success uve built over the years ._. i know u might feel like this is just "honest analysis" but it sounds like ur rly just beating urself up and its genuinely sad to see. ur allowed to be a person outside of your maps. i really hope you can find a way to enjoy creating again without it feeling like such a burden

oh i mean i guess the wall of text ended up looking much more negative than it should've been lol but ultimately i'm quite okay with how things are. i hold high standards upon myself because i feel like i'm stagnating if i don't. i'm genuinely fine with the niche i've achieved and i know there are people who enjoy my stuff so that's more than enough for me. i like mapping and i have a much more positive outlook on my creations than i used to, it's just that i feel i'm still far from creating something truly great for me and imo that's more of a motivation to keep going rather than a bad thing

thanks for taking the time to write this, it might feel self-indulgent but i love when i get to hear peoples thought processes like this. it was new to me that you're very self-aware of how your maps project. in my opinion you do have a really good handle on what more people might desire

one of the reasons this caught my eye is because the patterns you’re talking about in wyits stars map are the same ones that changed me as a mapper. the thing about those patterns that’s always been the most important to me is the horizontal symmetry, because beyond just involving the center of the screen, they’re entirely structurally dependent around the center of the screen. that’s what gives it the contrast that makes you raise your eyebrows at it - you mention being afraid of what’s too obvious, but those patterns are super duper obvious. when you pair that with a starkly unique part of the song, like the specific guitar line in stars that wyit picked out to do the symmetry on, thats why it hits

i think whats most important here though is that harnessing raw patterning ability is not the key to creative fulfillment anyway. you could spend a lot of time grinding something like visual spacing consistency but the mathematically perfect collection of objects at the end of the rainbow will still not be thoughtful or enjoyable unless you have projected your own desires onto it. this is why i actually wouldnt recommend something like mentorship as a means to this end - everything creatively satisfying is going to come from you and what you want.

*knowing* what you want is a different challenge. i’ve talked to a number of friends who have the same struggle you express with just generating ideas, or at least i think that’s what you mean when you talk about the mental effort it took to make this map, and it’s always tough to have an answer because i managed to avoid that right off the bat. like, when i was starting to map, i was in high school, and i would often zone out and just doodle patterns in class. i had too many ideas. i don’t mean to present that as a cool or positive thing about myself, i’m mainly just using it to say that i don’t know how people map without having adhd. it’s like the one thing that i can’t give any good advice on, besides just looking at other people’s maps to collect cool shapes in your brain, which i have to assume you’ve done a lot of

if it’s any consolation, i can give input on what you did do. i think for sure my favorite pattern in your map is the 3/4 line sliders at 01:59:221 (1,2,3,4,5,6) - , 02:06:004 (1,2,3,4) - , etc. its a very distinct and pishi-core idea, in fact it feels like the type of thing you’d see in the thank you scientist map that he ranked this year. i know saying “do more stuff like that” isnt exceedingly helpful for the problem i’ve just described, but i hope its better than nothing

anyway regardless of all of this its really nice to hear from your above comment that mapping is still fun for you no matter how insecure it can feel to keep pushing yourself, and that goes for anything creative. when you decide to finish a map i hope the greatest reason is that you felt like it

^^^
great follow up, the last comment especially

@bd can we do pinky promise that ur gna be a little kinder to urself anyways? :b

"mapping isn't really supposed to be this thing where you're just throwing your cursor around and seeing what sticks while having the most basic possible structure, it's more than that"

actually I think many of my favorite maps are exactly this

^ i do exaactly this but put 1000 overlap also to mind control people

simplicity is not a flaw, complexity is not a virtue

been reading and thinking about the convo here
just wanna add that sometimes (varies from person to person) the worst thing you can do to "improve" is to try too hard to improve https://youtu.be/zc0vRDh1ECA?si=UNZJOrseiC-XYzUh&t=1289

it can be tempting to look at the things you can't do, which are unnatural and therefore impressive to you, and try to emulate that, and you can definitely learn a lot from that kind of study. and if doing that is fun then that's great, the game's about having fun after all. but it's also beneficial imo to learn to lean into your own strengths, to get out of your own way and explore what only you can do, what comes naturally--so naturally that you might have taken it for granted

wow thats a great clip. real af

i wanna give a proper followup reply to these at some point but i really do appreciate the feedback and the thoughts posted here. again i didn't really mean to want pity points or talk about how bad i am or anything like that, the goal here was more of a positive one and just to showcase how i view improvement on mapping in a general sense.

but i genuinely will be taking all of these into consideration, especially melloe and kataryn's comments on valuing your own identity, which is something i neglected in the past, learned how to do it for a while (which is how KNOWER - Overtime (Live Band Session) (Froslass) came to exist) and then somehow that ended up being lost at some point again.

