Echolox Interactive

Factsheet

Developer:
Echolox Interactive
Based in Bochum, Germany

Announce date (Press Embargo & Steam Page launch):
2026, March 4 (Wednesday)
noon CET, 6am EST, 3am PST

Release date:
2026, tbd

Platforms:
PC (Microsoft Windows), Steamdeck

Website:
echolox.com

Description

Beat Weaver is a 3D multi-track rhythm game filled with layers of mechanics that reward expressive playstyles. Become a remix machine that bends time and space to become one with a highly replayable, genre-defying soundtrack.
Inspired by early Harmonix games Frequency and Amplitude, Beat Weaver expands the linear single-track gameplay typical to rhythm games into a fully 3D experience. Perform each element of a song and add instruments one by one to reveal the full mix. Your route through each song is never fixed: Switch from drums to bass to guitar anytime and try to keep the whole mix playing together.

The player pilots the Songbird, a modular music-tech inspired spaceship, along a dynamically shifting note highway which adds extra variety to each song's playthrough: Reshaping itself into a tunnel, tracks breaking out to rejoin in a different order or the player shuffling tracks around manually.
You may opt into the high-level athleticism of complex and fast note patterns or take it easy at a lower difficulty level. While the traditional action of "press the right button to the music" core to every rhythm-game is present, Beat Weaver takes the focus elsewhere: Your routing prowess, intimiate knowledge of the songs and their structure and strategic use of power-ups to aid your playstyle.

Core game mechanics

Play sequences of notes (Phrases) without mistakes to activate a track. An activated track will continue playing its audio without further actions by the player. However, it continually drains some of the player's energy.
By playing notes and completing more phrases the player gains energy to counter the drain from each activated track. Maintaining the full mix requires the player to revisit tracks and keep playing notes and phrases. If energy is dangerously low and the player makes a mistake, all activated tracks revert to their initial off-state and the player needs to reactivate them once more.

Solo-developed with custom engine tech

Beat Weaver is built without an engine like Unity or Unreal. It uses the industry standard FMOD for high-level audio playback, SDL2 for platform abstraction and Direct3D 11 for rendering. The game's architecture allows for minimal input-to-audio latency regardless of framerate or VSync. For rendering it doesn't use any traditional texture mapping in favor of generating colors, patterns & skyboxes with shader code, noise functions, raymarching & mathematical expressions. Its comparatively low performance demands and dependencies allow it to run on older machines.

Pour your love for music into a flow state

Musicianship isn’t all about precision. It’s also about feeling. Beat Weaver doesn’t require you to aim for perfect accuracy or stops dead in its tracks if you fail to hit enough notes.

The game rewards you for staying in a flow of playing and switching tracks, but you’re always in control of where the journey goes. Love that drum fill that leads into the first verse? Leap over there and play it. Can’t miss out on that guitar solo? Rearrange the highway so you’re sure to hit it. And when things get too hectic just stay where the note patterns are easier to nail.

And between those moments? Explore the instrumentation, discover little details and change things up. Every play through of a song can be as different as you like.

The more you learn the unique elements of each song, the better you become at improvising your route through them with stylish maneuvers, while keeping your energy charged and the full mix of all instruments playing.

That being said, all the hallmarks of rhythm games are here if you want to focus on them: Full-combos, astronomical scores and complex note patterns that feel satisfying to pull off.
It's a rhythm game at its core, but with the DNA of games like SSX or Burnout sprinkled in to incentivise and acknowledge stylish player actions.

History

After falling in love with Frequency and Amplitude on the Playstation 2, their concepts continued living rent-free in my head for decades. In 2017 I started developing ideas for some twists to their formula and found time to play explore them in a prototype over many weekends. This was merely meant as a hobby project at first.
This long time allowed me to experiment with audio playback systems and engine architecture to maximize the interactive music experience, as well as making maximum use of the third dimension with the dynamic note highway system.
In parallel, I've been composing songs in varying genres, whose instrumentation and rhythms create interesting gameplay while still being solid rock, electronic or pop songs on their own.
In 2025, the twice restarted project became my full-time occupation thanks to the Games Founding Grant "Press Start".

Features

• Arcade-style campaign for unlocking new songs and mechanics, adding new gameplay layers over time
• Classic high-score mode
• Songs can have between 6 and 16 tracks
• Fully dynamic 3D note highway that can can bend into a tunnel (player is on the inside) or cylinder (player is on the outside). Groups of tracks can break out and rejoin in a different order. Pairs of tracks can switch places.
• 10+ Power-Ups (called Live-Effects) like Slowdown, Rewind, Track-Swap to perform crazy maneuvers or simply give your fingers a moment to breathe.
• Varying time signatures, simple and complex rhythms. Large parts of the soundtrack are composed in-house specifically for the game. (No generative AI usage)
• 4 difficulty levels that affect note chart complexity: Easy, Medium, Hard Expert. Challenges are further shaped by each song having fewer or more tracks and more quickly changing song structures.
• Custom Songs: Musicians can put their own songs into the game. Doing so requires audio files for each individual instrument that will be separately playable in the game.
• Customizable controls: Rock out with a gamepad (recommended) or tap away on your keyboard. Core gameplay actions will be rebindable via multiple input presets and mostly freely remappable buttons.
• Built with a focus on minimal input-to-audio latency. Your button presses directly play the corresponding sounds from the song, whether you hit the right note or the wrong one. A hybrid between keysounds and stem-based audio playback.

Beat Weaver Credits

Echolox
Development, Music

Gray Shuko
Logo, Key Art, Songbird concept art

Music Artists
More to be revealed in the future

Contact

Inquiries
chris@echolox.com

Bluesky
bsky.app/profile/echolox.com

Twitter
twitter.com/echolox

Web
echolox.com