Hello again, my name is Steve Hunt and I’m the developer of the music driven shooter Beat Hazard Ultra. Now the game is out on PSN here’s some exclusive insider gameplay, tactics and trophy tips. Use this sort-of-secret knowledge to help propel yourself up the leader boards in no time!

Beat Hazard Ultra – The Basics

Beat Hazard Ultra is a twin stick shooter that is powered by your music. The game turns any piece of music in to a level. Everything in the game is powered by the music in some way, from your weapon power to the type and formations of the enemies, and all accompanied with intense visual feedback!

Copying Music to Your PS3

Before I start, here’s a quick tip about copying music to your PS3 using a USB memory stick. On the XMB go to Music->USB Device. Then press TRIANGLE and select ‘Display All’. From there select ‘Copy Multiple’. This will ensue your PS3 will find and copy all the music on the USB stick.

The Bad Guys

Aside from basic fodder, you will come across the following bad guys. And here’s how to deal with them:

Pulsar Pack: These bully boys form a ring and try to close in on you. Not much of a threat though.
Best Defence: Don’t waste powerups on these. Kill with standard weapon

Bulldog: These form a line and chase you down. Medium Threat.
Best Defence: A well aimed Ultra Beam blast can take out 4 or 5 at a time

Miner: Drops homing mines that stop you firing if you hit them. These can be very dangerous if left for too long. You can soon be swamped by mines.
Best Defence: Standard weapon or Micro Missiles if no direct line of fire

Stalker: Use a powerful tractor beam to pull you in. Range proportional to music intensity.
Best Defence: Micro Missiles. Shield will neutralize pull force

Repulsar: Use a powerful repulse beam to push you around. Dangerous in packs.
Best Defence: Micro Missiles. Shield will neutralize push force

Reaper: Releases a hail of homing missiles when destroyed. Number of missiles proportional to music intensity.
Best Defence: An Ultra Beam will kill the ship and most of the missiles. Kill with shield to convert missiles to your side!

Mini-Serpent: Head & Tail are invincible so shoot from the side. Flips between chasing and random movement.
Best Defence: Micro Missiles or Ultra Beam to the flank

Perks

Ultra has 23 unlockable & upgradeable perks. A perk is unlocked each time you level up. Each perk must be purchased and upgraded using in game cash.

To start with you should unlock the ‘POW POW POW’ & ‘Pump Up the Vol’ perks. Enabling these will give you more firepower at the start. And when fully upgraded you will start with maximum firepower and the Beat Hazard weapon activated.

After that I would recommend unlocking Micro Missiles followed by either Ultra Beam or Reflect Shield. These will give you a lot more fire power and allow you to tackle harder difficulty levels.

Once you’re a badass, you can start to focus on the scoring perks. Enabling these in any combination will massively increase your scoring ability – remember Beat Hazard Ultra uses a non-linear scoring system, so you can quickly go from scoring a few thousand per song to a few million! So don’t feel bad if your scores seem low compared to those on the leader boards.

Perk Loadout Tactics

Perks split into two categories, scoring and firepower. Scoring perks increase your ability to score points in various ways, for example ‘Score Booster’ adds a percentage to any points you gain. Firepower perks enhance your ability to kill / survive the onslaught of bad guys.

Choosing the correct loadout can massively change your survivability and potential score. You need to get the balance just right to get the highest score for any particular situation. You can go in armed to the teeth but might not score much, or die a horrible death in the middle of a tune through lack of adequate weaponry.

In general, the longer the song the more weapons and survival perks you will need. With short songs you can sacrifice all this in favour of a complete scoring loadout.

Weapon Tips

There are 3 unlockable weapons, Micro Missiles, Ultra Beam and Reflect Shield.

Micro Missiles: Fires a hail of homing missiles. Each missile will target the highest threat on-screen. Incoming enemy missiles are the highest threat followed by Bosses and then Mini-Serpents, Repulsars and Stalkers.

