This guide contains information about Project Heartbeat internals and some hidden features you might be interested in

Keep in mind everything in this list is completely unsupported, but it's made available in case it is useful to someone, I would suggest that for more advanced features you backup your user folder. These features aren't designed with the same care the rest of the game is made since they are mostly debugging features, don't tell me I didn't warn you.

Some of the game's features are hidden, there may be various reasons behind this, but generally it's because they are debugging features that aren't supposed to be used by the general public and may change at any time.



A very simple controller visualization tool is provided, press Control+G to enable it.


The debug menu can be enabled by pressing Control+D, this menu allows you to check the logs with filtering and do various things (achievment related buttons only work on EIRTeam accounts).

You can also enable autoplay, obviously scores achieved with autoplay enabled won't count for leaderboards.


Some parts of the game might allow you to see extra data on screen, this may vary from update to update and it's used for debugging on my end, to enable the debug display simply press Control+F.

Project Heartbeat is built using a custom build of the Godot Engine version 3.2.3, this custom build has included a Steamworks module, based on Gramp's GodotSteam, but with some small changes.

During early access Hearbteat ships with a semi-debug build of the engine, this means it has debugging features but doesn't include debugging symbols and it also doesn't have all optimizations disabled, this is a very good middle ground, it makes it easier to find bugs while having a relatively small performance loss.


Some parts of Project Heartbeat are contained inside native modules, the game can be built without these modules on platforms that have no use for them.

Video decoding is done using a GDNative binding to FFmpeg, this will probably be changed in the future to an internal libvpx module (or I will fix godot's libvpx decoder, which currently is in a fairly broken state, hence why we use the ffmpeg binding).

Discord rich presence is also done through a GDNative module written in rust.


Project Heartbeat's included assets are contained inside a read-only filesystem inside the "Project Heartbeat.pck" package file.

Godot caches all assets into a more game-friendly format inside an internal cache folder than is found inside the game's PCK, this means that external assets such as images or audio files are loaded in a slightly different way.


On platforms where it's available, PH makes use

Heartbeat accepts many command line arguments, keep in mind a lot of these aren't available on the retail build of the engine that ships with PH (and even if you did, they wouldn't be very useful, read the first chapter on why this is the case).

Options that don't work in the shipping versions of the game are marked with TOOL



When running the game in demo mode the following features are disabled/changed:

• User content is entirely disabled, this includes loading of songs folder songs, workshop songs, custom icon packs and the editor.
  
• Multiplayer is disabled
  
• Instead of loading the traditional version of the main menu a demo version of it is loaded instead.
  
• YoutubeDL is disabled entirely.

Keep in mind the demo build differs in more than one place with the normal build, for example it doesn't come with the YoutubeDL binaries and FFmpeg video decoding binaries. It also only ships with a few songs meant only for the demo.





Display options



Note that the following options are only available during early access, this is because they are only available on debug builds of the engine, future builds of the game won't have these options, however if the community wants to we can still ship a debug binary of the engine with the game.