Song: "Post Shelter" by @inabakumori (ポストシェルター by 稲葉曇)
ID: 96270293
Song download: https://mega.nz/file/PtEwQKKK#0eg-u6i...
Song link: • 稲葉曇『ポストシェルター』Vo. 弦巻マキ

Unfortunately, I had to lie about Endless being the last layout on my channel in 2.1. A lot of my close friends all made solo layouts to end off their time in 2.1, and I truthfully had no plans of doing one for a while. I was too busy with finishing up all of my other projects to start another one. However, something a lot of people in my friend group like to do (That admittedly I started) is drop secret projects out of nowhere. I used to enjoy this, but I really don't anymore. I find it hard to make certain creative decisions sometimes without another person to bounce off of. However, I hid all gd activity on steam and discord every single time I built in this until I revealed it at the end of my previous video. Practically nobody knew about this at all.

On September 12th, I needed a creative break from building Endless and I was mildly stressed out over the whole 2.2 situation. I was listening to a lot of inabakumori's music at the time - particularly this song (This has become one of my favorite songs ever). That night, I wanted to build - but I couldn't bring myself to build Endless - so I just started building this. I made over 30 seconds that night, and I really enjoyed making it, and I enjoyed what I made. That's what started it all. This, until Endless was finished, never became my main project. I just slowly chipped away at it over time, except for this last week, when I put an absurd amount of hours into finishing it just how I wanted it.

The reason I don't build that many solo layouts, despite them being my favorite type of layouts in the game - is that my standards for myself are through the roof. This is how most people are, but when it comes to solo projects that raises the mental stakes to an unprecedented level. While building the chorus buildup, I experienced a lot of frustration due to the increasing quality threshold I was giving myself. I ended up in a lot of calls where I seemed randomly angry for no reason because I was extremely creatively frustrated. After pushing through that section though, I mostly enjoyed building the rest of the gameplay. When I started making the visuals and structuring, I impressed myself with how well I was representing my own creative thoughts. Building gameplay and visuals from the chorus on was an absolute blast. Pushing through those roughly 10s~ of difficult to build gameplay ended up making for my best experience building a solo yet. I never thought I could truly push through my own mental block to finish something by myself of this quality, but I was somehow able to satisfy myself enough to do it.

I referenced everything I could from this song and took all of it's elements into account. I directly took colors and theming from its cover art, and I adapted not only sounds, but the meaning behind the lyrics as well. With that being said, I almost dropped making this due to me getting some lyric representation wrong. I mostly used a general translation for the wording (Which I have linked at the end of this description), which creates some issues. If you don't know, Japanese and English are 2 very different languages, that don't truly perfectly translate to one another. The emotions and sentence structure are completely different. Therefore, I often had to ask a friend that knows the language which words actually translate to certain English words. Whole lines are off in the general translation to help fix sentence structure. After 2.2 got delayed to November though, I decided it would be worth it to redo some stuff and go all out for this. You will better understand the theming and feelings that I tried to bring out with this layout if you view it through a lyrical lens. The only thing I didn't directly adapt was the color of the umbrella, which I took the liberty of making the curtain color since I didn't use the curtains from the cover art.

I think the only main change i would make to this is making the clouds move, I was originally going to do it but I didn't think it was a make-or-break situation. Every day more this layout didn't come out was extra stress that Rob might drop the update at any minute.

I made an LDM toggle for click indicators to help learn/play the level and make it a more fun experience, so I would greatly appreciate if you gave it a try! I worked extremely hard on making sure this was fun to play and hopefully free of bugs.

I don't know when I'm going to make another solo, my standards are very hard to push past, and the amount of effort that goes into something like this is tiring and time consuming. I hope you enjoy this for what it is though.

Lyrics translation link: https://vocaloidlyrics.fandom.com/wik...)

Effort: 10/10
Satisfaction: 10/10