GAMES / EXPERIMENTS
Beathoven.
A four-button rhythm game experiment built with LÖVE, exploring timing, music and arcade-style play.
Key facts
- Status
- Experimenton pause, as of October 2026
- Years
- 2022
- Role
- Design and code. The music is a remix by Lionel Yu and Nicholas Chazarre.
- Stack
- Lua
- LÖVE
- love.js (WebGL)
- Highlight
- One song, four buttons, playable in the browser
Why I built it
I was working on a game in order to explore LÖVE. That game is called Beathoven. It is a rhythm game based on the remix of the 5th symphony of Beethoven made by Lionel Yu and Nicholas Chazarre.
Instead of using a piano like controller, I wanted to use something a bit more like those music arcade games with buttons spread around the screen. I went with 4 buttons spread as a diamond: 4 fingers gameplay, which sounds not too overwhelming, but still fun.
What it does
You play with the S, E, F and C keys. Each right note scores, each wrong note reduces your HP, and note streaks are tracked with different messages at different levels.
There is also a splash screen, a title screen and a timer before the game starts.
How it's built
It is written in Lua with LÖVE. Each button has a track with a queue of notes: when I press a button, a note is dequeued, and we check if the note was overlapping the button.
The 2022 devblogs document the note queues, the beat mapping with Audacity, scoring and streaks, then bringing the prototype to the browser with love.js and WebGL.
Where it is now
Beathoven is on pause. The game over screen and the notes balancing are not completely finalized.
This is an experiment, rather than an actively developed product. I would like to finish it one day.