Doppelganger writeup

DOPPELGANGER. The stars and planets aligned for this stage - the character, the gimmick, the mood of the song, it all worked together fantastically.

It's mostly all stuff we've seen before, with a couple of major "wow" moments.

0:20 wobbly ball "Wibbry cheek" is a simple raymarch made from this tutorial: http://www.michaelwalczyk.com/blog/2017/5/25/ray-marching . It gradually fades to a "wibbry" (wobbly pensive) emoji over time.
The background is a plasma made from https://www.bidouille.org/prog/plasma but with a bunch of other post processing effects glued onto it.
That plasma shows up in multiple places throughout this file and the extra stage.

The next part with the 4 playfields, "Spooky Action at a distance" is probably the most awful context-switch gimmick I've ever made. It's a super brutal sightread! Enjoy! The walk cycle is lightly referenced from some Studio Ghibli walk cycle references, and it's also partially Murakumo (Pop'n music) inspired. I gave Peeesh a pretty MZD energy here. I had no reference for the upper body/shoulder motion, so I improvised it, and I'm extremely happy with how it turned out. https://streamable.com/cc8cq
The stairs are made using a vertex shader, completing the murakumo reference. The escher geometry is just where he lives within the thread. The pieces are conjured from his mind in the same way that Blingdenway (fantasy town) was, based on his design sense and just wanting to appear cool. This also shows up in the UKSRTX teaser trailer footage.

It then transitions into an attack called "uncertainty principle", which is basically just "whenever peeesh's face is on screen, it's flip", but then some Dizzy starts creeping up the screen...

Next up is "entangled pair", which is another pretty mean gimmick. You have to switch between reading the top portal and the bottom portal (actually it's based on the pitch of the bassline!!) and if you're reading the wrong place you just instantly perish.

NOW BEGINS THE MEMES. https://i.imgur.com/PbpcqnV.png

It's pretty much just callbacks to the previous stages, with some new memes thrown in. The ITG2 bg variants were made WAY BACK IN 2016 for this by Silverhawke, Gabrimax, and Sayori, with one extra one (chalkboard) borrowed from Daikyi's Voltex Taisou Daiichi (Mods Boot Camp 3) file. This attack is called "Smorgasbord", because that's what it is. After a quick interlude and a "scooby doo" (lateral) step pattern, the phase II begins with a Please Install Counter Strike Source gmod error. This is made with 4 AFTs cropped onto 4 sprites, with the crop point being worked out to be .25 screens based on a "start location". Each AFT has a playfield under it with a different noteskin, then I applied some light mods. It ended up being VERY fun to read.

It then transitions into "Language Barrier", one of the first ideas I ever had for the character - that he's absorbing the languages of the tournament participants and just generally nearby people in the venue to, use against the players he's fighting. It's such a wholesome meme, he's even having a lot of fun doing it. He's then interrupted by... Himself, actually startling his little clones in the process, to segue into the next section "Assault and battery", which is just him brutally attacking you.

"Split the atom" is the next section, which is a fakespline made out of some bumpy permutations in order to turn the playfield into an atom-shape. It's a pseudo-sequel to the Oriental Star from the MBC3 extra stage. By the way, many of Peeesh's spellcards are relating to quantum phenomena, hinting towards Giger's experiments on him, and how he's pretty much a walking quantum phenomenon. Probably the closest thing to an SCP in the canon currently. Also, one of the working titles for the Thread (his domain) was the "Schroedinger's box".

NEXT onto the 2nd raymarch. I think this is my best one? "Wibbry Multiverse" features a raymarched pulsing sphere domain repetition, that also has a moving rotateable camera and lightsource. I originally wanted to make the light source move around too, but it turned out to be way too distracting on sightread. It ends with a section I called "Hopscotch with Stakes", where you have to make a snap decision on whether to hit up or down between each jump, and it keeps flipping, and also there's one instance of two downs in a row. Peeesh then punches you into the sky, out of the thread and back to UKSRT8's hospital, confirming that their spatial location is actually directly under the hospital, before dragging you back down with his stretchy arms. (This scene is actually inspired by Steven Universe movie, which was wonderful)

You are then dragged back down into a raymarched hell (lightly modified version of Abstract Glassy Field - https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ttGDH ). I refracted the playfield through the walls. The mods in this section are an interesting blend of a vertex shader with a bunch of auxvar controlled presets I made, and regular ol mods applied as well, to create an extremely chaotic feeling. Despite how simple it is, I really haven't ever seen anything like it before. I'm excited to do more with this concept in future.

The previous section drained almost all of peeesh's energy, and pretty much caused him to overheat, so he needed to cool off in a pool of water. This weird dpad is actually a spiral that's being counter-rotated! The direction the arrows travel is not based on their hit direction, but actually their TIMING. 4ths come from the left and right alternately, and 8ths come from the top and bottom alternately. 16ths would come from the diagonals, if there were any in this section. I had to write a vertex shader for the holds, because they overlapped the notes and made the whole thing really annoying and not very fun to read. The solution I ended up coming up with, was changing the Z space positioning of the hold vertices based on distance from their parent tap note. It makes it look just offset enough that they aren't completely obscuring the notes in an annoying way.

After that, Peeesh walks along the holds towards you menacingly (the holds' path is curved manually using parabola to keep him ontop of it) in my favourite transitional mod I've ever written, before having a complete wardrobe malfunction (imagine being so angry that you're simply unable to keep a consistent form. Couldn't be Neazra...) and rushing at you as a Mega Mix of Ayaze, Laer and Neko. This ending gimmick is sorta the culmination of all his frustrations, the BG turns angry and the notechart becomes relentless, and the gimmick from Why Do You Hate Me (a single chart split among multiple playfields) returns in a more cursed way. This mod is done using a new nITG v4 feature called "SetHiddenRegions" which allows me to specify tables of notes to not draw on specific playfields. Oh yeah, also the whole song is 280 bpm, and I used a v4 feature called "SetNoteTypeMults" to scale all the timing colors to halftime.

Finally, Peeesh is defeated, turning into a single tap note as one last screw you. Enjoy :)