Community Mentorship Program 2016
Discussion 1: Pressure"Discussions" are Mentorship discord-internal events where Mentors host a public lesson and discussion about a certain topic. This guide is the result of said discussion.
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Introduction
Pressure is the amount of strain you put on players with a pattern. Players have to put in physical effort in order to play your map, the amount of effort someone has to put into playing generally depends on their skill and on your map’s difficulty. While you cannot control the player’s skill you can control the difficulty and pressure within your maps. As an example something that would be very high pressure for a Hard difficulty would probably be considered very low pressure on an Expert difficulty.
Generally speaking there are three kinds of pressures:
Pressure is the amount of strain you put on players with a pattern. Players have to put in physical effort in order to play your map, the amount of effort someone has to put into playing generally depends on their skill and on your map’s difficulty. While you cannot control the player’s skill you can control the difficulty and pressure within your maps. As an example something that would be very high pressure for a Hard difficulty would probably be considered very low pressure on an Expert difficulty.
Generally speaking there are three kinds of pressures:
- Local
- Global
- Relative
Local Pressure
Local refers to the following scenario: a 5.0x spacing jump is harder to play than an 1.0x spacing jump. So local pressure refers to how hard a certain pattern is, if you just take it out of context and don’t look at anything else.
If there’s a certain part in the song you want to emphasise (such as sudden high-pitch notes), you may want to use higher pressure patterns for it to reflect that.
Local refers to the following scenario: a 5.0x spacing jump is harder to play than an 1.0x spacing jump. So local pressure refers to how hard a certain pattern is, if you just take it out of context and don’t look at anything else.
If there’s a certain part in the song you want to emphasise (such as sudden high-pitch notes), you may want to use higher pressure patterns for it to reflect that.
Global Pressure
Global pressure refers to the playfield itself creating pressure:
There are multiple areas on the playfield which are more difficult to play, namely the corners. Assuming right handed players (which should be done since the majority of people is actually right-handed) so while all these patterns look the same, the movements you have to do for each of them are very different because of your hand/wrist positioning. In general all of the corners have high pressure, just some have more than others. Generally the bottom corners are harder to reach with most ways of holding an input device. People in the discussion room mostly found bottom right being the hardest, but a few also argued bottom left is harder, so that seems to be up to the player’s way of holding their input device.
When mapping jumps you can consider global pressure, because this makes jumps from top left to bottom right way harder than jumps from top right to bottom left.
Global pressure refers to the playfield itself creating pressure:
There are multiple areas on the playfield which are more difficult to play, namely the corners. Assuming right handed players (which should be done since the majority of people is actually right-handed) so while all these patterns look the same, the movements you have to do for each of them are very different because of your hand/wrist positioning. In general all of the corners have high pressure, just some have more than others. Generally the bottom corners are harder to reach with most ways of holding an input device. People in the discussion room mostly found bottom right being the hardest, but a few also argued bottom left is harder, so that seems to be up to the player’s way of holding their input device.
When mapping jumps you can consider global pressure, because this makes jumps from top left to bottom right way harder than jumps from top right to bottom left.
Relative Pressure
Lastly, relative pressure is the combination of both: if i have 5 really big jumps in one direction and then end the pattern with a really small jump into the opposite direction, the jump into the opposite direction is going to be harder to play as it requires reading and changing momentum for precise small movements. That’s it for circles. The same concepts apply to sliders as well except that sliders have two different stages of pressure: their head and their tail, since clicking is the most effective way of emphasising something, you may want to avoid placing sliderheads on weaker beats than their ends.
Lastly, relative pressure is the combination of both: if i have 5 really big jumps in one direction and then end the pattern with a really small jump into the opposite direction, the jump into the opposite direction is going to be harder to play as it requires reading and changing momentum for precise small movements. That’s it for circles. The same concepts apply to sliders as well except that sliders have two different stages of pressure: their head and their tail, since clicking is the most effective way of emphasising something, you may want to avoid placing sliderheads on weaker beats than their ends.
Momentum
Momentum plays a part in how difficult and how much pressure a pattern has as well. Easiest to explain these two terms is by writing them:
Obviously these physics also apply to playing osu! so momentum management in mapping means that you are conscious of the amount of momentum your patterns create while placing them. So big jumps or small jumps out of nowhere will be way harder than gradually increasing / decreasing spacing.
Momentum plays a part in how difficult and how much pressure a pattern has as well. Easiest to explain these two terms is by writing them:
- s p a c i n g
- m o m__e_____n__________t_______________u__________________________m
Obviously these physics also apply to playing osu! so momentum management in mapping means that you are conscious of the amount of momentum your patterns create while placing them. So big jumps or small jumps out of nowhere will be way harder than gradually increasing / decreasing spacing.