Ultra Beam: Fires a concentrated beam of death and destruction. With a good aim this weapon can do massive damage. You can take out a boss turret or a string of ships in one blast. Good for path clearing.

Reflect Shield: This is the awesome shield of awesomeness. Not only does this shield protect you from all impacts it will deflect any incoming projectile and turn it against the enemy! Used on a swarm of missiles can cause devastation to the enemy hordes.

BIG TIP: One important tactic to remember is that all three weapons are stackable. That is if you fire the shield 5 times quickly the game will stack 5 shields one after the other. Try it, it’s useful!

Trophy Hunter

Ultra has 42 challenges to complete. Each time you complete any 3 challenges you will receive a trophy. Complete all 42 to unlock all the trophies.

Here are a few tips on some of the more difficult challenges:

Don’t Panic: Don’t fire for 60 seconds (Tip: play on Easy)

Boss Slayer: Kill 8 bosses in 1 game (Tip: Easy when you play Boss Rush)

Brutal Boss Kill: Kill a boss before it fires (Tip: Easiest to kill one of the small bosses by flying over it quickly and setting off a lot of super bombs. You can get more super bombs by using the ‘Jamie likes big boom’ perk)

Pwnage: Get a 1,000 kill streak (Tip: Kill 1,000 enemies in a row without dying. Takes about 4-5 mins on Hardcore level. Probably easiest on Survival mode)

A Real Dare Devil: In Standard play get the Dare Devil multiplier 10 times (Tip: Play on Easy and just don’t fire for periods of time until you get 10 Dare Devil bonuses)

Survival Champion: Reach 20 Minutes in Survival Mode (Tip: Best done when you’ve unlocked Extra lives, Extra bombs and the Missiles, Reflect Shield & Ultra Beam Perks)

Perk MAXED: Buy all the upgrades for a Perk (Tip: It’s really cheap to fully upgrade the ‘Goodie Bag’ perk)

Ultra Beam of Death: Kill 150 enemies with 1 Ultra Beam blast (Tip: Ultra Beams can be stacked so you can use all your beams in one go and the time will add up. Also, unlocking the ‘Ultra Ultra Beam’ perk & the ‘Extra Ultra Beam’ perks will make this easier.)

Reflection: Reflect 150 projectiles with 1 Shield burst (Tip: Shields can be stacked so you can use all your power-ups in one go and the time will add up. Also, unlocking the ‘Stay Hidden’ perk & the ‘Extra Reflect Shield’ perks will make this easier.)

A Real Mine Sweeper: Collide with 50 mines in one track without losing a life (Tip: Mines are the round orange spiked balls that come out of the back of the Mine Ship. Just crash into 50 of these over the course of a song and complete the track without dying)

Tug of War: Have a 10 second tug of war with a Stalker (Tip: Play on easy & just hang out near a Stalker for 10s)

Boss Dance: Survive with 4 bosses on the screen in Boss Rush mode (Tip: Play Boss rush and try not to kill the boss completely)

Boss King: Get to Wave 30 in Boss Rush mode (Tip: Best done when you’ve unlocked Extra lives, Extra bombs and the Missiles, Reflect Shield & Ultra Beam Perks)

2 Player Tips

If you’re playing online or local head to head, here are some cool tips:

• Bosses are scored per hit, so don’t go for the kill, get as many hits are you can
• If your opponent dies, grab all his pickups before he re-spawns
• Hang out near the top of the screen to grab bombs and multipliers
• Steal kills with a well timed super bomb. E.g. when a ring of Pulsars are on screen
• Play chicken at the start. Try to build up your dare devil multiplier before the carnage starts
• The yellow Beat Hazard logo will be next to the score that is the highest. Useful for checking if you’re winning with a quick glance.

