Steam Next Fest: June 2024 Edition

We are happy to announce our participation at Steam Next Fest: June 2024!

Check out our Next Fest Demo!

We have been putting a lot of work into polishing things and getting ready for Next Fest, and are proud to be featured in the official Next Fest Trailer. This is a huge milestone for us and you can help us by wishlisting and telling your friends!

Don’t miss our live-stream events!

• Saturday at 22:00 CEST
• Sunday at 18:00 CEST

Join us as we showcase Beats of Betrayal. You’ll get a sneak peek at upcoming content, gameplay, behind-the-scenes insights, and a chance to chat with us!

Content and Feature Update

Hey everyone, we’re back! The flu hit us hard and kept us down for a bit, but we have not been lazy. We’re excited to show you some of the cool stuff we’ve been working on since our last update!

Mallory

Meet our new character, Mallory! She’s burning up the scene with her fire-based skills that you might want to play around with. We’re still working on her abilities and special attack, but we think she will ignite your gameplay experience.

The Mansion

We’re hard at work on our fourth area, the mansion. While we’re not quite ready to reveal the area boss just yet, we’re excited to share a teaser soon. In the meantime, check out some fresh gameplay footage! We’ve added more rooms and decoration, new enemies, and a fitting sountrack. This haunted place will be part of the Early-Access version!

Slime Boss

To help players get familiar with the red attack, we’ve added a new boss – one that’s a real classic. You can now face this boss in the tutorial of the demo. It’s not a huge challenge, but it’s perfect for getting you comfortable with the controls. Give it a try and see how you do!

Aim Marker

Some players mentioned they had trouble figuring out which enemy they were targeting when they pressed the aim button. To make things easier, we’ve added a marker to clearly indicate your target, helping you navigate those tricky situations more smoothly!

Story and Tutorial

We’re currently fine-tuning the tutorial and laying the groundwork for our story mode. Throughout Early-Access, we will add all the remaining stages and characters to rogue mode, so we can work on and finish story mode. The tutorial now features a glimpse of what to expect playing through the future story mode.

Animated Controls

We’ve added some cool new control animations! Instead of hitting you with a ton of dialogue right at the start, we’ve packed the key info into these short, fun animations. A few of them turned out pretty amusing, and we think they do a great job of getting the point across while making the tutorial more enjoyable.

Next Up is Next Fest

We’re currently putting the finishing touches on Beats of Betrayal to participate at Next Fest! To make everything run smoothly we are fixing as many issues and bugs as possible. Check it out soon:

-> Steam Next Fest: June 2024 <-

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more updates!

Steam Demo Release

We are thrilled to announce that Beats of Betrayal is now available on Steam!

Ready for a challenge?

To beat the demo you will have to beat both of the two stages in succession! Choose your skills wisely, as a good selection will be neccessary to beat the higher difficulties. Submit your final result onto the global score list and try to beat our scores!

Main Highlights

• Clear both stages in succession to beat the game
• Choose your skills wisely as you keep them for the difficult second stage
• Total result overview with victory tunes for each character and mini-game
• Critical combo system
• New and improved controls

More Changes

• Added inventory and status overview
• New behavior for enemies and companions
• Enemies aim smarter with some evil shots up their sleeves
• Auto-targeting drains your energy now
• New temple and taurus boss animations
• Added and improved lots of sound effects
• Tutorial additions and polishing
• Tons of tiny changes and bug fixes

Online/Offline

• Optionally enable it in the new startup screen
• Submit scores to compete with others
• Brag about it on Discord

This is a big milestone for us, and for the game, as we can now continue working on new stages and bosses, now that the main polishing for the demo is complete. We still have some ideas up our sleeves that we hope to surprise you with later this year!

If you have any thoughts or feedback, we would love to hear about it on our Discord!

Thank you for your support, especially those who already played last week!

