BeatByte

An original five-lane rhythm game in Rust. Your music, the community's charts, a 3D stage that plays along.

🌐 beatbyte.celox.io

Status

Quality

Tech

Platforms

Gameplay

Just for fun

Support

BeatByte is an original, open-source rhythm game in the classic five-lane guitar tradition — rebuilt from scratch in Rust and Bevy. Round glossy gems and HDR bloom on a 3D concert stage, with a live venue behind the neck. Drop in your own music, let BeatByte analyze it and generate a playable chart, then shred it solo or with up to four players on one machine.

Status: all thirteen build milestones complete — playable solo or with friends, themed, packaged for all three platforms. 0.x versions until the tuning settles; see the roadmap.

A tour

A community chart of "Heroes" on Expert with Hype running: double points, lightning over the crowd, the hit flame on the green fret. The band plays on the riser, the crowd moves to the song, and the PA monitors show the level of what you are hearing. Every lane has its own gem shape, so colour is never the only signal.

Star-shaped notes mark a phrase. Land all of it and the room flashes white and the Hype tube fills; spend the tube for double points.

One list, one search. SHOW narrows it to community charts, game rips or your own imports; each song's versions are named in plain words (COMMUNITY 1, RIP 1). A search with no match offers to fetch the song: BeatByte fetches a recording and charts its audio with the installed local song-chart pipeline. Existing community and game-rip versions remain playable.

Tab (or the pad's orange fret) opens every tool for the selected song, grouped, each with its key. F1 lists every key there is, for keyboard, pad and guitar.

After the last note: rank, accuracy, timing, streak, and three ratings (song, chart, lyrics) that the browser remembers.

_{The pictures are the game's own frames, taken by its screenshot harness from the current build and set into mockups drawn in CSS: tools/mockups/shoot.sh takes the frames, tools/mockups/render.sh lays them out. No lyrics are shown, because the words belong to their writers.}

Features

• 🎸 Classic five-lane gameplay — single notes, chords, sustains, hammer-ons/pull-offs, combos, multipliers and the Hype meter
• ♿ Colorblind-safe by default — every lane has a distinct gem shape on notes and receptors; a Stage Motion setting stills the backdrop for reduced motion
• 🎵 Bring your own music — WAV / OGG / FLAC / MP3 / M4A; drop generated charts into songs/ and they appear in the browser — or drop a folder onto the window and BeatByte watches it for new tracks (duplicates skipped by content hash; in-game deletes stay deleted)
• 👀 See how hard a song is before you play it — rest the cursor on a song in the browser for about a second and, while its hook plays, the panel shows its notes on a small highway scrolling in step with the music, the density of the whole song lit up to where the preview stands, and its average and peak notes per second — for the selected difficulty. Arrowing through the list reads nothing, so the list stays instant
• 🔎 Add a song by name — Ctrl+D in the browser (or ADD A SONG in its action menu), type it and press Enter (Esc cancels): BeatByte finds and fetches a recording with yt-dlp, then imports its audio through the installed local song-chart pipeline. Optionally a model helps choose the recording — see what leaves your machine.
• 🎤 Live karaoke lyrics — Ctrl+L in the browser (FETCH LYRICS in its action menu) and BeatByte looks the track up in lrclib's open catalogue (anonymous, no account, only artist and title leave the machine), or drop your own .lrc beside the song. The words sing along above the highway on the same clock the notes fall on, with a per-glyph karaoke fill and a highlight behind the passage being sung. With the optional local aligner (beatbyte-cli align, build feature ml) the fill follows the song letter by letter: each line appear