Quinn Angstrom
[pjd] rambling a bit about beatmap design and why this game is good at it
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I drew drawings because it's easier to explain that way, in the drawings Ill be using a pentagon to represent "a note is here but your brain hasn't parsed which one it is yet"
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9★ テオ (Teo) Extreme Perfect Mega39s NS
first off, here's what gameplay looks like, as a reference
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the playstation buttons are 'press button when this overlaps with the marker'
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the left/right arrows are analog stick flicks
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or holds
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during complex chains, there's enough going on that it would be a nightmare to play if there weren't strict visual rules the game almost always follows (and only doesn't on the hardest of hard content)
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here's some rules that nearly all beatmaps in project diva follow:
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1. Distance between notes is proportional to time between notes
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The actual distance between notes will vary per song but, within a phrase,
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if two notes are twice as far apart, the gap between hitting them is twice as long
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Ouendan is also very good about this and it allows you to see the beat of the music
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the same way that a long gap between DDR steps means a long break between notes
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the stream of notes moves at a consistent speed
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also, notably usually the next one will start somewhere near where the last one ended
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so you don't need to move your eyes as much
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2. Doubles put the notes in a specific order
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this one's a bit harder to explain
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but the red things, where you have to press two buttons at once
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those notes are usually lined up vertically or horizontally with each other
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and if they're vertical, the order, top to bottom, will always be this: 
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and horizontal will always be in this order: 
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and that includes having gaps - OX will put the notes closer together while O+Square will put them a bit further apart
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what this means for the player is that you don't need to be able to parse what symbol each note is when there's a lot of doubles
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if you see this
if you see this
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you can tell just from the vertical spacing that left to right it's tri+sq, sq+X, X+O
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the positioning of the notes alone tells you that immediately
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3. Triples do the same thing but try to fuck with you a bit
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Triples are usually huge and cover like half the screen
Triples are usually huge and cover like half the screen
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which can be hard to see all of, until you realize
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that they follow the same spacing rules as horizontal doubles
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and almost always use one of the same two patterns:
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on the left and 
on on the right
on the left and 
on on the right
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so if you see a big triple, you can tell what it is just by physically where it is on the screen
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4. Long streams of different notes usually spin around the face buttons.
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sometimes there are a whole lot of notes in a row at a steady rhythm, quickly, and they're all different notes
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these 99% of the time follow... the same order as all the other shit above
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triangle square X O, or o x square triangle
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which is just spinning in circles around the face buttons
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you will never see this
you will never see this
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you will always see this
you will always see this
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so you can just look at the first two notes, get your starting position and spin direction
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then spen
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spin
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5. Arrows follow the direction of movement.
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EX plays a bit loose with this one compared to the others but
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if you have a string of buttons going left to right, then an arrow
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it will be a right arrow, because you're moving to the right
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and if there are multiple arrows in a row, they will almost always alternate left and right
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so if you're going right to left and get X O X O (arrow) (arrow) (arrow)
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huge money that the arrows will be left, right, left
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because you're moving left, so the first one is left, and then it'll alternate
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THE RESULT OF ALL THIS IS
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while things look chaotic and super impossible
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after a while you get good at not just specific songs
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but in blind reading other hard songs
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because you learn all of the patterns of how beatmaps are shaped and can just trust the game design to fill in the gaps
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and that is cool
NekoInc, MSPM
It's a good scheme of things