February Update

Next Demo Release Date

Friday, 23rd of February, 2024

We aim to release the next public demo on 2024/02/23, and preparations so far are going smoothly. As you might know, we plan on submitting Beats of Betrayal to the “Steam Next Fest: June 2024”. The demo should be considered a “test run” for the version we want to upload for the Next Fest. To get into the mood for the demo, we want to give you a little peek into what you can expect from it this month.

Multiple Stage Runs

In our previous demo versions the game ended after one stage. From now on your run will continue until you either die or you complete all stages. This means you keep all your skills for the whole run, so choose wisely! In between stages there are ways to get stronger and modify your skills. For example you can spend your beatcoins on permanent upgrades. The stages that are currently available are the forest and the temple.

Scrolls

Within stages you can find “scrolls” in treasure chests. Between stages you can spend these scrolls in two ways:

1. “Enhance” one of your skills, making it stronger in general.
2. “Transform” one of your skills into a completely new skill.

When transforming, the new skill will always be one from another character’s deck. This allows you to create hybrid builds by combining skills from different characters. For example: You play as Bob and you picked up the skill “Power” twice in the first stage. Between stages you might have the opportunity to transform your Power skill into Alice’s skill “Ricochet”. This would make it as if you picked up Ricochet twice instead of Power.

Critical Combo Meter

It was suggested in the Discord, that some kind of combo mechanic would be neat. We listened and tried to work something in, which now became the critical combo meter. This means: The better you keep your combo, the higher your critical hit chance becomes! There is a maximum critical hit chance, which you can raise by spending beatcoins in between stages.

Steam Store Page

We are finally officially Steamworks Partners, so we are currently very busy with creating our store page. There are only few assets missing until we can submit the page for reviewing. We will soon have to create an official trailer as well! Getting the game to Steam was a goal from the start and to finally watch this become reality is very exciting!

… and more!

There is a lot more going on in the background, for example these cute robot enemies.

We are working on the third & fourth stage, as well as making enemies and bosses more engaging while keeping in mind to regularly implement small fixes. Additionally there are some preparations needed for the Steam Next Fest in regards to marketing assets and deadlines to keep. For now everything is going well and we are looking forward to presenting the game at the festival.

Thats all for today, stay tuned!

October Update

The year is almost over and a lot has happened around the game. Of course, there is still a lot of work to be done and we would like to take this opportunity to let you know what we are currently working on and what our plans are for the coming year.

Roadmap

Next Fest
Our next “big” goal would be to participate in a Steam Next Fest with a demo version of ‘Beats of Betrayal’. We are currently going through the Steam on-boarding process. Exactly when we will be able to participate in a Next Fest depends on how long it takes for our tax and bank information to be verified.

Early Access
After generating a little more buzz around the game, it will be time to release the game on Steam Early Access. We plan to do this within the next year and have a major content update ready for that occasion.

Release
The actual release of the game will probably be about a year after the early access. Our vision for the final game includes more stages, enemies, characters and skills, and runs where you keep your skills across multiple stages. We are also thinking about things like an adventure mode or earning medals in challenges, although these are just ideas in our notebook right now.

New Demo
We are currently taking all the feedback from Gamescom and our trusty Discord community and implementing anything we feel will improve the game. There is also some polishing going on that may not be obvious to the player at first glance.

Sight Map

In the past, enemies would sometimes move to hard to reach areas. Since some players like to clear the whole stage, this was a bit unfortunate. To solve this problem, we have been working on calculating sight maps on the fly. This allows the enemy to know which parts of a room are difficult for the player to reach, so they can avoid them. However, this also means that they are more likely to hit you with their bullets. How unfair! We look forward to our enemies hunting you more efficiently from now on.

Behavior Tree

We love smart enemies. However, our current enemies are all handcrafted, so their behavior is not as complex as we would like. To address this, we have been working on a behavior tree system that is designed to be extensible and allows us to reuse certain behaviors, such as enemies fleeing when their health is low. In the future, we can take this behavior even further by having enemies try to get close to a healing enemy to recover. How unfair! You can see a behavior tree in action in the preview below.

