BEATalk #1 : How to play BEATris
BEATris is inspired by Tetris
There is no hiding that the game is inspired by one of the classics. Tetris is a successful puzzle game that has been loved for more than 30 years. It requires players to think ahead and strategize their placements through out the gameplay. The Tetris itself has a perfect game design and it’s better to be untouched.
Tetris is also known for its difficulty as it requires the player to think multiple factors in certain amount of time. One misplacement will punish the player throughout the gameplay because it is hard to recover, and this is where BEATris mechanism is different.
BEATris is a rhythm game
In early development, the goal was to make a new form of rhythm game. Don’t get me wrong, I love note-based rhythm games and “Sound Voltex” is one of my favorites. My thought is that the rhythm-genre has its potential to have more variety of mechanisms.
During the process of making prototypes, fusion of Tetris with rhythm-elements had a good feedback. However, as the speed got faster, many mistakes were made and made the game less enjoyable.
Rhythm-genre is enjoyed by it’s rhythmic gameplay with fast or diverse sequences, but the fast block-stacking made players to make more mistakes, leading into unenjoyable gameplay. In order to fix this, the game had to let the player mop up their mistakes more easily and thus BEATSlide was implemented. BEATSlide let’s the player recover from the mistakes by filling in blank spaces.
With BEATSlide, BEATris became much easier than Tetris. This made the game be more focused on the rhythm rather than on strategy elements, such as making garbage blocks in-sync with the music. At this point, the way the game is played is very different from Tetris.
How to play BEATris : Focus on the empty spots.
BEATris is generous to mistakes. Whenever a misplacement is made, the player can push the blocks to fill it in. No complicate techniques are needed. As a developer, my tip would be “Focus on filling the empty spaces with BEATSlide”.Because the game is inspired by Tetris, we have seen many players try to strategize on making 3-line clear rather than filling the line. This may be the side-effect of inspiration games and needs to be handled. However, it is obvious that BEATris has failed to educate concept as the difficulty shifts ridiculously. Therefore, our current priority is to provide more easier level for players to get used to.
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Hello, I am one of the developers of BEATris. I took part as a game designer/programmer. I posted this to share some thoughts with the players. We hope these communications will help the development of the game :)
The first topic is about the core mechanism of BEATris. The gameplay concept has been really hard to deliver to players and is often miscommunicated to. Hope this helps :) Please feel free to talk about it below.
Also, I know that the update is slow at the moment. We will make sure that more contents will updated in the near future.