Hi everyone. I just published the free demo of Tied to the Beat, a rhythm arena survivor I have been building solo for the last two years.
The idea: the lyrics of the song you are playing are what fights for you. Every line that plays becomes something on screen. "Fire" sets the arena on fire, "rain" brings rain, "freeze" freezes what is chasing you. Over a thousand words are wired to their own effect, and it works in 31 languages, so a Spanish song plays in Spanish and a Chinese song plays in Chinese, not just translated in the UI.
In the full game you can drop in your own MP3 and it transcribes the lyrics locally and wires them up, so your own music becomes the level. The demo ships with four songs so you can see how the system feels first.
The part I am most proud of technically: there is no Unity or Godot here. The engine is hand-written in TypeScript and Pixi.js, with its own game loop, collision, particle system and rendering pipeline. That is why it holds 60 FPS on a 2018 laptop with integrated graphics and has no quality settings to fiddle with. It just runs.
The demo: first map, two instruments, easy difficulty, four songs. Windows and Linux, no account, no launcher, runs offline. Your progress carries over if you get the full game later.
I would really like feedback on one thing in particular: whether the connection between the word you hear and the effect you see reads clearly, or whether it feels like random chaos on screen. That is the whole pitch of the game and it is the hardest thing to judge from the inside.
👉 https://lianes8.itch.io/tied-to-the-beat-demo
Happy to answer anything about how the lyric-to-effect system works under the hood.</p  > 
](https://img.itch.zone/aW1nLzI4ODU4NjQ4LnBuZw==/original/Bo%2Fm3W.png)
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