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Castlevania: Cacophony of Incarnation 2016


MindWanderer
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23 hours ago, Supercoolmike said:

been swamped pretty much all of march. Don't know If I missed my drackula bracket. I see that it doesn't end till the 30th. Am I apart of that bracket or did I miss out?

That's the voting period for round 2, so yeah, you missed the submission deadline.

So, so far we have really only one person (PlanarianHugger) express enthusiastic interest in continuing.  Jorito will participate if we do continue, but it sounds like he'd be happier if we didn't.  Gario's only been able to put in a serious effort in one round out of 3.  OA is feeling fatigue.

Looking at the points, only Jorito and the three hero bracket finalists (Gario and whoever loses between OA and wildfire) have a shot at winning the Dracula bracket.  Of those people, none has expressed better than an ambivalent opinion about continuing.

So here are the options I'm thinking of.

  1. We continue as planned.  This would only be if several people changed their minds and expressed interest in this.
  2. We call it and declare either OA or wildfire the winner, based on this round's results.
  3. We abort the last Dracula round and go straight to the final battle.  This would be if, of the participants still in the running, only two people are interested in continuing, and one of those is the winner of the Hero finals.
  4. We wrap this up with a special round that doesn't count towards winning the tournament, but would provide closure.  I'm thinking a collab of some sort; we can work out the details if people want this.  If we go ahead with this, we might or might not do Dracula Round 3; this would be up to the people in that bracket.  We could do these sequentially or concurrently, again based on interest.

Participants, let me know your thoughts!

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I think I'm only good for one more track tops, so I guess that's option 3 or 4 for me.

I do want to point out that I still had (have) a lot of fun with the compo and that I'm a bit sad that it has dwindled a bit after the big initial round. But yeah, for me personally things are a bit hectic atm and finding time and energy for the compo is tough.

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I'm not a participant so you can take or leave my thoughts on the matter if you so choose, but something I noticed in the last compo I ran is that life happens and people fizzle out over time. I had to extend deadlines by days or even a week near the end, and only one person took on any of the added participation opportunities I offered to anyone that lost a round. If it were up to me, I think I would move to wrap things up. Personally, I would go with either 2 or 3, though I do like the idea of 4 if enough people are interested and able to do it. Just some thoughts I had reading MindWanderer's last post, I hope that wasn't viewed as overstepping my bounds or anything.

That said, I did cast my vote for the finals today. It was a real tough call, both Wildfire and OA nailed it. I loved the lyrics Wildfire wrote for her entry and I was really feeling it with OA's track as well. Regardless of the outcome, you guys both win in my book. Well done!

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14 hours ago, FenixDown said:

I'm not a participant so you can take or leave my thoughts on the matter if you so choose, but something I noticed in the last compo I ran is that life happens and people fizzle out over time. I had to extend deadlines by days or even a week near the end, and only one person took on any of the added participation opportunities I offered to anyone that lost a round. If it were up to me, I think I would move to wrap things up. Personally, I would go with either 2 or 3, though I do like the idea of 4 if enough people are interested and able to do it. Just some thoughts I had reading MindWanderer's last post, I hope that wasn't viewed as overstepping my bounds or anything.

Yeah, it's interesting how this has changed over time.  The first GRMRB had 4 rounds plus a losers' bracket, and while several people petered out early, lots of people kept going. The second one had an extra thread for people who lost early to challenge each other, even though there wasn't an official losers' bracket.  But more recent compos seem to show people getting fatigued after even a couple of rounds.  3 rounds seems to be the most reasonable expectation these days.  4 rounds is pushing it.  I think going forward, I'll plan on no more than a 3-round main event and one special conclusion/exhibition round.

Right now, Jorito is solidly winning the Dracula Bracket, and it looks like OA is probably going to win the Hero finals.  If nothing else changes, here's what I'll do.

Tomorrow, when voting closes for both of the current matchups, I'll announce the rules for two final brackets.  One will be the Final Battle, with OA representing Simon Belmont going up against Dracula as embodied in Jorito.  I'm thinking a generous 3-week deadline for this, so they can take their time and not feel rushed or burnt-out.  The second will be open to everyone else, an exhibition round to provide closure.  You can collaborate, and I'll even open it up to folks who haven't been participating up to this point, if they want; if people express interest I'll provide rules for that.

14 hours ago, FenixDown said:

That said, I did cast my vote for the finals today. It was a real tough call, both Wildfire and OA nailed it. I loved the lyrics Wildfire wrote for her entry and I was really feeling it with OA's track as well. Regardless of the outcome, you guys both win in my book. Well done!

I thought it was an especially strong round as well.  I cast my vote for wildfire because I thought her remix flowed better, while OA's seemed a little more awkwardly pasted together, despite having better sound quality.  I'm glad wildfire has been sending her remixes over to the Workshop; I think the concepts and arrangements behind all three were amazing, and I'd love to see them polished up for submission.  Jorito has been doing a fabulous job as well, and I'd love to see some of his ideas fleshed out more fully, too.

