TotalBS - Interview with Swifter
Surely you've heard of Swifter!? You know... one of the mappers involved in the (as of writing this article) #2 map of all time with a whopping 17,000+ upvotes: Modchart acloudyskye - Somewhere Out There. This map won in the 2021 BeastSaber Mapping Awards for not only the Best ModChart of the Year, but also THE Map of the Year!
Video playthrough of Somewhere Out There
Interview with Swifter
Q: Tell us who you are! Your name, how long you’ve been playing Beat Saber, what got you started playing, what got you started modding, hobbies, etc
A: I'm Swifter! I've been doing stuff in Beat Saber for about 5 years or so now, I started mapping around November 2019. I'm known for my visual art that I make in the game, mostly by the infamous "Somewhere Out There" map that blew up around 3 years ago. But I've done more since and have a lot of passion for making beautiful audio-visual-physical experiences. I am extremely passionate about music, I have a wonderful circle of friends who make some of my favorite music and I've even began producing some myself. In general I would describe myself as a programmer, artist, and producer.
Q: Where else do you participate in the Custom Beat Saber Community? Mapping? Ranking? How long?
A: I'm generally in my little corner of the community making my maps and posting them occasionally. I think a lot of people know me/see me around so in some ways I am connected to the whole community, but I rarely interact inside of larger servers.
Q: When and why did you start coding?
A: You could say I started "scripting" around 2015 with the Minecraft command system; I actually used to be a mapmaker for Minecraft Realms and a few youtubers like PrestonPlayz. A lot of the same logic of those systems still apply to actual languages, but Minecraft's systems were a lot more limiting and verbose. I was scared of "real coding" for a while, but finally the ice was broken in late 2019 by my computer science teacher, I am really thankful that he pushed me out of my comfort zone! Ever since then, I've learned a number of languages such as C#, C++, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, GLSL, HLSL, HTML, and CSS.
The motivation definitely depends on the project, but in general I find it really fun and addicting. There's a lot to it, it's more than just trying to solve a problem, but it's to do so elegantly and concisely. Just like how in writing you can have sentences that are hard to follow, you can have code that is hard to follow. I enjoy expressing myself through my solutions and watching my creations come to life!
Q: What mod(s), websites, tools, etc. have you made or contributed to for the Beat Saber community?
A: I have made a couple of tools for the community, most notably ReMapper, which is a TypeScript framework for manipulating beatmaps. ReMapper was "founded" by me and Fern, a creator who ports most of Aeroluna's mods to the quest version of the game. I wanted to make the techniques I developed during Somewhere Out There more abstracted and accessible, while Fern wanted to guarantee proper syntax in the map data so that mapper's mistakes wouldn't cause problems for modders. It was really the perfect project; Fern is sort of a professional so he basically took on the role of mentoring me during development. Believe it or not, ReMapper also counted toward credits that enabled me to graduate high school. Lots of popular maps in the community are made using ReMapper or some adaptation of the code/ideas from it, which is really fantastic!
Another smaller thing I made was Enlighten, which is just a plugin for ChroMapper that helps create advanced lighting patterns. It allows you to do things like hue shift lighting events, change their saturation, or adjust their brightness. And on top of that, the strength/parameters of those effects can be changed over time!
I'm also working on some tools to lower the barrier to entry for the new mod. I'm preparing a Unity project that will export for all versions of the game necessary, and it provides a bunch of scenes with shader examples. ReMapper will also work with this new mod at launch with some really neat integration with the Unity project. It will allow you to have information about all of your assets while you're typing the code!
Q: For you, what was the most interesting or exciting part behind Extra Sensory I?
A: I only vaguely remember Extra Sensory from the outside, as I joined TotalBS a while after it launched. But it definitely set the foundation for things to come. Ironically, I found Chroma ended up really being the mod to carry things forward. All of the crazy environment maps you see are actually 95% carried by Chroma; it's a common misconception that Noodle is a powerhouse for visuals.
Q: What are some of your favorite modcharts?
A: I have to say Somewhere Out There since that one obviously means a ton to me. Though if I want to talk about the maps that were historically the most important to me and gave me the most inspiration, I have a couple I want to mention.
I think that Rustic's map of "Interluden" and "Human Error" by Xilent (two songs in one map) was really important for me. This was using Mapping Extensions at the time, which was sort of the predecessor to Noodle Extensions. It allowed gameplay objects (usually walls) to be put anywhere, and the way Rustic utilized this extremely simple feature to express this song opened a whole new world for me.
Rustic even passed down the audio for this map to me along with permission to make my own version, which I did, and it got a relatively decent rating!
In general, Rustic was a huge inspiration to me in the early days. Stuff like his map of "The Wall - Buunshin Remix" really opened my eyes to a whole new way music could be expressed.
Coming into the Noodle Extensions era, I think the most influential map to me was "Try" by MitiS, mapped by Remie. At the time, this was the pinnacle of Beat Saber modcharts and it was a song that I really enjoyed. Later on, I took very direct inspiration of it for my own map "Homesick" by MitiS, which was my introduction into making Noodle Extensions maps.
Q: How did you get involved in TotalBS?
A: I first got involved around late 2020. I believe around this time I was sending my charts to Mawntee for playtesting quite regularly, and we became good friends. He was impressed with how I was creating interesting things on my own and decided to send me an invite. It was really cool to see all of the most influential and innovative mappers all in one place, I felt like I was included into something unique and special.
Q: How and where did you contribute to Extra Sensory II?
A: Back when Vivify was revealed internally, I was just focused on trying to make a map for the event as I had no idea how to even use Unity. As I developed my skills though, I slowly took on more things and became more of a project lead.
Mainly I focused on assisting others either through tooling or through direct help. There were multiple members I spent 1 on 1 time with either trying to teach them something, or helping them fix issues. I also was going into people's projects and helping with optimization, visuals, and fixes.
