Decode The Beat

A tiny rhythm game about autism, masking and decoding conversations...

How to play

• W - A - S - D  / Arrow Keys / Gamepad (X Y A B)
• Esc to trigger game-over any time
• ENTER / SPACE / Gamepad (X) to start / retry

The little round guy will play N notes. Quick ! You must figure out the code to such conversations!

Why?

People with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) who still manage to function in a social setting typically do so by having a learned coping strategy. This lifelong experience in analyzing various situations, carefully tuning their behavior for each case and consciously or unconsciously suppressing some autistic traits, is known as Masking.

So here's our theme!

A common trait of autistic people is that they struggle to understand the social context and subtext of non-autistic people in conversational or printed situations, which gave me the idea of a game of "decoding a conversation".

It then felt natural to have a rhythm game to represent the conversation, with a twist that you have to figure out which notes to play... Et voilà.

Limitations

This was part of a game jam for which I had limited time, and it was my first attempt at such an exercise... The timing of input detection is tricky and I wasn't able to fine tune it in time, sorry :(