Game Summary
Beet Beats is a rhythm game made in Unity 2D for Global Game Jam 2023. The jam's theme was "roots," so we interpreted that as
root vegetables, where you play as an anthropomorphized beet on his way to make some homemade soup. The gameplay involves 3 different
gameplay sections each with its own set of mechanics. The first section is a typical 3-lane rhythm game where you pick the vegetables to the
beat. The second section has you prepping the vegetables, and you must utilize yout knife and peeler to prep each vegetable according to the
pattern shown on the vegetable. The third and final stage has you stirring the soup, where you have to press buttons as they show up on the circle.
Afterwards, you're given a score based on how well you performed!
For this game, I worked on design and programming.
The design for this was primarily informed by the title, which I had come up with just naming root vegetables. From there, we kind of figured that
the simpler we made the mechanics the better off we'd be, and we could have a few Rhythm Heaven inspired stages that would give the game more variety
and replayability. As far as programming was concerned, I primarily worked on the 2nd stage as well as the general structure for the Game Manager and
hit detection for notes. I also was responsible for coding much of the UI. My final responsibility was to stitch together the trailer for the game, which
is admittedly not the best trailer ever made, but it is certainly a trailer!
For this jam I worked with a pretty small team of 5 people, and only two of us were programmers. Additionally, as a member of the board for Northeastern University
Game Development Club, I was one of the site organizers for 2023's jam in Boston, which we just so happened to be one of the largest sites in the entire country.
As a result, it was a pretty strenuous weekend for me, considering all the things I had to do. Therefore, scope was on the mind for the whole weekend. All things
considered though, me and the other programmer were able to get in pretty much everything that we wanted to do, plus more. We were originally planning on only having
the first 2 stages, but we figured it would feel pretty incomplete without the part where you actually make the soup. Given that my script for the hit detection and
scoring were completely abstracted, it made it pretty easy to actually just throw together that third minigame. I'm really proud of what we were able to accomplish with
our small team in the 48 hours that we were provided.