I also created the exporter/template project that actually ties together the workflow. Because we're releasing for 2 versions of unity, there needs to be additional functionality to properly export the assets to the map project. I created a tool such that it's just a couple clicks with a nice interface.
Q: What challenges did you need to overcome personally?
A: You're gonna have to bear with me for this one because I have a lot to say.
Back when Vivify was revealed internally around early 2021, I was not that strong of a programmer. I also didn't really know how to make 3D art that well. What followed was 2-3 years of projects in pursuit of getting my skills to a point I deemed adequite for the event.
During this time, I creating ReMapper, which was a massive contributor to my skill due to the sheer amount of refactoring and iteration I contributed to it. All of the 50+ chroma environments I was making also helped me focus on composition and getting my 3D work to a standard I had hoped for.
But for the longest time I felt quite hopeless when it came to making my own assets in Unity. I kind of refused to use other people's assets because I did not enjoy looking for them and potentially paying for them. I also felt the end result wouldn't be as "me" as it could be, because it would be a kitbash of a bunch of artstyles that I'd like more control and understanding of. Unity was just such an unfamiliar medium, and I wanted to get back into my comfort zone with chroma where I knew how to wrangle the systems and get something close to what I wanted, albeit compromised by the mod's limitations.
I was always hearing the word "shaders" being thrown around, and was basing my expectations pretty much entirely on what I was seeing on ShaderToy, where people were making incredible worlds out of nothing but math.
I had quite a few attempts trying to make interesting things with shaders, but they all ended up going nowhere because I just didn't know what I was doing. I felt really frustrated and hopeless because things were just not clicking for me. I spent all of 2023 trying to crack down on learning shaders, but I was not getting where I wanted to and any tutorials about it just flew over my head.
This came to a peak at summer 2023, where I honestly was in a depressive state and felt like I was going to give up the idea of having a map in the event. I wasn't even convinced that the event would ever happen at that point either.
During the summer I began really looking into raymarching, a simple technique for rendering 3D objects. Now, I should preface that this method is not really a production ready solution, as it is really intensive compared to rasterization (typical rendering using triangles). However, something about this concept finally clicked with me, and along with it, a deep understanding of manipulating visuals with math came into place.
Suddenly I understood spaces and transformations on a much deeper level, it allowed me to create a world entirely through algorithmic means.
It honestly changed the way I view the world and everything around me. It made me much more analytical and it made me break every single thing I'm looking at down into something I could recreate with a procedure. This mindset perpetuated my love for math and computer science, and I began absorbing more and more information just by looking at media on the subject. This breakthrough was the final piece I needed to create something for the event.
The inception of my map took place around October 2023, and the first version of it was done within a few weeks. Ever since then, I've been iterating on it, learning more and more and getting more and more comfortable with the medium. I truly feel like I can create anything I want now!
Q: What challenges did you need to overcome as a team?
A: I feel like one of the biggest downfalls of the team was communication. There was often a lot of downtime because there was simply no game plan. Our internal release date kept moving and there didn't seem to be anything getting done.
It was really hard to motivate people because we were pretty much all getting into this stuff for the first time. We're also all volunteers who aren't being paid. So as a result, the quality of organization and the urgency were just not there. It sort of felt like a group project at school where nobody wanted to do anything, except there never came a point where it was "due tomorrow".
For a really long time the project was in absolute purgatory, I imagine because many people were in a similar place as me where they didn't know how to make things. Though, I think that once I had my breakthrough and was posting progress on my map, it really caused people to pick up the pace and we actually got on track to have something release.
2024 was a lot better in this regard. We were having weekly/biweekly playtests, which helped a lot with urgency and getting things done. I honestly have really enjoyed the productivity we have had this year!
Q: For someone who doesn't know anything about modcharting, where and how do you recommend they get started?
A: First things first, you should spent quite a bit of time making vanilla maps. I find that my experience gets ruined pretty quickly by bad mapping unless the visuals make up for it, which they usually don't. Learn to make somewhat decent, probably super safe maps using the BSMG wiki before you get into modifying the gameplay. I would recommend you make about 10 vanilla maps before you start modcharting.
After that point, there's a bunch of different routes you can go. You could use something like the PropEdit plugin in ChroMapper to kind of experiment with simple effects. After that point, ideally ReMapper is a good entrypoint! You aren't really going to get around having to script things, and I think if you look at a couple maps that use ReMapper as well as it's documentation, you should be able to put something together!
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to share in general?
A: Just as far as my own personal art goes, I still have a lot to say and a lot to make. I can't help but feel a self-imposed sense of guilt that I haven't made anything "big" in quite some time (I'm sure LOTS of artists can resonate with this). The last "big" multi-environment and incredibly ambitious chart I've made was Heliov, about 2 years ago now (that feels insane but anyway). What I've made for EXSII definitely feels like another one of those to me, but also not the most ambitious I could get or the best I can do. I can't wait to make something that truly displays my fiery ambition. I want to blow everyone away. I really hope I can put something like that together, it's a constant struggle, but I'm slowly building up to it.
For any artists who feel this way, like they're constantly chasing the next best thing, please remember that that's the reason we're all still creating. If you ever "peaked", and felt like you truly can't do anything better, then what would you even do at that point? You'd probably feel similar to finishing an amazing game or TV series. The beauty is we will never reach that point. Realistically I'm gonna make whatever I want to make and then I'll immediately be dreaming up whatever comes next.
But guess what, I'll do that until the day I die. I'm really excited to see how far things can be pushed :)
We'd like to thank Swifter for taking the time to answer our questions! Be sure to check out the interviews with the rest of the team!
*This interview was lightly edited for spelling, grammar, formatting, and clarity.