Movement is often not paid enough attention to in maps. It’s not very well understood even by some of the most experienced mappers that use it to its best. People usually have some level of intuitive grasp on movement but don’t have anything outside the established meta language to make sense of it. This meta language is more than useless when you try to make sense of even a half competent camellia map. You can very often point out why certain movements don’t work and make sense of movements on a case by case basis but I don’t think many people have a few universal words or concepts that can be used to make sense of movements in any map. The aim of this is to try to change that and I’m doing that because I think movement is important. Osu more than any current rhythm game is unique in the sense that you can make it much more than just hitting notes. You can make it a dance (while avoiding the mediocre gameplay of dance games). The thing that is responsible in its entirety for this is good movement. Movement is physical. It’s the raw mechanical part of the gameplay. It is you choreographing the dance. Bare in mind this is still going to be quite opinionated and be based on subjective experiences but I’ll try to make it as useful as possible.

The choreography

The choreography is simply the paths you set out for the player to follow during gameplay. It’s made of sliders and notes + the paths between them with sliders containing the path(s) within themselves. This path however is not always followed!

Shortcuts/Lazy playing

The choreographed path isn’t always followed because a more comfortable and/or efficient path exists. I’ve seen stuff like “oh I always play how the mapper intended” or “well it doesn’t feel right cause you’re not playing it how it should be played”. It is not the players fault if they can farm easy exp early game by exploiting NPCs due to an oversight by the game designer. It is similarly not the players fault if the mapper is ignorant of how players play. The amount of shortcuts taken varies depending on player of course. Some try to be safe and follow as rigidly as possible, some try to push all their available mechanical skill as far as possible and take every shortcut they can and some just want to, as I said “play how the mapper intended”. I personally chose movements that are indifferent to lazy and rigid play however shortcuts/lazy playing is still important to pay attention to. You can still control their movements by offering/leaving more comfortable/efficient paths. And with this manipulation create some of the most interesting and complex kinds of feedback.

Feedback

Feedback is what players experience from following or not following the choreography. It’s a large part of what their pen/mouse hand feels. Feedback is mostly prevalent in sliders but you can get it in circles too sometimes. I’ll be focusing on the slider part. A useful way of thinking about the kind of feedback sliders create would be to think of the entire play field as a slab, the sliders being little cut out grooves, the slider ball being a weighty metal ball in those grooves that travels along them and the mouse being a magnetic object that both pulls on the slider ball but is also pulled by the slider ball. It’s just then about incorporating the sensations these behaviors create into your maps to create feedback that expresses the music. Some examples of sensations you’d commonly experience might be a high SV circular slider that covers ⅓ or more of the play field. Your mouse almost gets the same sensation as trying to hold onto a car going around a roundabout. You feel like the slider ball’s being thrown out of the circle and you’re pulling it back. But I also said you experience feedback from not following the choreography. The single most common example of this is short repeat sliders. Depending on their frequency short repeat sliders can be anything like holding a bottle with something rattling around inside it or holding a vibrating phone. Another example might be a moderate speed straight(ish) slider with regular bumps. It’s like rolling something along a bumpy road. This is the single reason why I do not like almost all existing slider art. The feedback is absolute nonsense. You’ll notice I used physical things to explain feedback sensations and I’m going to keep doing it. As I said movement is physical so physical abstractions are useful ideas to make sense of it. Feedback is very good for expressing individual sounds but there are a few things that I’d argue are just as if not even more important than feedback when it comes to movement.

Kinetics

What do I mean when I say kinetics? The motions of the cursor. Particularly:

1. Speed/Velocity: rate of change of position
2. Acceleration/deceleration: rate of change of speed
3. Jerk: rate of change of acceleration (probably won’t see this one as much as the others)

All of these things are what’s known as vectors. They have magnitude and direction.
This part of movement I feel is almost unanimously wrongly approached by mappers.
So I’m not only going to explain the concept but give my idea of how these elements should be handled.

Let’s start with how they’re done wrongly first. Open any map in the editor. Even one you’d consider good. Does not matter who it’s by. Lots of my maps have this issue too I’m not innocent of this either. It just needs to be recent enough. Go to the meat of the map (meaning the drop or the intense part). Now just ghost play to it. Pay attention to the speed and acceleration of the cursor. How does that feel? Flat. It might be fast or it might be slow or maybe moderate but chances are it’s flat. It’s not changing. The speed is the same for almost the entirety of the section. There’s no stimulating accelerations and contrasting/complimenting speeds matching the music. The mapper either just makes every note the same huge jump or uses kinetics on too much of a macro scale for it to have any stimulating presence in the movement. Good kinetics need to be dynamic. They have to be changing. And you do not need to disregard the song to achieve this. Songs present so many opportunities to create dynamic kinetics but there are 2 that I think go completely unutilized almost everywhere. (If you managed to open a map that doesn’t fit this description please post it in a response I wan’t to see it. I know a few myself but I want to see more.)

The metronome and the rhythms. These bois here need more lovin. Let’s start with rhythms.
The rhythms are the arrangements of notes you hear and each of the notes have their own qualities to them. You express these qualities with different sensations of speeds and accelerations. You're very much expressing these musical rhythms with sensational rhythms. And like musical rhythms if you hear them repeating then you should repeat the sensation. Notice I said to repeat the sensation not the pattern (unless you're really trying to hammer home a repetition). You can create the same sensations over and over again with different patterns and in this way create a dance in your movement while retaining aesthetic stimulation and not butchering your creative possibilities by forcing yourself to use copy paste patterns. But the rhythms however are really just playing a supporting role. The star of most drops in songs should be the metronome.

The metronome is really just a special rhythm. It’s the white ticks on the timeline. The ticking in the timing section. It’s what you bop your head to if you really like the song. And similarly unless there’s sounds that stand out in any particular moment in time it should be the core of your movement. You should very much be making the players cursor almost bop to the music. Lots and I mean LOTS of songs have very very pronounced metronomes in their drops. Sometimes even outside the drop too. You don’t need to believe me you just need to listen to your songs. The most common kinetic pattern bops will take on (other patterns of speed and acceleration will fit better for certain songs but this is what you'll find works pretty ok for most songs) is a high speed into rapid deceleration pattern. Just like rhythms unless you're trying to hammer home a repetition you repeat sensations not patterns. And again, unless there are sounds that stand out in any particular moment in time the metronome bops should be the most pronounced sensations in a drop. And when I say pronounced I don't mean it should be the largest movements but the feeling should be the most prominent. The metronome should be the foundation of your movement with all the other rhythms shining through it in playing a supporting role and adding detail to the micro while the metronome stays the macro. The rhythms only leave this support role and take center stage (being the most identifiable and pronounced sensations) when appropriate.

All of this once put together is how you achieve expressive and dynamic movements and is how you make players dance.