Project Heartbeat Phoenix Update: Now available

"After 10 thousands years in development, hopefully, it will have been worth the wait!"

Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come. We've gone through an insane amount of hardships together over the last year and this is the culmination of that work. Welcome to Project Heartbeat Phoenix.

Welcome home, rhythm game enjoyer

Project Heartbeat Phoenix is the most far-reaching update we've made ever since the game released back in March of the seemingly cursed year that was 2020.

This update touches every aspect of the game and improves upon it, not only is the engine brand new, so is the input system, the video decoding, the steam integration, the multiplayer, the rendering code, everything has been meticulously revamped to harness the power of the great Godot 4.

This update won't really blow your mind with fancy bells and whistles, as there aren't that many new features, what it provides however is an incredible improvement to the bare essentials, never before seen consistency and world-class rhythm game technology, this will not only improve the game, but also my ability to expand it in 1.0, let's get into the details.

The new approach

As some of you may be aware, in this year since the last major update I started a Patreon, this has not just resulted in a much-needed help to sustain myself (PH isn't profitable at all, with me not earning minimum wage most months) but also it has allowed me to have a "reason" to work on engine extensions that can be shared between different games.

The result of this is the new Steamworks, input glyphs and FFmpeg modules I developed for the engine, these are open source and available on the EIRTeam GitHub for everyone to use!

If you want to help me out further monetarily check out the Patreon, this is obviously optional and doesn't get you many benefits other than a different color in the discord.

New content

New song: Versos perversos

Licensed from the great Andrés Alguacil, AKA elBokeron, Versos Perversos is a relatively popular Spanish meme rap song that I added because I personally like it much, luunah decided to make an extra hard difficulty named "Lunatic", this won't become the norm but it's just a nice plus.

This is a collaboration I've been wanting to do for a while, I actually obtained permission from Andrés back in 2021 to use his work, but life and Project Heartbeat got a bit on the way.

The art was made by @Psycho_Loli on twitter. Please check out her work!

Charted by luunah and lino.

New song: War zone

Touhou Eurobeat, the source of all great things in Project Heartbeat, here's another Eurobeat song from our friends at Grazepoint, based on an original Touhou Project song, this was arranged by WORLDWIDEWOLF with vocals and lyrics from Timothy.

The artwork was made by our great resident artist @Guinii4 please make sure to check out her work!

The new game engine

Phoenix uses the new Godot 4 game engine, the result is increased performance, more renderer options and less headaches for me, yay.

The star of the show: Subtick system

While working on what would later become Phoenix I had an idea, could we possibly make the game more consistent if we applied the same technology valve's Counter-Strike 2 uses for subtick input? The answer as it turns out, is a resounding yes.

You can learn more about how it actually works in the