Update log
Full Project Heartbeat update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Hello, long time no see! It's been almost a year since my last public update on the project, I thought it would be a good time to share an update on the status of the project, as well as the future!
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
- Server
- Workshop
- UI and audio
Where have you been?
As some of you may remember, I got hired in March 2025 to work at a big game company, due to this and some personal issues (more on that later) I haven't had as much time as I want to to work on PH, however I did manage to get things done.
As I said the last time, PH is pretty much feature complete, anything from here is mostly polish, but there are still some key things I want to do before releasing it completely.
Some of you may have realized but I did soft-launch 1.0 to the stable branch a while ago, but the game will remain in early access until I have proper marketing material to make the launch big.
New content
There are currently 4 new songs in development, one of them is already in the game but without graphics, I will share more news soon, in the meantime here's a teaser of the art for one of them!
Website DDOS shenanigans
The website (and by proxy, the backend) has been getting DDOS'd by companies scraping data, not sure what for, whether it's AI training or other reason, either way I am working on counter measures for (installing anubis on the server) but it's gonna take a bit as the infrastructure I built is a bit of a mess, I plan to make it nicer.
No more yt-dlp in the workshop
One thing that's always plagued PH is needing yt-dlp for videos, in the end I decided to allow videos in the workshop, in fact, 1.0 won't let you upload songs without video or audio data in the songs themselves anymore!
I do plan to continue supporting yt-dlp for existing uploads, indeed I added the deno runtime with the game, which should make yt-dlp slightly more reliable.
I also created a migration tool to migrate your own songs to not require yt-dlp anymore, so you can upload them to the workshop!
PHZ format
To improve future archival and sharing of songs outside of the workshop I started work on an open format called PHZ.
PHZ files are just zip64 files structured in a certain way, they include metadata for archival purposes, they can hold multiple mods in a single file.
A new export tool has been added to the game so you can export your songs to PHZ!
Eventually, I'd like all workshop uploads to use PHZ once it's stable, however current uploads are still using the "bare" format.
UI redesign
I still have nothing to show about this, but I do want to redesign the game UI, I have contracted an external UI designer to do this for me, I will share updates as soon as I can!
Engine update
I have updated the base engine to Godot 4.6, this is currently experimental but it should be fine, this means that DX12 will become the default renderer again, which should improve frame pacing & more on windows, shutouts to Skyth who has been working on Godot's DX12 renderer for a while now!
Bug fixes
I've also been busy fixing bugs to polish up the experience, here's what's changed:
Source