IncrediBeats

Incredibox has been on my screen at home for years — the kids load it up almost every weekend. I wanted to see if I could put together something with the same drag-and-drop feel using nothing but Web Audio and a handful of looped samples. IncrediBeats is the result. It's not as deep as the original, but the core idea is intact: drop an icon onto a character and that character starts performing the loop in lockstep with everyone else on stage.

The trick to making anything that actually sounds good is layering. Start with a kick or a bassline on the leftmost slot so you have a foundation, then add a hat or shaker for movement, and only then bring in melodic synths. If a combination sounds muddy, swap out one of the bass layers — two sub patterns at once almost always fights itself. The loops are all the same number of bars and snap to the master beat, so anything you drop in will fit rhythmically, but harmonic compatibility is on you.

Under the hood

Keeping every loop perfectly in sync was the hard part. Loops play back through a single shared clock so that no matter when you drop a new icon, it falls in on the next bar instead of starting immediately. It feels obvious as a player but it took a couple of evenings of arguing with audio buffer scheduling to make it actually work. If you like this kind of toy, our Rockin' Tempo game is the other side of the same coin — instead of building beats, it asks you to hold one in your head.