Lastly, Some Nice Tricks/Tips

• Turn on the Shield and sit over the boss turret. Missiles fired will instantly change sides and go for the boss! (You can also do this with Reapers)
• Play Boss Rush and turn off weapon perks to collect lots of cash
  The Serpent boss will try to coil around you when he’s 70% dead. Watch out!
• The Octo-Boss will coil up when you get close. When coiled he’s invincible. Spread your fire around in a wide arc to kill him quickly.
• The Last Star Fighter Death Blossom looks nice, but it’s not an effective tactic on harder levels.
• Play Chill Out mode if you want to try weapons you’ve not unlocked yet.

Well, that’s it for now. I hope you enjoy the game and that this guide helps you kick some music butt!

I’ll be hanging out here on the blog so if you’ve got any other questions, fire away. You can also email me here, or follow me on Twitter here. Join the Ultra facebook fan page here or check out my website here.

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My name is Steve Hunt and I’m really excited to be able to talk about my PSN game Beat Hazard Ultra and how I wrote the game from scratch on my own, in my bedroom.

About the Game

Beat Hazard Ultra is a twin stick arcade shooter that is entirely powered by YOUR music! Just copy some music on to your PS3 hard drive, or use the built in songs choose a track, and be dazzled by the eye-bleeding visuals and enjoy blasting away enemy ships to the sound of your favourite pumping tunes.

Everything you see in the game is dictated by the music in some way, from the firepower of your ship to the number and patterns of enemies coming at you. Each track produces a unique (but, most importantly, repeatable) level.

In addition to Standard play, Ultra has plenty of cool gameplay features to keep you busy, including Boss Rush and Survival modes, 23 perks to unlock and 42 in-game challenges that award 14 trophies. There are also three awesome tactical weapons: Micro Missiles, Reflect Shield and Ultra Beam to unlock & upgrade, turning you into a mean music-driven badass.

Beat Hazard Ultra is designed to be a real ‘in yo face’ experience. It doesn’t pull any punches as the visuals pump and pulse to the music. However, you’ll be glad to know you can turn this down if you need too. But if you’re in the party mood you can turn the visuals up to 200% for the most intense action you can get.

And if you’re feeling like a challenge, you can jump online and play either co-op or head to head. Online play is crazy! Watching two powered up ships on Suicidal mode with 200% visuals is completely mental.

About me and the Development for PS3

This game was written from scratch by just me, in my bedroom. I started writing games when I was 14 back in the 8-bit days. After graduating from university, I spent 15 years working as a designer and programmer for bigger studios such as D.I.D, Rage Games and, most recently, Juice Games and THQ. Although I enjoyed working with the big guys I always wanted to go back to bedroom coding and working for myself. I got the push I needed to go Indie two years ago when I was made redundant. That was when Beat Hazard was born and, due to its success, I’ve not looked back since.

I’ve always been a massive PlayStation fanboy (I even had a Net Yaroze back in the day, anyone remember that?). I was ecstatic when Sony approved Beat Hazard Ultra for release on PSN last year. Once I’d finished jumping around and started to think of the challenge ahead, I suddenly realised I might have bitten off more than I could chew. Attempting to write a console game from scratch is a huge challenge and I knew I had a lot of work ahead.

And a massive challenge it was! However, as with any big project, I just broke it down and took it a day at a time. With the help of the awesome support guys at Sony, six months later here it is – Beat Hazard Ultra running on the PS3! I can’t tell you how rewarding that feels!

In that time I’ve learnt many new skills, from writing a renderer on the PS3, to coding a Digital Signal Processor which runs asynchronously on the PlayStation SPUs and is used to analyse the music in real time.

I get many emails from budding game designers and programmers asking about going Indie. Well here you go – even one guy can write a game for PSN, and it’s all there for you if you have the time and dedication to go for it. I hope Beat Hazard inspires more Indie guys out there.

Beat Hazard Ultra should be out this September. I really hope you enjoy the game.

I’ll be hanging out here on the blog to answer any question about Ultra or its development process. You can also email me here, or follow me on Twitter here. Join the Ultra facebook fan page here or check out my website here.

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