This also means we are rewriting and refining the behavior of current enemies.
Check out our classic companion mimic being powered by a behavior tree!

New Stage Teaser

Are you afraid of what is lurking in the dark?
This stage will surely test your courage!

Gamescom, Free Demo, Studio, YouTube

Gamescom 2023 Review

The Gamescom 2023 is over and it was a real blast! Even though the event took a lot of energy, we are so thankful that we had the opportunity to present ‘Beats of Betrayal’ publicly and connect with interested players. We are especially happy about all the people that joined our Discord server to stay in touch, play the demo and give us feedback to help us give the game the polish it deserves.
Thank you for the support, we’re glad to have you!

Free demo in Discord

You read that right: There is a public demo version available for free right now!
To play, all you have to do is join our Discord server, visit the download channel and click the link.

Join our Discord server here: https://beatsofbetrayal.com/discord

The demo version includes two game modes, three difficulties, two stages, three playable characters and 36 skills. This playtest ends on October 9th 2023.

Games2Beat Studio

We are finally officially a two person company! Next to our official legal company name we were able to pick a name for commercial representation and settled on ‘Games2Beat Studio’. This took a while but this means we are one step closer to getting that Steam store page.

YouTube Channel

We created a new YouTube-Channel for the studio, for which we have some future plans. For now we settled on uploading gameplay footage of a complete forest stage run, to showcase some of the current state of the game. I recorded this very recently while playing the demo version that is available on the Discord server.

As you can see, these are exciting times for us and the game. There is a lot to be done, we have so many plans for so many things, but most importantly we are looking forward to seeing the whole project coming together.

This is all for now, thank you for reading!

Gamescom 2023

We have the opportunity to present ‘Beats of Betrayal’ at this years gamescom 2023 in Cologne, Germany! This is very exciting so we went ahead and did a lot of artworks and designs for print-media to be fully prepared for our time there.

For this event we have something really special in store for you: We got our hands on two “Vewlix Diamond” arcade cabinets, which will run ‘Beats of Betrayal’ at the convention! The artworks I mentioned earlier are in part for these cabinets, for example I created an instruction panel to place just above the controllers so you can always look up the button mapping.

To find us on the gamescom fairgrounds, enter hall 10 and get to the “retro area”. In the hall plan below you can see the area in orange.

Until the convention starts there is still much to do, so we will go back to work…
Visit us at the gamescom 2023 in Cologne between August 23rd and August 28th!

This is all for now, thank you for reading!

State of the game

Hi, this is Flo, one of the developers of Beats of Betrayal.

I want to start this post off by saying that the game is evolving at a very satisfying rate! That is mainly because my new job allows me to spend more time on it, which I enjoy very much. Also we have a serious deadline for a playable version coming up, I will make another post about that. For now I want to talk about the current state of the game as it is, and what content we want to implement for that playable version.

Play Mode

The game runs in sort of an Arcade-/Rogue-like mode. In Arcade mode you insert credits which are used to start the game and optionally get used up to continue after you die, resetting the score, just like in a real coin operated game. You can either die from damage or when the timer runs out, however defeating enemies and progressing through the stage adds bonus time. Upon defeating the stage boss the player can progress to the next stage. The goal of the game is getting the highest score possible. You earn points by defeating enemies and playing well, and at the end of each stage there is a result screen that shows your final grade for the stage.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the player can chose one of currently three playable characters (in this case “Bob”), and the player also has some difficulty settings. You can choose from one out of four difficulties (Normal, Hard, Nightmare, Betrayal) to make the game harder.

Control schemes

You can choose from three different options: “Beginner”, “Single” and “Double”. To attack, you have two buttons, the kick drum and the snare drum, which must be pressed according to the rhythm of the soundtrack. In the past we required the player to control both buttons, however moving the player and taking care of hitting the buttons to the beat proved to be very challenging for various play testers, especially those with no previous experience in rhythm-games. This is why we introduced the “Beginner” mode which only requires holding down the buttons, and the “Single” mode which only requires pressing to the kick beat.

