Beat And Blade

Welcome to Beat & Blade. Here, every note is a strike, and every combo is a claim to glory. Enter the joust, follow the rhythm, and challenge this week’s champion. The crown awaits a new ruler.

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Champ « About the project » (Markdown)

Inspiration

It started as a Patapon-like, and it brought back all the hours I spent on Guitar Hero World Tour on my Xbox 360. I really like very dynamic gameplay... so I just tried some stuff, and after a while: I wanted the feeling of a medieval joust (two fighters, one crown, a crowd deciding who fights next) compressed into a rhythm game you can play inside a Reddit feed. Illuminated manuscripts set the art direction: every screen is a page from a chronicle being written about your reign.

What it does

Beat & Blade is a rhythm duel: notes fly at your blade, tap them on the beat to strike the boss.

  • The King's Challenge (weekly). One song is the battlefield. Beat the reigning King's score and the crown is yours instantly. Then you write your royal decree, an 80-character taunt that every challenger reads before trying to dethrone you.
  • The people pick the next boss. Players vote in-game between 3 candidate tracks. Every Monday, automated posts crown last week's King (final top 5) and proclaim the community's chosen battlefield, so the subreddit feed is part of the game loop.
  • Campaign & streaks. 11 bosses across 4 difficulties, per-song leaderboards, daily streaks and unlockable court titles.

How I built it

Phaser 3 on Devvit Web (TypeScript, Hono server, Redis). Note charts are generated from the audio itself, and a WebAudio clock keeps judgment purely temporal so desktop and mobile play fair. Two hand-tuned compositions: a horizontal manuscript flow on desktop, and a vertical "puppet duel" on mobile where knight and boss hang from strings above the lanes. The Devvit scheduler drives the Monday coronation and challenge posts. Weekly leaderboards are isolated per week in Redis, so every Monday starts a fresh race for the throne.

Challenges I ran into

The Reddit mobile webview is a short 400x630 frame, so I redesigned combat for it rather than shrinking the desktop view. First load was cut to about a tenth of what it was (WebP everywhere, lazy "bestiary" download with progress shown on a parchment). Keeping notes locked to the music across devices forced a full rework of the chart and audio pipeline. Also: it's my first video game!

What we learned & what's next

Retention isn't a feature, it's a calendar: coronation on Sunday, new boss on Monday, decree drama all week. Next up: per-difficulty rank badges in the armory, a hall of past kings, and community-forged note charts.

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