in the end i'm aware that simplicity isn't inherently a bad thing, but i feel like there's a net positive in striving for a more diverse set of mapping skills. as i mentioned in the review i won't really do that if it means mapping isn't fun for me anymore, so thankfully it's been a good journey so far

to make a slightly more serious comment i think its not so good for improvement especially after a lot of experience to set up in ur mind that xy type mappers approach mapping "correctly" and you need to completely emulate what they do to make a "correct" map cuz like what good does it do to deny all of your accumulated experience as a player & a mapper to adapt to something that isn't instantly agreeable with u

there are 20000000000000000000000000000 ways to make a correct map and the greatest thing about mapping is that you are allowed to explore all those ways and take the great parts of all those ways to make a "correct map"

i never felt myself that I could fully grasp more concepts that other good maps built itself on or maybe I disagreed with them in some way but taking the parts of those maps that I liked and not doing the rest that I disliked got me decently far i think

but whenever I try to deny parts of my own experience, my own shit that i do spontaneously in the pursuit of making what i found "correct" at the time I just got insanely bored of mapping

so I think denying yourself from being expressed in you make is the worst thing you can do as a mapper
but if you can find the balance of adopting things that you like that could possibly be found in other maps whilst keeping the things exclusive to you as a mapper visible in your maps that's when most mappers would agree that you've made a "great" thing

and the greatest thing about mapping is that this kind of "layering" of concepts and experiences and skills can be expressed in any kind of map regardless of how intricate the map's structural decisions are

i kinda just yapped the whole time about nothing in total so i will go back to making nonsensical and offensive comments

i wna add context to my original comment why i felt like typing it out in the first place after reading ur review, u can treat it as an open letter to u and can decide whether what im saying has truth to it or not

obv i dont wna dismiss ur comments above and as much as id like to take ur word for u being content and happy with ur journey i think ur statements are directly contradicting with each other, lemme elaborate a little and show u my perspective on it, again this wont be about the specific map or mapping philosophy at all and more about u and how i perceived u throughout the years

i always found it interesting that a maps raison d'etre (<-- i dont actually use that word, i just finished subahibi the other day and wanted to use this at least ONCE) can say a lot about a mappers personal motivations, may it be mapping for fun, playcount, popularity, to impress other mappers, to show off music etc etc

coincidentally ive binched most of pishis videos recently, including ur interview and it left me with a similar sad feeling, to me theres a pattern of behaviour in ur career thats chasing constant approval/validation, whenever theres a next big mapping thing, ur telling urself u have to adopt their principles and adapt in order to prove that ur still "good" at mapping

i dont think u can achieve fulfillment with that mindset when ur constantly pressuring urself to fit into whatevers perceived as the highest affinity of mapping at that time Q__Q others were pointing it out aswell that ur more likely to find success when ur main driving factor is ur intrinsic motivation for the medium and imploring of ur own mapping personality rather than the appeal/approval of others

im saying this cause i think the version of u that wrote the first post seemed hurt when ur directly saying to urself that ur "simply not meant to create something great" and seeing ur map as "obviously underwhelming" etc, i think it lets ur inner feelings about ur selfworth show thru and directly clashes with the latter statement that ur genuinely fine and happy with ur overall journey, if u were *truly* content ud def talk different and welp.. more neutral about "failed" experimental projects

tbh im pretty much projecting thru u cause ive been in the validation seeking trap for the longest time and i felt like theres similarities between how we view our time spent on this game, i wna emphasize that im writing this with no ill intent, but i needed to get this out of my system

i know im very late to the party but there were many things said in this thread and in the original review that resonated with me a lot. Melloe's post in particular hit me hard because it is a struggle I've had for a long time - where my heart is in a different place than my expertise.

It is natural to seek validation from other people about your work. We are social creatures and a large part of the enjoyment of art is being able to share your experiences with other people (think showing a cool map to one of your friends and them feeling a similar way to how you feel). As such it can feel isolating when there are things you value that other people don't seem to. You can start to second guess yourself and force yourself to see what the "right" way of mapping is (like how froslass mentioned raiko/xarr maps being "properly" mapped). And it's okay to map for recognition, but it comes at the cost of doing something outside of where your heart is.

As for my own experience with this I got recognition (though i am still a nobody tbh) from making hsv/very visually focused maps - but the truth is I'm not even *that* fond of these kind of maps (i like them but there are other types of maps I appreciate more). I didn't even want to become this sort of mapper I just happened to be quite good at it, and for a while a rolled with it because having recognition feels nice. But after a while I realized I did not feel fufilled, and that the attention was just.... shallow. So I've really been trying to map what *I* like in maps - In particular trying to capture a specific mood with different movement ideas or making fun iterative gameplay concepts or trying to express the song in my own special or extreme way. But I find trying to do these things to just be so much harder for me. Many a time I'll open the editor with a vision in my head and whatever I place is just... mediocore. But importantly when I was able to finish a map and do what I wanted to do it did feel a lot more rewarding, because I was pushing myself and more importantly I was following my heart. This feeling of finishing a project filled with a lot of passion is a form of joy that is truly special.

The cost of this however is that I've spent all this effort for a map, that is probably lower quality as I am trying to do what I'm not good at, and is going to get 0 recognition and rot away in graveyard. It just.... stings a lot. And I know these are very strong feelings to have about a circle clicking game and I'm aware its probably unhealthy. but that's just what I feel because I am an extremely emotional (moreso neurotic) person. I feel like I view maps as more precious than others may do. it's why I don't rly like to give low ratings on this site. So long as a map isn't obviously in bad faith (mapped for exploiting pp or for attention etc etc) I try my best to see the value in maps. Because they aren't *just maps*, there are people behind them, people who are often trying to make something meaningful or special. Maps are a reflection of who we are in that they are a manifestation of our enjoyments, each decision made with that intent.

Anyway im realising im yapping a lot and gotten off-topic I guess what I'm trying to say is that mapping should be a happy thing, and you should keep making what you enjoy to make because that's how u become truly fulfilled. ty for reading if u made it down here :D

the advice in this thread hit hard for me as an artist who struggled a long time with art block and feeling like my art wasn't improving. creative work is all one big family