Spin the Beat
New Price!
Spin the Beat's 1-Year Annivesary!
The Jolly Holiday Update has arrived!
The Jolly Holiday Update introduces a brand-new stage, titled "Festive." This stage features a calming holiday setting with six Christmas-centric scenes, one on each side of the cube. Enjoy the soothing scenery, but don't get too comfortable - the set pieces on the stage can easily fling you into the abyss if you aren't paying attention!
Enjoy the Festive stage, and have a very happy holiday season and New Year, which ever days you may or may not celebrate!
The Spooky Update is Live!
This update brings with it a brand-new stage full of tricks and treats. The player avatars from the Neon stage have donned their Halloween costumes and been spirited away to an eerie cemetery amidst mysterious towers, where just about anything can happen! Try not to get too spooked...
Features of the new "Spooky" stage:
- Watch out for the headstones as the stage spins - they might just catch you off-guard and fling you to your doom!
- Both the players and enemies have received a total Halloween makeover.
- Unique music in the ever-bizarre time signature of 5/4.
- No indication whatsoever of which way the stage is about to turn - it's always a surprise!
- A special "Trick-Or-Treat" event that may occur in place of regular events. During this event, treat bags will spawn on the stage. Pick one up and you might get a treat ... or a nasty trick! How will you know which you'll get? The only way to find out is to pick it up...
--- As this event involves power-ups, it will not occur if you turn off power-ups on the game menu.
As always, please report any unexpected issues you encounter. Happy Halloween!
There's a chill in the air...
Look forward to something creepy coming to Spin the Beat in the coming days...
The Tune-Up-Date is Live!
As said in the previous post, this update doesn't add any new gameplay content, but it does completely overhaul the game's behind the-scenes operations in the hope of providing improved performance on some systems, as well as making adding features in future updates MUCH easier.
Even with no major content additions, there are still a handful of gameplay tweaks snuck into this update!
- First, the Orange enemies in all stages have had their speed reduced significantly. They should now be much easier to evade and dispatch with a Push Attack.
- Second, the Bullseye bogus power-up has received a major change. Previously its only effect was to cause enemies to prioritize the player(s) who picked it up over the other players, which meant it did nothing in singleplayer and wasn't super-potent even in multiplayer. Now, however, any Orange, Green, Blue, or Pink enemies targeting a Bullseye-carrying player will move much more quickly than usual! (Their speed returns to normal when targeting a non-Bullseye-carrying player. Red and Yellow enemies are unaffected since they don't target players specifically.)
- Finally, the Unity launcher that appeared on startup is gone, replaced instead with an in-game options menu. This means that Spin the Beat can now be played entirely with a gamepad once you launch it - no more need for a mouse or keyboard to get past that pesky launcher! This also means that the game is now 100% compatible with Big Picture mode.
If you see any other significant gameplay changes that you weren't expecting, as well as any new bugs, please don't hesitate to report them. Have fun!
For full behind-the-scenes patch notes, read below.
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PATCH NOTES:
- Complete replacement of all menu code - all menus now use a modular system that makes adding new menu options and tweaking existing ones vastly easier than before, as well as hopefully smoothing out menu operations for the end user.
- All HUD elements have had their placement adjusted to provide a better experience at extremely high and extremely low resolutions, as well as correct text overflow problems at all resolutions.
--- Please note that while the game is playable at resolutions higher than 1920x1080, these are not considered officially supported at this time due to how menus are managed in-game, which may cause inactive menus to be visible at the edges of the screen at these extremely high resolutions.
- Cleaned up lots of redundant and sloppy code, replacing many poorly-implemented timers and loops with coroutines, which are a much cleaner way of handling repeating functions and timers.
- Fixed players who were active in the previous game having to re-join upon returning to the main menu - in other words, if player 2/3/4 was playing in the last round, they are automatically set to "Ready!" on the main menu after the game ends.
- Orange enemies have had their default flight speed reduced.
- Picking up a Bullseye power-up now causes enemies targeting you to move 50% faster than normal. (Previously, their speed did not change.)
- Removed the Unity launcher and replaced it with an in-game Options menu. This menu offers options for resolution, windowed mode, and overall graphical quality.
Coming soon: The Tune-Up-Date!
During development, a lot of Spin the Beat's components ended up being hard-coded as a shortcut to get the game out more quickly after numerous delays. While doing so definitely served that purpose and provided the desired gameplay experience for the end user, it's far from optimal and makes updating certain components a hassle. Those hard-coded elements are being gutted in the Tune-Up-Date and replaced with new, modular systems that can be easily expanded as content is added in future updates. Some highly inefficient code is also being replaced with streamlined iterations in the hope of providing vastly-improved performance on most systems.
Even though most of the changes are under the hood, you'll still see a couple of tweaks on the front-end, including a big change to one of the game's "bogus" power-ups and a new in-game Options menu replacing the Unity launcher at startup. Stay tuned for news about when the update will go live!
The Happy Birthday Update is here!
The new "Birthday" stage takes place atop a giant birthday cake surrounded by enormous wrapped gifts. Slices of the cake will drop away in time with the music. Enemies take on the appearance of wrapped presents and balloons, with some of them spewing confetti when defeated. Unlike the Garden and Cave stages, enemies cannot hop around in the gaps on this stage - they'll fall right through! Watch out for the new "Cake Splitter" event, which spreads the cake's slices out to create a much trickier platforming experience.
As with any update, this patch also includes a few minor fixes and adjustments, including making the Game Mode selection on the main menu loop - you can now press either left or right to change game modes rather than left for Party Mode and right for Survival Mode.
The update is live now! Enjoy it as an upbeat start to the summer!
Spin the Beat's free demo is now available on Steam!
The free demo features a fully playable version of the "Neon" stage in Party Mode. The full game also offers the competitive Survival Mode and several additional stages, each with unique gameplay quirks, twists, and hazards.
To install, simply hit the "Download Demo" button on the Store page.