We Said 'Fuck It, We Ball' and Finished Second at Locus 2025

On February 1st, 2025, at 10:16 in the morning, Iyouka sent me a DM.

Iyoukanak join locus? (osu map contest)

Translated: “Want to join Locus?”

My first response was “Huh,” followed by asking where this contest was happening. He said it was an osu! official contest so I went to look for a news post. After looking, I realized it was a BMS-inspired event and started checking the dates to see if I can make it. Iyouka was already asking whether I was joining because if I wasn’t, he was going to pull someone else in. This was a tought call, the deadline was in June and I’m going to juggle between work and this project, Take would need time to finish the song, and at 10:51 I arrived at my extremely detailed assessment of the situation:

MeFuck it we ball

Thirty-five minutes from invitation to commitment and that was how I ended up working on Haiboku no Altra Vita, our entry for Locus 2025.

So What Did I Just Sign Up For?

Locus brought together teams of up to five people to create an original beatmap experience: a song, a full difficulty spread, and visuals. Music, mapping, and graphics would each be evaluated through community voting. The teams also had to stay anonymous until the contest concluded which is a standard procedure for any mapping related contests.

So we needed to make the music, map a full spread, put together the visuals and get the whole thing working as one entry. All while keeping quiet about who was doing it.

Iyouka had already formed a team with Takehirotei and Kardshark. He brought in Apek, also known as Etsuko Marvia (or Noi Komazawa right now), and me to fill the remaining slots. We had some shared history through osu! Malaysia Tournament grand finals tiebreaker projects so this wasn’t five strangers trying to figure each other out from scratch.

We went back and forth for our team name and ended up with Sylenth2 v7.2769420 “Unlimited Synth Works”. Yeah, go figure what each of that number means.

Take handled the composition. Iyouka handled the illustration, design, and storyboard. Apek, Kardshark, and I worked on the mapping, with Take and Iyouka also contributing to some parts of the mapping. The top difficulty was a collaboration between all five of us. I took the Hard, the hitsounds, and the eventual hosting of the set.

There were also jokes immediately after I joined about me doing the storyboard and needing someone to teach me C# again. Take said the only C# he knew was the one in music. That should give you an idea of how the group chat operated, just five guys rambling about random stuff here and there.

Take Cooked, So I Had to Step Up

Take went above and beyond with the composition, and hearing that made me feel like I needed to step up my own work to match it. My approach was to follow the percussion, drums, and genre changes. I wanted the samples to mirror what the song was doing while still giving players adequate feedback when they hit something.

For anyone who plays osu! but hasn’t worked on hitsounds, there’s more choice involved than just putting a random sample on a note. You’re choosing the sound that accompanies an input, where it belongs and how loud it should be against the music. I’d say cliche things like how those choices can change how a section feels to play but to me it’s just a slightly upgraded routine work.

With this song, the sound choices had to move with the music. An orchestral passage and a hardstyle section call for different samples. I used orchestral samples, hardstyle kicks, and other sounds to follow those changes, then worked through their placement and volume.

I described the way I hitsound in the group chat as using a “bootleg DAW”, mainly due to the fact that I use the osu! mania editor for arranging hitsounds. But truth be told there’s a lot of listening, placing samples, adjusting them, and listening again. Except I’m doing it inside a rhythm game’s editor.

Some of those samples came from other beatmaps, some of them from someone else’s samples library. I even joked about people praising the hardstyle kicks without knowing I’d borrowed them from a map. The work was in selecting and applying them to this particular song, and making them useful as feedback across the spread.

By the time people were playing the entry, the hitsounds were getting praises too and made me quite proud of that. Especially considering some of the work on the hitsounds had happened between serving customers and sneaking in time with osu!. I do not work there anymore so no use for snitching about that part, hehe.

Mapping the Hard Was, Unfortunately, Hard

The Hard was my solo difficulty. The main challenge was balancing the song’s changing rhythms with how much of that information a Hard should ask the player to follow. Additionally, this is my first time creating a hard difficulty. I actually researched some of my friend’s hard difficulties to get an idea on how they’re supposed to be made and that actually made a huge difference.

But still, I had to spread things out and simplify the rhythm choices while keeping them connected to the music. The result sat a bit on the higher end for a Hard, but it was more than enough for the contest. At least I think it should be, I’m still lacking experience in that part.

Across the set, though, we had a bigger problem: the jump from the Insane to the top difficulty was too large. We had some gaps in communication and decided to roll with what we had anyway.

That decision would come back in the mapping results. We had individual difficulties we were happy with, but the progression between them still needed work.

The Last Stretch

By late June, we were putting everything together. On June 27th, I was telling the group that the Hard and hitsounds were still left on my side. I was also working as a supervisor at a keyboard store, and finding time for the project around that wasn’t always easy. Sometimes I’d steal time between downtime on serving customers to work on it and place the work on a discord channel to keep track of what I did and constantly update it in between days.

On June 29th, Iyouka asked when I expected to finish when I was still at work. I said around midnight, since the remaining hitsound work was mostly samples and volumes. My shift ended at 10 p.m., and I expected to get home around 10:30.

When I got home, I booted up the computer and finished what needed doing. I thought I’d finish it quickly and get it done after 30 minutes. But after being distracted by a couple things during the night, it ended up taking much longer than that.

At around 1 a.m., the package was ready. I double checked the hitsounds, applied it to the entire set, packaged it up into an .osz and sent it to the group. I asked whether there was anything else I needed to do which was asnwered with a silence and finally take that as a way to signal myself that I could sleep well. Until the voting period, anyway.

