A Big Risk for The Beat
I'm taking a big risk with this release of The Beat and I'm hoping you'll come with me.
Over the last two years I have rewritten the game code from scratch and today I am ready to share it!
This new version is better in some ways, just some of the improvements include:
better user interface
game no longer needs an internet connection
gamepad and keyboard remapping
massively simplified codebase for future updates
But it is a case of ten steps forward, five steps backwards.
Some features such as Brofinder are missing from the new version. In fact, the new version is extremely "no frills" and lacks a lot of polish (such as tutorials and shortcuts between calendars and messages). This is the risk: At the moment the game is fairly inscrutable. It's not at my usual standard of "pick up and play". I think people will not like the game in its current form. But on balance I had to act.
So, how did we get here?
When I started on The Beat almost a decade ago I was enamoured with the idea of coding the game logic in Prolog, a programming language that I had a feeling would be perfect for a murder mystery.
Prolog is an extremely rare declarative programming language. Instead of giving it a list of instructions you give it a set of facts and then query it. It's a very strange way of coding. But it gives The Beat its unique flavour.
How do I use Prolog in The Beat? Well, instead of linear narratives or branching trees like most games, The Beat has a bucket of mostly linear narrative threads broken up into hundreds of short scripts. The Prolog part of the game assembles a narrative from this bucket as you progress through the game. I call it "self assembling narratives" and it is a really elegant idea that has massive potential for really interesting gameplay, especially for detective-style games.
Problems, however, have compounded over the two years since release.
The Beat was my first game using an engine called Godot. I heavily over-engineered that side of the code out of ignorance. Then a major problem occurred extremely close to release. While Prolog runs great on Linux and other open source operating systems, it is hard to bundle up for closed sourced operating systems such as Windows and Mac.
My solution at the time was to wrap the Prolog code in a small Python server and place it on Linux servers in the cloud. The main drawback of this was that to play The Beat it required a connection to the Internet. For a single player game that is not ideal and there was a risk that if the servers ever went offline my beautiful game would no longer be playable.
As you can imagine, a first time Godot project with a web client interface talking to a python server running in the cloud that was wrapped around a Prolog instance is incredibly fragile. It got the game to release and I was very happy with the finished product but it made the project impossible to alter. Any time I wanted to change one line of code, it would trigger this massive cascading set of changes. Ironically it wasn't usually my code that would break (for once) so much as the build process always needs some library updated or security policy reworked. The experience has really cooled me on hosting anything in "the cloud" really.
So about two years ago I made the difficult decision to rewrite the game. That task has finally reached the tipping point where I have switched over the release version from the original version of The Beat to this new version, which a friend termed "Rebeat". Now the game runs entirely within Godot.
I ported the Prolog code to Godot so the game logic functions exactly the same. This was only possible because of gay icon Alan Turing and his work on Turing-completeness which in one way means that any code in one programming language can be rewritten in another if both languages are Turing-complete. It's normally expressed as a very impractical thing to do and I agree. I can't say it was fun to port Prolog to a Python-like language but I do love the resulting new codebase which is about a bajillion times more maintainable than the previous version. That unique flavour that Prolog brought to the game is 100% maintained. I'm really proud of that. Sorry for the technical info dump!
I can never promise future updates but my intention is to continue improving The Beat over the next few years. This is a labour of love for me. There is a strange, otherworldly, interesting game in here somewhere.
So I guess I'm asking that people are a little kind to Rebeat for a while.
Best regards,
Luke