[NotITG] UKSRTX Stage 5a: morrigan / GOLDEN RULE

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It's not a Get F***ed, but it is still Eat Sh*t!

In this stage, the Villain first pretends to be God, and expends almost all of his energy, then tries to come at you with the last of his remaining energy in a last ditch battle. It doesn't go well for him, but at least he tried right?

This thing is my magnum opus. I spent the last two years working on it on and off (started in may 2017). It started as a conceptual "what if", if you had to actually Fight with Luculent (UKSRT8 Matoi), what would that fight be like? What kind of things would they try to do to you?

I learned how to do a lot of things on this stage.

The opening is a callback to matoi, but the text transition uses kuut's velloaamis ("wobbling") shader that was used in UKSRT9 and MM3.

The effect on the water is one of my first Vertex Shaders, I wrote some kinda-shitty code to detect if an arrow is below an imaginary "sea level" and distorte and fade the vertices of any arrow or hold portion that meets that criteria. The effect is surprisingly convincing, and I'm happy with how it turned out.

The next effect is another vertex shader, this time applied to the "red line receptor" as well as the playfields. There are other lines also scrolling that indicate when one play segment ends and another begins. This was the first effect written for this series of files in 2017, but it didn't have the vertex shader applied to it until mid 2019. The vertex shader allowed me to bend the receptor line and changeover lines in tandem with the playfields, using the same math functions. (it's a collection of sine waves, in a shader I wrote called "lifeform.vert")

The aesthetic idea behind 1:00 is a sort of lovecraftian thing, where the idea is that if you stare at a single playfield for too long, you go mad - the information becomes incorrect in a way that's difficult to describe, pretty subtle and way harder than it looks, as the arrows end up out of order very quickly. There is a hexagonal game of life simulation that's seeded when/wherever a new playfield spawns (location is randomized within bounds) It's based on THIS https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ltKcRD by Telperion.

1:28 is my first raymarcher, "visionquest.frag". I placed 8 sdf roundboxes in a ring, and used domain repetition to make it into an endless tunnel. UV is pretty much copied from the analys cubes. I made sure to manually fade the texture at the edges so no seams are visible. Here is the texture applied to the sdroundboxes https://imgur.com/a/OkXOfw5
The mural begins to scroll when the player starts ascending upwards out of it. The texture is actually a dead giveaway that the stage is a lie. It's only made up of characters that Peeesh knows, and there's like three Irmas in there...

After this we get a reference to the ending of the original Matoi, except now we have DPads with rainbow arrowpaths. This ends with a fairly tame jumpscare into a section I nicknamed "Hehu Wonk". Hehu Wonk is a reference to one of the mod-types in Daikyi's Anomaly file, specifically "Final Wonk", except it brings back the vertex shader from earlier in the file, using a vertical sine wave (synced to the music) this time. There's also some AFT feedback, and the canvas the feedback is drawing to has some small sine and cosine distortion applied to it, which creates those "eddy currents" that you can see in the trails.

The transition out of THAT, is probably my favorite hold note I've ever made. Luculent then claps, and we get ourselves a D-pad. This time, with a black hole in the middle, and Daikyi's twist.frag shader that he and FMS_Cat wrote for Perthed Again (celestial harbor). I really felt like this shader works super well with D-pads, haha. The transition out of this is also pretty spicy, the two holds become the receptor line for the next section.

The next part is called "Drop Distortion Universe", which is a riff on UKSRT7 Pernicious Deed's "Drop Distortion Beam". This was another mod made in early 2018. It uses 6 playfields, driven dropping diagonally from each other. The transition from one corner to the next is pretty brutal. The playfields crop in horizontally one arrow per beat, and crop out vertically one "arrow size" per beat as the red line clears them. It also includes the return of the eddy current feedback from hehu wonk. Then, they start to skew in reference to Disperagioia from Celestial Harbor.

It ends with a cute spotlight gimmick that's way harder than it looks, I turned on brake towards the end because I hate fun. It ends with a fake mine (another dispera reference) that turns into a real mine if you don't heed its warning. The fake Luculent breaks character at this moment, and the Peeesh smile appears. (TO BE CONTINUED IN STAGE 5B)