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Thursday, April 16, 2020

Beat Saber 30 Day Challenge

In April, during quarantine, Infinite.cz was so kind and provided me with Oculus Rift. My intention was to use it to play Beat Saber - a rhythm game I longed to play since like forever. I was still recovering from the corona virus at the time but starting the second week in April I was able to start physical activity and that also meant playing Beat Saber for real. While trying to find some information about Beat Saber I landed on Beat Saber's twitter account finding out about a 30 Day Challenge that just started. I wanted to participate and didn't want to post it publicly but on day 3 I decided that maybe I could actually do it because it would keep me committed.

Since I didn't make majority of the videos public on YouTube I decided to create this post with all the videos.

This challenge was actually way more beneficial for me than I expected in all kinds of ways. Since I just started playing Beat Saber you should be able to see some progress. I started playing on Expert so maybe the progress may not be that obvious in my videos. On day 1 I did not expect to pass any song on Expert+. On day 3 I passed 7 different songs on Expert+ thinking that passing any Camellia song on Expert won't ever happen. A week later I had B grade or higher on all the songs but GHOST and Cycle Hit. There is still a lot of room for improvement and I plan on passing all Camellia songs on Expert+ one day.

The challenges also made me discover One Saber Mode. Unlimited Power on Day 2 was quite painful for me. Not only because I struggled with that particular song on any difficulty but also because that strain on my arms was too much. Even though I play other games with my hands/arms I wasn't used for that kind of motion range. It also made me realize that knowing the right trajectory for the sabers to hit notes properly is more important than I initially thought. Thanks to that I learned how to stream which was the primary reason why I was failing Camellia songs.

When trying to Full Combo songs I had to pay more attention to when and how I hit the notes. There were notes I was pretty much missing all the time and this forced me to analyze why and change my play style accordingly. Now I don't have problems with the notes that fly somewhere above my head.

Those are just examples of what I managed to learn or realize and I doubt I would have discovered that without doing this 30 Day Challenge.

Since I was streaming and uploading at least one video per day and I wanted the videos to be watchable and not making other people motion sick. That's how I ended up playing around with avatars and mixed reality capture. I used LIV for both and thanks to Infinite.cz again, I was able to get my hands on Kinect camera. I didn't manage to calibrate the camera the way I wanted but considering my play area the result was actually good. As for avatars, I got curious about how to create an avatar and how to import it into mixed reality recording. I learned about VRoid Studio and installed Blender for modelling and Unity for creating a game object and I'm considering creating more 3d content in the near future. I created an avatar for me and my flatmate and I have to say that I am glad I did this. This 30 day challenge gave me something to do and I wanted to do it. For years I've been depressed and not having the motivation to do anything. Not even playing games I liked and this changed that.

Thank you Beat Games Studio for Beat Saber and this challenge. For that one month I found the will to live because there was something I was looking forward to and everything became easier because of that and I hope it will stay that way. That I alone will be able to find more challenges for myself and keep me busy and keep depression at bay.

Here are the 30 videos I recorded. I'm not proud of some but completing this challenge felt rewarding.

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