Resurrection Cup 2024 Results

Phreel

How did Serenity come to life?

Yumeyo

If I remember correctly it was your idea that a mascot would be good to have for ResCup. You gave me a few starting points, and the rest was basically up to me, I was given full creative freedom about her.

Phreel

What was your main inspiration for her?

Yumeyo

I always loved the character designs and style of gacha games, mostly Honkai, or Genshin, so that was definitely a big inspiration! Her angelic elements came from the tournament's name, which let's be real is already very heaven or religion coded. I think she represents the tourney perfectly. She's also a warrior, incorporating the element of competition.

Phreel

Where did the name come from?

Yumeyo

The name came from our brainstorming, and the name also represents the softer side of her personality, but also having a harder edge to it, incorporating her composed nature.

Phreel

So what is her personality?

Yumeyo

Her personality is a bit complex, she is individualistic, bit egoistic, always the center of attention, but still very much poised. But if you peel back the tough shield, she is really sweet, pure, angelic, and a best friend you can always count on, someone that will fight for you no matter what.

Phreel

Were there any challenges?

Yumeyo

Trying to communicate her personality through art was a tough task, as I have made OCs before, but this was my first experience making a character that I knew will be in front of many people, and also representing Resurrection Cup, and the community working behind it.

Phreel

What does Serenity represent about Resurrection Cup?

Yumeyo

For me, she is meant to represent how individuals come together to create something amazing for the community. So many talented artists come together to guarantee the best experience for attendees, and Serenity is meant to represent the individualism that with time and friendship forges into an amazing team-effort, creating a creative space for everyone while working towards the same goal.

Also in my opinion, a mascot for a tournament with so many custom songs is a really useful thing, as it makes a great starting point for custom map backgrounds, jacket art etc.

Phreel

What was your initial thought about having more than 20 original songs to do pooling with?

Alvearia

I was surprised the most with the number of composers we were able to invite. When we had 5, 7, 10, I thought it's already too much and would require a lot of work to organize, but seeing more than 20 insanely talented people absolutely blew my mind. Each artist being unique with their genres and mixes, they still provided Resurrection Cup with astonishing songs that you would want to listen to on repeat. I'd say, my first initial thoughts were amazement and impatience to start the work on those projects.

Luminous Sky

While I was happy that we had lots of original songs, I knew these songs would hardly be the only custom maps we would end up with. Lo and behold, we had a total of 91 custom maps. 91!!

That's an astonishingly large amount of customs, and with our policy of trying not to reject a map due to slot-fitting reasons, so long as the map itself is of acceptable quality, I knew pooling, or moreso the lack of it, especially in later stages, would make testing all skillsets representing many genres and maintaining a similar difficulty across all maps in a pool quite the challenge.

Regardless, I tried my best to cover missing skillsets as best as I could, sort of killing slot-pooling because of this, but only when necessary, like having a low BPM flow aim FM1 in Finals using Prayer for example.

Phreel

Was it difficult managing all those custom maps and songs?

Alvearia

Managing around 90 original custom maps sounds like a really tough task to accomplish – but thanks to main host's/Phreel's organization plans, selecting small group of knowledgeable people to be a part of a Quality Assurance Team and dividing all mappers by divisions was a really smart move to do, and mostly by that, we finished this job successfully. But, nonetheless, there's plenty of room for improvement, overall quality of pools, which our team, of course, will try their absolute best to achieve in the next iteration.

Luminous Sky

Contrary to my initial expectations, I didn't find managing the custom maps and songs all that difficult, and even sometimes intruded into threads of maps assigned to other members of the mappool Quality Assurance Team because I felt I had to get a decent idea of what the maps are like and not just trust them to fit the norms of a slot or descriptions others give me, or we would get another aim FM2 incident like in Quarterfinals.

There was also a period of time where I was really sick for like 2-3 weeks and others rechecked a couple maps after I initially requested some changes to them, but felt unable to offer great feedback due to my health. I'm very thankful for that. So, yeah, overall, it wasn't that difficult, but while I of course love how many artists and mappers we gathered for this tourney, I would've still preferred a little fewer customs overall for higher player enjoyment as well.

Phreel

How would you describe your experience with the custom mappers of the tournament?

Alvearia

From my side I would not say there were any issues, at least in my division – all mappers delivered really high-quality maps within the given deadlines, and even if there was need to apply some mods or generally buff/nerf sections, they tried their best to make it done as fast as possible while keeping the quality level. If you ask my view on all 90 customs, I think every map found their fans, as for players that will replay them from time to time and wish to see them in ranked section, and as for other poolers in the community that would like to use ResCup customs in their tournaments.

Phreel

How would you describe your experience in short with the composers and illustrators of ResCup 2024 that you worked or interacted with this year?

Krimek

Resurrection Cup has grown significantly in terms of team size and staff members. The number of custom songs tripled from last year, leading to an increase in song covers and jacket artworks. Despite this, the team remained motivated and positive. We faced challenges like ensuring genre diversity and managing mapper and designer capacities, but we overcame them. The outcome is something we're all proud of. Personally, I've made many friends across different areas, which I find very valuable.