Then the next afternoon I realized I’d left my hitsound working difficulty inside the package. So there was one more export, one more check, and an apology to the team. Thankfully there was still time before submission closed. We clutched it at like 1 hour before the submission deadline. I guess we’re never beating the last minute allegations with this one.

Our Team Name Broke the Storyboard

When the official anonymized entries went up at the end of July, we checked ours. We’d finished the entry, but we still needed to make sure the version people were actually downloading worked. I was on my off day during the judging phase started so I had time to check it and noticed a couple issues:

First, there was a storyboard problem. Apek tracked it down to the quotation marks in our team name. The filename handling had left spaces where the quotation marks had been, and the storyboard filename no longer matched what the game expected.

Remember “Unlimited Synth Works”? Yes. Our joke team name had become a debugging task.

Once the filename was fixed, we checked it again and the storyboard loaded. Great. Now surely we could leave it alone so we told the organizers about the issue and they promptly fixed it for the anonymized entries.

Then I played through the official upload again and noticed some sections were muted. I checked the sample files in the folder and played it back and it played…fine? This doesn’t make sense? Why would a perfectly playable sample not load in osu!?

I then compared the original source files with the files in the anonymized upload. The audio files had been processed to strip metadata, and that had caused a playback issue in-game. The sounds were present in our source package. Something had gone wrong while preparing the public version. After another update using the original submission files, the affected section played properly again.

Between the storyboard filename and the audio files, we’d managed to get technical issues in both the visual and sound parts of the experience. I’m glad we checked the official release instead of assuming our finished package meant everything was fine.

The Countdown

I watched the results livestream on August 17th together with everyone in the team in our group chat.

Originally, I didn’t expect us to win. Then the countdown reached the top ten, and with every entry that appeared, my heartbeat got noticeably faster. Ours still hadn’t shown up. Are we actually winning? Did we beat the other entries?

Top five was the point where the group chat started losing it. That meant we were among the winning entries. We were getting the title. We were getting the badge. Take was keyboard smashing, and I was shouting about us making the top five in chat and in the VC.

Then it kept going. Top four. Top three. At that point my heartbeat was reaching its climax, and eventually we saw it:

Second overall.

Our final results were:

• #2 overall out of 42 entries.
• #1 in graphics.
• #2 in music.
• #12 in mapping.

I was more than happy for us, and I was happy for the actual first-place entry too. Koto Spirit’s Locus of Hexagram was a personal favourite of mine. It followed that BMS-like format really well across the song, mapping, and visuals. Losing to that felt completely fair. And the fact that our song lyrics is basically talking about “Suffering from Successs.” It just makes the entire thing feels canon.

Twelfth in mapping was a bit disappointing but it was also expected. We knew about the difficulty gap. We knew some of the communication could have been better. Those issues were still there even with the other parts of the entry doing so well.

But we’d finished second in an official contest with an entry that started from a random DM. I wasn’t about to be unhappy with that.

Getting the Set Ready for Ranked (slowly)

The contest results didn’t finish the mapping work. Afterward, we started preparing the beatmapset for ranking. I asked around and got SupaV and fieryrage as our BNs and we asked them for input. The main issue we had was the fact that the gap between Insane and Top Diff was too massive that even I, myself was wondering if we are able to add an gap reducing difficulty in between the two.

Originally, we were told against doing so which prompted a veto by DeviousPanda that I totally agree upon. We had some back and forth and ultimately asked peppy (the creator of the game) if we’re allowed to have an exception. He then said it’s fine and we promptly worked on the Expert.

Kardshark and I split the work on it and we finished it in a couple of days. Same thing as before, I applied the hitsounds, checked if there’s anything wrong and uploaded it to the set.

I also essentially remapped the Easy, using Iyouka and Take’s rhythm choices as the basis. The goal was to turn it into an actual Easy difficulty while keeping their musical choices as the starting point as the original Easy diff was…unrankable to put it lightly.

These changes matter when looking back at the entry. The set people can play now includes work we did after judging. It took more mapping, revisions, and a ranking process debate to get there.

On November 21st, 2025, the set reached Ranked. Then came the badge. Something I never expected to get throughout my years being in the community.

The Locus Dinner

After everything, Iyouka invited all of us to have a Locus dinner as a sign of thanks for our participation. We all collectively said yes and we planned it to be on the first day of CF.

We went with hotpot near where I work since I was able to easily book a table there. Joined by us that evening was also a few other prominent figures in the osu! community and we talked a bit about osu! internal works, especially the World Cup.

We had a great time and it’s one of the most memorable thing I’ll always cherish. I’d also remember the fact that I choked myself eating noodles soaked in Mala soup and got my face deep red.

What I Got Out of It

Looking back, what stays with me is how casually the whole thing began.

I checked a contest announcement, checked the dates, said “fuck it we ball,” and got added to a group chat. Now I have a badge, a Mapping Architect title, and I’m closer with each of the people I worked with.

Everyone had their own specialty, and everyone was willing to go beyond their comfort zone. We had communication issues, last-minute work, and an upload that needed fixing, but we also made something I’m happy to have been part of.

I’m proud of my hitsounds. I’m proud that we pulled the entry together. And I’m glad Iyouka sent that DM before finding someone else.

Thirty-five minutes was apparently enough time to make a pretty good decision.

You can play Haiboku no Altra Vita, listen to Takehirotei’s song, or read the official Locus results post.