By the Power of Friendship!
Massive Community Meteor Crash!



Set to: I Can Be Your Friend, covered by The O.C. Supertones
By: K2J, m980, and many many other pariticpants. Thanks, everyone!

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This project, nearly a year in the making, is an effort (as I've detailed below) to encourage osu! players to not give up trying to be friends with each other. I chose the culture barrier (Japanese-inspired vs. Western-inspired, a la Ouendan vs. Elite Beat Agents) as the most obvious division, but of course this is just an example told in metaphor.

I mapped the first three difficulties and did the entire Storyboard myself, for the most part. However, in a manner befitting this map's theme, I was helped out and encouraged a lot by many members of the osu! community, including m980, who not only provided his own difficulty out of the blue, but also took the time to teach me the techniques of authentic-style mapping. I couldn't have made this without him, or without the contributions from everyone who appears in this map.

As a last note, this map has been a message not only from me to the community, but also from the community to myself. I thank you all for helping out so much. Truly, you all are proof of this map's meaning. Keep up the good work!

The original post (and changelog) follows:

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So I've noticed that osu! is made up of people. And people tend to be really mean toward each other. I know that's inevitable in any community, but I'm making this map to emphasize the other side of the coin - we're here to have fun. We can be friends, despite (and in fact, enjoying) our differences of opinions, musical styles, ability, and so on.

The song is I Can Be Your Friend from the third VeggieTales episode (remember those?). Luckily, this version isn't sung by Jimmy & Jerry Gourd, but by The O.C. Supertones (part of the Veggie Rocks! album, from which Relient K's amazing rendition of The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything comes), so it's a bit less cheesy and a bit more rockin'.

The storyboard (still in the planning stages) tells of a mythical land of osu!, where war is being waged by the Red Sun and the Blue Sea armies (representing those who want osu! to be pro-Japanese flavor and those who don't, respectively). The protaganist, a conscientious objector, is the only one not busy enough to see a giant clich? meteor heading towards them! He rushes to warn the armies, but he realizes he can only stop them from fighting with the power of FRIENDSHIP! Will the meteor impact osu! and destroy everyone, or will our hero convince everyone to be friends?

I'm going for a semi-authentic style in this map. I'm not going to stick strictly to EBA, but I want to at least try some of this more exciting "authentic" stuff. Enjoy!

History
20 Nov 09: Uploaded completed 2nd difficulty, Choppin'.
9 Dec 09: All three diffs up, but I'll probably tweak them a bit later to make the difficulty growth more obvioius.
20 Dec 09: Wow, slow going. m980's contributed the Insane difficulty, and I'm working my way down the difficulties to bring them into line with the "authentic" style.
28 Dec 09: Veggin' is updated. I did a bit of work on Choppin', but I'm not done yet.
3 Jan 10: All updated, hitsounds notwithstanding.
4 Jan 10: Hitsounds updated, let me know if you have any suggestions.
4 Jul 10: Six months later... SB has been updated a bit. The first playtime segment now has what I intend to be its final SB, though it may change. Offer suggestions, please.
7 Jul 10: Second playtime segment done. Hopefully any layering issues have been fixed; last time some shadows seemed to have gotten behind the background during the upload process. Also, the main MP3 is no longer an unnecessarily high bitrate.
18 Jul 10: Aw, what the heck. I was planning on keeping everything under wraps until I had the cutscenes finished, but I decided it would be better if people knew what I was doing. At least a little bit (there's more to this than there may seem!). The SB is at least a skeleton for the pre-MP3 intro and the playable sections, though there are still issues I'm too tired to fix tonight.
19 Jul 10: Renamed m980's difficulty and double-checked SB accuracy.
22 Jul 10: Added SB intro (the part during the MP3, where you go if you hit skip the first time). If I didn't mention it I fixed NoHItter's edits as per my reply.
23 Jul 10: Added SB Cutscene 1 (between first and second playable sections), though there are some details I still need to take care of.
26 Jul 10: Added SB Cutscene 2, updated a few other SB things, and changed the combo colors to be better seen on the SB.
30 Jul 10: Added SB Cutscene 3, and made a few minor adjustments. Getting closer now: all that's left are the two (?) endings!
9 Aug 10: The two endings are up. That means I'm done, right? I've still got an ace up my sleeve... Please wait a few more days! (laughs)
10 Aug 10: Fixed a few SB and other issues. Decided to take the pre-Kiai spinner out of Squeezin' (which reminds me, I need to deactivate Kiai at the end of the song). If all goes according to plan, this should be in Pending by Friday.
13 Aug 10: Make that Saturday, or even Sunday. I'm done with pretty much everything, but I'd like to sit on it for a few days. If anything seems off about the storyboard, let me know either by PM or in the Off-Topic thread (of course, if anything's wrong with the map itself, let me know in this thread). Just a few minor touches, like sound effects, to go.
14 Aug 10: Due to my misunderstanding of m980 earlier, Choppin' no longer uses the pattern from iNiS980 during the instrumental break. Oh, and sound effects are in; I'll probably recompress the .png files later tonight per MetalMario201's suggestions in-chat.
5 Sep 10: Almost entirely remapped after conversations with m980 regarding what "authentic" means. No hitsounds yet, and I'll still need to do some compressing in the audio and picture section. Also, there is now a CtB skin, for those who care. It's based off of this song's origin, the children's cartoon VeggieTales.
6 Sep 10: More secret m980 modding.
7 Sep 10 AM: Hitsounds and more editing.
7 Sep 10 PM: Moved to Pending
8 Sep 10 AM: A few SB things, so that the Skip button doesn't cover the "A GIGANTIC CLICHE METEOR" text.
8 Sep 10 PM: 0_o's fixes.
15 Sep 10: WikiLeon's fixes. Some SB assets have been changed; I no longer make blunt references to my past maps in Cutscene 2 (they're now subtle references in Cutscene 3).
17 Sep 10: Changed an SB asset and altered the first part of the bridge in [Veggin'] to not be similar to [iNiS980].
19 Sep 10 AM: NotShinta's changes. Changed bridge again.
19 Sep 10 PM: m980's, WikiLeon's, and wmfchris' changes. Some storyboard optimizing. Should be making a few file changes over the next week, when I have time.
16 Oct 10 A: Hardcoded some of the break-time images to lower the SB Load. The ending doesn't have this yet, but I think unless someone says they're actually experiencing lag, these non-gameplay-relevant sections should be fine. I don't want to put any more in the .osb than I have to.
16 Oct 10 B: Fixed duplicate m980 tag, added 0_o tag.
23 Oct 10: Did a few more reductions. It shouldn't be too bad, now. Also, the skip is now an SB'd object with an invisible overlay (a la Pirates' Island). Let me know if there's any issues.
24 Oct 10: DiamondCrash's fixes. Made an extremely subtle change to the third play section SB.
25 Oct 10: DiamondCrash's fixes, again.
16 Nov 10: Bump.