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20 minutes ago, MindWanderer said:

Yeah, it's interesting how this has changed over time.  The first GRMRB had 4 rounds plus a losers' bracket, and while several people petered out early, lots of people kept going. The second one had an extra thread for people who lost early to challenge each other, even though there wasn't an official losers' bracket.  But more recent compos seem to show people getting fatigued after even a couple of rounds.  3 rounds seems to be the most reasonable expectation these days.  4 rounds is pushing it.  I think going forward, I'll plan on no more than a 3-round main event and one special conclusion/exhibition round.

What I'm seeing in another community that I've been involved in for over a decade, is that the core members are getting older and as because of that other things take up their time (family and work mostly) than their hobbies. I suspect something similar might be happening here, with people transitioning from college to Real Life™? So  no more abundance of free time and more other commitments that all fight for that small bit of free time. I know for a fact that when I was studying I had a lot more free time and energy than nowadays.

26 minutes ago, MindWanderer said:

 Jorito has been doing a fabulous job as well, and I'd love to see some of his ideas fleshed out more fully, too.

Thanks man! And yes, I have plans to polish up the 3 tracks so far and have them NO'ed by the judges somewhere down the line ;) First gotta polish one more track from the Sigma Fortress compo from last year tho.

Anyway, I'll patiently wait for this round to close and am good with whatever comes out of it.

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On 3/24/2016 at 2:32 PM, wildfire said:

Maybe someday we can get more than one lady to enter a compo!

*Waves hand*

Sorry I haven't been able to contribute to the Dracula bracket. Honestly it was kind of a relief to get knocked out because I've been struggling with school enough as it is. Too bad everyone else seems to have had similar problems...

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12 hours ago, Magnetic Ether said:

*Waves hand*

Sorry I haven't been able to contribute to the Dracula bracket. Honestly it was kind of a relief to get knocked out because I've been struggling with school enough as it is. Too bad everyone else seems to have had similar problems...

Ah shit, I didn't know! 

Hope school doesn't get you too down, I know this time of year can be really stressful with exams.

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All right, the epic conclusion, as promised!

The Final Battle

This battle will be between OA, representing Simon Belmont, and Jorito, representing Dracula. As for the sources:

Epilogue
 
Anyone is welcome to participate in this round.  Current participants should use the same source they've been using all along.  Anyone who wants to join in for just this round may do so; just post the source you'd like to use, using the same rules as the beginning of the tournament, so I can make sure it follows those rules.
 
The other source you'll be remixing your chosen source with is Evergreen.  Your title should use "Evergreen, 1476" as the source name.
 
Again, the deadline is 3 weeks from now: April 20 at 12:00 PDT.
 
Good luck!
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1 minute ago, Jorito said:

I see what you did there. Nice, I like it :)

No bonus points for including more source tracks I guess? :P

That would be up to the voters.  Don't go overboard, and keep it coherent.  I'm reminded of Gario's Magnus Divinicus Chiptunicus from WCRG 1, which I love and is in my daily playlist, but some of the unnecessary stuff he threw in there, like Schala's theme, detracted from the sources he was required to include, which is why it didn't get my vote.  On the other hand, that little nod to Schala's theme is one of the things that makes me love it, so YMMV.

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8 minutes ago, wildfire said:

I don't see what he did there. Was it Castlevania related? I'm not familiar with the storylines...

I'm also not that familiar with the story lines, but by the looks of it he picked a source from every single Castlevania game that's about a protagonist vs. evil boss (Dracula in all of them?), and I find that to be a pretty appropriate theme.

Also a similar theme for the epilogue; the Evergreen has a nice sense of closure and lament in there. Another good source for the epilogue would have been this one I think, but that's mostly IMHO and irrelevant:

(or the original in stead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsnuoPfSLK4)

(gosh, I love that track!)

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8 minutes ago, Jorito said:

I'm also not that familiar with the story lines, but by the looks of it he picked a source from every single Castlevania game that's about a protagonist vs. evil boss (Dracula in all of them?), and I find that to be a pretty appropriate theme.

Yep, I believe it's every Dracula battle theme that doesn't serve a dual purpose (as the theme for walking around the final tower, as a generic boss theme, or as a repurposed stage theme).

There were lots of good choices for the epilogue.  Requiem for the Nameless Victims was also on my short list, as were The Legend of Dracula, March of the Holy Men, Repose of Souls, Portrait of Destiny, and Tractus.  But this was originally going to be the Dracula Round 3 theme; the plan was to have one intro, one boss, and one epilogue theme, and include one from the NES trilogy, one modern, and one other.  And there's no way I wasn't going to include Castlevania III, one of my all-time favorite soundtracks in all VGM.

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On 4/5/2016 at 2:27 PM, Jorito said:

I just went over the sources for the final round and damn, you're not making it easy for us :) These tracks are pretty quirky and mostly consist out of scales, arps and suspense devices, not the melodic content I prefer to work with. Awell, OA has the same challenge so we'll just have to make do ;)

same, it was really tricky picking out sources, but i got my 2 that i think will work pretty well, I'm curious to see what you've chosen. :-)

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