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Path Not Taken (Pre Alpha) screenshot

Game

Path Not Taken (Pre Alpha)

development

A first-person rhythm duel, and a pre-alpha: what is here are the first gameplay tests, with a greybox attacker standing in for the real one. Every glowing line that falls down the three lanes is a hit in the music. Dodge left, down or right as it touches its pad, hold a blue line for bullet time while one slow blow crawls in, dodge a burst of quick blows after an orange one, and strike when the red button comes up. One miss is death, and a death skips the intro, so you are straight back in. The three songs are short film-score battle cues I made with ElevenLabs Music: about ten seconds of intro, a minute of fighting and ten seconds to close. The story comes later.

Screenshots

What it does

  • Every tile sits on a hit in the recording. I measured each song’s tempo to a thousandth of a beat and its hits slot by slot, and the chart refuses a tile where the music has nothing to hit.
  • Three songs at 140, 150 and 162 BPM, each shaped as about ten seconds of intro, a minute of play and ten seconds of exit. A death restarts the song two seconds before the first tile.
  • One miss is death, judged within 200 ms on the forgiving setting, with a tap-along calibration for Bluetooth headphones and slow screens.
  • Pre-alpha, and it says so: the attacker is a greybox stand-in, and the game is still being built.

Built with

  • HTML5
  • Canvas
  • Vanilla JavaScript
  • Web Audio API
  • ElevenLabs Music

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