NotITG

(Here's some really rough writing!)

What is "Not In the Groove"? 

Technically, everything that is not ITG is "Not ITG", despite NotITG being a thing on its own.  But specifically, NotITG, or nITG is ITG... but "not" exactly.  So what is ITG, so we can make that distinction?

ITG is essentially NotDDR.  Uh oh.

And DDR is Dance Dance Revolution, a game published by Konami that involves the player watching a scrolling playfield of arrows approach a set of receptors, and the player then stepping on the corresponding arrows when they reach said receptors.  A classic rhythm game.

OK, now we can work backwards.

ITG is Not DDR, in that the same concept of arrows approaching receptors that need to be hit by the player stepping on the pad on the ground.  However, the majority of the content is community curated instead of large company published.  That means that people have the capability to create their own charts to songs, with pretty much complete freedom on that front™️.  At the same time, to be considered a 'competent' file, there's a separate level of charting rhetoric that goes into ITG files in general that focuses on choreographing each arrow to a more intuitive, guaranteed pattern where you can always™️ alternate your feet to hit the patterns comfortably™️.  Whereas DDR generally foregoes these kinds of conventions and many charts require a little bit of extra studying to figure out how best you'd want to hit the arrows in a given song.

In both ITG and DDR, there are specific modifiers that players can turn on to either.... modify the way the playfield scrolls, or do some wacky things.  In DDR, there's classic scroll speed changes, along with some more niche ones, such as accel/decel (notes accelerate and decelerate towards the receptors), and hidden/sudden (notes fade in/out at a certain point on the playfield.)  ITG expanded on this with a ton of extra modifiers, some that were very aestheticly oriented, such as perspective mods (make it look like the notes are scrolling through a 3d plane instead of a flat screen), drunk/tipsy (the columns sway horizontally and vertically as if inebriated), and a bunch of other modifiers that would be a little too much to list out.

Somewhere along the line in the ITG sphere, people decided to script these mods to activate and deactivate specifically to accent and go along with certain songs.  And thus the modfile was born.  Skip a few more years, and people figured that you could embed lua scripts in the xml structure of a background/foreground file and further do more granular things with mods.  Or just make the playfields spin and the other screen elements float around the screen randomly.  Due to the natuire of ITG as a program, modwriters were able to get really funky with their visualizations.  But there were still a lot of drawbacks, as ITG wasn't coded with this kind of thing in mind, and it was only through a ton of workarounds and janky hacks that a lot of things were possible through ITG modfiles.

nITG is ITG with a ton of extra functionality and capabilities added in order to better allow people to express themselves and create modfiles.  nITG is ITG, but "not" exactly.

I'm a nITG modder.  I make arrows do funny things, that make players need to stretch their brains in order to parse and play properly.

Here's a lot of the songs that I modded, in a youtube playlist - nITG Portfolio
Here's a huge modfile project that I helped work on - MBC3 Playlist

The plan is to eventually write thoughts and stuff about each of the things I've worked on