BEET | Devpost

title screen
tutorial play
garden
dialogue

Inspiration

We wanted to explore the intersection of nature, art, and audio by creating a game where the player pieces together parts of a fragmented song to restore balance to the world. The player tends to a magical garden, directly translating into a beautiful, custom music composition.

What it does

BEET is an indie game that combines 2d combat, 2.5d isometric gardening, and music. As players explore the world and discover the story behind the "silence" that has taken over the world, their actions and the magical plants they discover generate unique musical stems and beats.

How we built it

Our team members hand drew the sprites for most of the gameplay elements. The enemies, environment, garden hub, and player models were all created over the course of the hackathon. Additionally, the theme music for each section was composed to match the themes and aesthetic of each area. We built the core game environment using Unity, which allowed us to handle the visual aesthetics and the audio-system integrations. To accelerate our development, we leveraged OpenAI's Codex to write our foundational C# Unity scripts and even generate the code for some custom GUI elements, saving us hours of manual UI setup and logic coding.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was balancing the dual gameplay loops, ensuring the transition between the 2D combat sequences and the 2.5D isometric gardening felt natural and cohesive, preseving the style of the game between these two scenes. Additionally, hand-drawing all the sprites for enemies, the environment, and the garden hub under a hackathon time crunch was a massive undertaking. On the technical side, we had to figure out how to seamlessly integrate our Codex generated scripts and GUI elements with Unity's audio managers so the music reacts to the player's progress.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of the world building and atmosphere we achieved. Blending our hand drawn art, custom theme music, and the narrative about defeating the "silence" brought the game to life in a really unique way. Watching the custom musical compositions build up as the player pieces together the fragmented song through combat and gardening is a highly rewarding experience.

What we learned

We learned how to effectively manage multiple different gameplay perspectives (isometric grids vs. 2D combat) within a single Unity project. We also deepened our understanding of dynamic audio manipulation and discovered how to best leverage generative AI tools like Codex to quickly bridge the gap between our art, music, and game logic without getting bogged down in manual setup.

What's next for BEET

We plan to expand the game's lore, introducing new regions affected by the "silence," along with more complex enemy types and diverse magical plants. We also want to implement a wider array of musical styles and explore a feature where players can compose their own songs in the garden, and generate unique gardens based on the songs that they create. We hope to continue this project and eventually release a full indie game.