Haley Heartbeat

Haley Heartbeat

Play as Haley Heartbeat, a young magician walking back to her home, hindered only by EVIL enchanted beings...

Haley Heartbeat is a shoot-em-up game with an added component of rhythm: shoot right as your heart beats to get more powerful shots. Hitting on-beat shots regularly (whether right after each other or not) will cycle through more powerful versions of your bullets.

How to Play

Use WASD to move. Use spacebar to jump and Z to shoot. You may also play with a gamepad--highly recommended!

You may also change properties of the game in the options menu. Options include:

• Player Speed: How quickly the player moves.
• Player Damage: How much damage your attack does.
• Player Health: How much health the player has.

You can tweak these to make the game easier or harder. The default values of 100% should give a balanced experience for most players, but they're there if you want to play with them!

Source Code

This game is open source!

Credits

All of the code and assets in this game are my work. Most of the sound effects are based on public-domain samples from freesound, as well as a couple generated ones.

Changelog

Version 1.2 (July 6, 2023): More bug fixes and polish.

Changes:

• Fixed bug where the crystal enemy (introduced in level 4) would crash the game on death, making the game unplayable.
• Changed core rhythm mechanic to be substantially more forgiving. In particular, you no longer need to "combo" your shots to get the powerful shots; you simply have to occasionally have an on-beat shot. This change makes the game feel a lot better.
• Tweaked the volume of some sound effects.
• Changed "gameplay options" to snap to rounded values. This makes it easier to reset them to 100%, at the cost of precise dialing in of values.
• Added Windows & Linux downloadable versions.

Version 1.1 (March 1, 2021): Bug fix and polish version! Many bugs were fixed.

Changes:

• Fixed possible softlock on death animation.
• Fixed level win screen for level 4. The win screen now takes you to level 5 as expected.
• Fixed tutorial, which suggested to use WASD. Tutorial now correctly suggests to use arrow keys.
• Fixed menu background being slightly off-screen, which had resulted in a gray artifact.
• Lose screen and win screen music now plays only once instead of looping.
• On-damage outline effect around book enemies is now more pronounced.
• Added "Back to Menu" button to level select.
• Added pause menu, which may be accessed with Escape or Start/Select on controllers.
• Added three new options: Player Speed, Player Damage, and Player Health.
• Switched graphics to GLES2 instead of GLES3. This does lead to slightly worse particle effects but should theoretically make the game perform better.
• Added additional indication to the UI controls on the options screen--this should make the options screen easier to use with a controller.

Version 1.0 (Feb 21, 2021): Initial game-jam version.