Stages

As of right now, the game includes three stages. Each with a unique soundtrack, enemies, boss and obviously different scenery. These are the forest, the city, and the temple. We try to make it so each stage offers a slightly different play style. Also these stages are randomly generated which means that each time you enter the stage, the layout will most likely be completely different.

Screenshots from the three stages currently available in the game

Power Ups

When you enter a stage, you will have zero units of the currency we called “Beatcoin”. Defeating enemies and picking up treasure chests will provide you with more coins to loot. There are two ways to spend those for power-ups. Either by opening one of the ability chests that are scattered throughout the stage, or by visiting the shop. In each stage you will find entrances to that stages shop. It will have three different power-ups to offer at a time, which are also split into three categories. Also you have the option to re-roll the selection the shop has to offer.

Power-ups usually appear in stacks, so you will pick up multiple instances of the same power up at once. This is because the power ups have a finite life-time: after a certain amount of time one instance of the power-up will disappear. If you have none left, you will no longer have the bonuses it provided. It might be wise to save some money first and stack up on power ups in the second half of the stage, so you hopefully have some power ups left when you enter the stage’s boss fight.

Characters

There are different characters to choose from, each with a completely unique skill set and a unique action ability. To provide the character’s skill set, we made the game in a way that completely swaps out the pool of power-ups that can appear in chests and the shop, depending on what character you chose. That way the vampire character can get “companion bats” (see video above) while a mage-type character might have some ice spells in store for example.

Playable version

To “complete” the next playable version, we want to give all three areas their finishing touches, rework some of the characters power-up options, and make a lot of comfort changes (the menu is missing some information for example). Also there is a game mechanic that we have yet to introduce to the game, which are “perks”. In the future we plan it so after each stage the player can spend the coins he saved by not buying power ups on perks, which provide them with a permanent bonus for the duration of the run. This will be a new strategic element in the game, where the player’s decision in the first stage might affect their performance in the third stage.

The end of this post

I wanted to provide the reader with kind of a complete package on what our game currently has to offer. More stages, characters, power-ups, and so on will be created in the future, until we are satisfied with the amount of content. For now we focus on wrapping up that playable version and go at it one step at a time. Thank you for reading!

Greetings,
Flo

Collapsing Waves: Parallax Edition

Stuff has been pretty busy lately, not just with life, but also with building the temple area we always wanted! Trying to look into new opportunities to make our game look better, we settled on the perspective and were pretty happy with it quickly. This is how it looked after a few revisions:

Using fog seemed like a good idea for the background and it was easy to achieve using our existing noise generation code. However we wanted something more dynamic, and a parallax scrolling background was the thing we always talked about but never actually tried, due to doubts if we could make it looking good enough. Turns out it was actually pretty simple! Using the Wave Function Collapse algorithm (WFC, in specific this library) we were able to draw a small texture and get a dynamically assembled randomized looping background ready to use in-game!

On the left, we can see the algorithm’s input and on the right side, we have the output! Pretty nifty, right? Now, it’s all about putting it in the game’s background, we want it behind the fog so we get a feeling of perspective, at least in theory. But we also want to make it move, smoothly of course! Below is our first result we were happy with:

It seemed pretty good and we were especially happy with the fact that we were able to make the background jump a tile downwards with the beat, hiding the fact we actually can’t make it scroll smoothly pixel by pixel! Little did I know that I would find out days later that it gains a much better feeling of depth by making the yellow background light effects not affect the moving tiles in the background, making it look like it is being lit from beneath!

That’s it for today, feel free to tell us if you want to hear about more technical detail. There will probably be more stuff to be read about our tech soon, suggestions welcome! Be sure to leave a comment if you want us to know this site is being read by people other than the spam posting bots as well! >:)