Xyris

From what I've seen both composers and illustrators had a strong work ethic; I was able to see the passion they put into their work. Composers were punctual, on time, and the illustrators accommodated for their songs with great quality. At the end, I was able to form many connections with the composers and illustrators alike with the friendly atmosphere at ResCup.

Phreel

Krimek, what inspired you to create "Lunaria" for this year's tournament, and how was your experience incorporating vocals for the first time?

Krimek

You encouraged me to collaborate with a vocalist, michiri9, which was both challenging and rewarding. Initially, my song wasn't suitable for vocals, so I started over. After sharing several short WIPs with michiri9, we chose what became Lunaria, inspired by M2U & Guriri. I wanted to create a song suitable for a singer, something ResCup hadn't seen before—traditional yet diverse and lively, with a small but deep story.

The idea was a love story symbolized by a flower, told like a fairy tale with a thought-provoking ending. The simple melodies left room for vocals, and the technical drop made it exciting for mapping. Mixing and mastering vocals was a new challenge, but with online research and feedback from other artists, it worked out great.

Phreel

How would you describe your musical style, and how do you think it complements the theme of ResCup 2024?

Krimek

I would describe my style as diverse, heavily influenced by rhythm game songs, EDM and doujin artists. My goal is to stay true to my sound while exploring various genres. I want to create music that is also enjoyable for both mappers and players in osu!. I think that every artist has their own vision for the music they want to create, which is exactly how art should be. This diversity of approaches, combined with the variety of talented artists in ResCup, makes the tournament special.

Phreel

Which artists or composers do you draw inspiration from, and how have they influenced your approach to creating custom songs for osu! tournaments?

Krimek

There are many artists who inspire me, even if they're not my favorites. Their work still offers new perspectives, which is crucial for broadening your horizons. My major idols are definitely Taishi, Supire and Camellia. Taishi is a master of atmosphere and storytelling, Supire is a rhythm and sound design genius, and Camellia... well, you already know why.

I draw inspiration from these three and try to incorporate their strengths into my songs. In other words: I try to learn from them and improve those areas in my songs. They've also become part of the osu! community, and their music is well-loved. How it influences my approach to creating custom song for osu! tournaments? If you create innovative music with exciting rhythms, you already have a great foundation for a custom tournament song.

Phreel

What was the main reason to take a detour from the usual osu!(lazer) streaming overlay?

Hoaq

Customizability. The community would agree as well. osu!(lazer) is cool and really easy to setup, but at the same time near impossible to customize, even if you understand its codebase.

[Boy]DaLat

So I started developing overlays with the aim to provide a more customized, personalized overlay for each tournament. I believe that there are many potentials to how we could improve the default layout.

Phreel

What were your biggest fears or concerns while developing the overlay? Was it a difficult transition?

Hoaq

Totally. Using 3rd-party tools is always like living on the edge. In the past, each time osu! (more specifically the cutting-edge release) gets updated, our custom overlay would stop working, unless the tool we use to run the overlay gets updated as well.

[Boy]DaLat

I would say transitioning from osu!(lazer) to a custom overlay might need a little bit of work. Each overlay has its own set of defined workflows, comparing to the standardized flow of osu!(lazer). Streamers, to some extent, need to be introduced to a different workflow, user experience, etc, which might take a while to adapt to.

At first, developing overlays is pretty much trivial: you read the state from tosumemory, compare changes, and update the state on the UI. But when I started to scale things up, for example, when I have to add more custom state or more interactions, I need to change my way of thinking over and over again, because things might break miserably if I do not engineering thoroughly.

That is why when I was asked to add feature abcdxyz to the overlay, during the production of the tournament, I got really upset because now I had to expand the structure of the overlay in such a short amount of time to keep up with the matches.

Phreel

Did you take inspiration for the aesthetics of the overlay? If yes, from where and what inspired you the most?

Hoaq

Saying we didn't would be a blatant lie. Learning from other tournaments (osu! or any other esports) is our go-to solution. There aren't any tournament overlays that really gave us the direction for our overlay.

[Boy]DaLat

Speaking of the layout, in fact, I mainly took inspirations from Corsace. For the aesthetic, I'm mostly influenced by the design of Google's Material UI, specifically Android 12's Material You. If you look at the initial prototype design of ResCup overlay, you will notice a heavy resemblance from it. I'm trying to switch to a different style at the moment, which is brutalism. Maybe it will appear in my future overlays.

Phreel

Do you see the community fully switching to custom overlay solutions from osu!(lazer) for tournament streaming?

Hoaq

Probably no. Transitioning to custom tournament overlay means that you will need someone with coding knowledge (HTML, CSS and JavaScript at minimum). Not many tournaments have voluntary staff that can also deal with the mess of coding what essentially is a static website. But some tournaments do, and they try to go for the best look that suits their tournament's design.

[Boy]DaLat

Despite being an overlay developer for 4 years, I am pretty sure that the community will not be switching fully to tosumemory overlays anytime soon in the future. osu!(lazer) is a native, highly maintained, fully tested, easy-to-set-up streaming client. Even without the highly customizable experience of tosumemory overlays, it is the de facto, the one to go for when you first think of organizing a tournament.

Tosumemory overlays are great, but for it to have the native-like experience of osu!(lazer) will need a lot of efforts. Each one has its own pros and cons respectively so it is best to choose which kind of client you want based on your needs, not to be biased by the majority.