After 4 months of heavy development and energy drink consumption, I’m glad to announce that beatquest.fm is live! Followed by a downer: It’s not done yet!

We have worked hard on this and made beatquest.fm a highly addictive and fun browser game with some really neat features. But we are not even close to the end - there is so much more to come! We are still working on improvements, new game modes and very cool features that will be released step by step within the next weeks.

For now, we have only enabled 3 of over 20 music channels. So if those 3 rooms do not fit your taste of music, yet - don’t be depressed! Wait a week or so and we will definitely have some more stuff for you. The new rooms we are working on include: House, Reggae / Dancehall, Hardstyle, New Metal, Metal and many more.

A big thank you goes to the team: Umut, Dennis, Martin and Umut. You are awesome! Another big thank you goes out to the guys at 9elements who actually had a lot of influence into the project. 

So, try it! Go for it!

As I said, more stuff is definitely coming within the next weeks, so stay tuned!

Since we would like to keep you up-to-date about the game development and design, we will post an update on what happened at beatquest.fm every friday. Here’s the first one! :)

This week I focused on fixing some bugs and doing some social media stuff. I hope that I’ll be able to fix some more known issues this weekend. So first off, the changelog:

Changelog

Bugfixes

• Fixed the in-game text input since this was broken in some browsers.
• Fixed some closed beta signup / login issues.
• Podium (shown at the end of every round) is now displayed correctly
• Achievements now show up correctly
• Fixed some displaying issues with the options menu
• Fixed game intro (sponsors / partners did not show up correctly)
• Background now resizes automatically in Firefox
• Transitions and animations now work properly in Firefox
• Players do no longer get disconnected when hitting “escape” in Firefox
• Removed the annoying FM tuning sound between the songs
• 3D stuff now works with Firefox
• Slightly rearranged the game objects and user menu

New Features

• Updated rooms selection: now consists of a nice CSS3 cover-flow system
• Added a sound slider to change the game volume globally
  
• You can now switch back from the game to the main menu by clicking the beatquest logo

Plans for next week

Next week I’d like to focus on developing new features. Actually right now I have no idea on how or where to start. But I’ll let you know about that and you will actually see it (at least if you play regularly).

In this blog post I’d like to talk about what the idea behind beatquest.fm is, what I have created so far and what I think it should become in the near future.

But first off, let me introduce myself: My name is Sascha Gehlich, I’m a young web developer from Germany and I’m loving creating new projects. I started doing internet stuff when I was 8 (about 12 years ago) and in these 12 years I have actually learned a whole bunch of programming languages and web technologies.

5 years ago I started a project called FILSH.net. FILSH is a web service that allows you to download online videos (like videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion etc.) and convert them in the cloud. FILSH.net has grown to a huge project with over 6 million unique visitors and and 55 million page impressions per month. But things have changed, Google has pissed me off, so now I’m looking for a new opportunity to do something cool

The idea

So about 9 months ago I had the idea of a game that’s all about music. Do you know the music quiz on the old iPod nano? I played that a long time ago and somehow this game came back to my mind, so I decided to try porting the idea to a browser game. So I created a small prototype and published it on Twitter, Facebook and HackerNews. In a very short period of time it got 1000 registered users, people got addicted to it and played it for hours.

So I thought a bit about it and started creating an advanced version of that. Unfortunately I had some personal issues only a few weeks later, so I had to abandon the idea which I picked up again a few months ago.

What is beatquest right now?

A cool, unfinished and addictive browser game, that’s for sure! So here’s the stuff I have done so far:

• Simple user management with buddy invitations / buddy lists and profiles
• An awesomely cute yet simple avatar creator that lets you create your individual avatar
• Public game mode: Choose a room with a specific music genre, listen to music and guess the artists / titles. Compete against other players in the same room and try to be faster than them
• XP / Levels / Achievements: For each song you guess right, you earn experience points (XP). The more XP you get, the higher your level gets. Also, there are a lot of achievements, e.g. for “Songs guessed in a row”, “Songs guessed in total”, “Guessing speed”, “Games won” and there are a lot more to come
• And very important: A very cool pure HTML5 and CSS3 game-like web interface which I will improve in the next weeks

Also, I have two awesome guys called Umut Türkoglu and Umut Deniz who are working on social media / marketing campaigns and feeding / cleaning up the database. If you ever think about visiting our office, prepare for some nasty kofte and sucuk smell - these guys are eating it like nobody else.

What will beatquest become?

Good question - next question! There are so many unfinished ideas in my head that I’m trying to get clear about. Some stuff I’m definitely working on is DJ / Guitar equipment that you can unlock or buy to improve your gameplay / gain more XP and unlock more game features. Some other thing is creating weekly tournaments among your friends to keep the fun factor quite high. But I guess the most ideas will come when working on it.

And what’s most important: I want to involve you as much as possible! Tell me your ideas, I tell you whether I like them or not. If you have ideas or questions, feel free to post them on our facebook page.

So far, so good. Stay tuned folks, this will be epic! :)

Hello folks!

This is our Blog, where we will post information about the game, the development process / progress, new ideas and stuff like that. Geeky stuff, you know?

So, to stay up-to-date like us on facebook and subscribe to our RSS feed!

Sincerely,

Sascha