Arcaea is a mobile rhythm game that combines many elements popular in arcade music games while bringing the experience to be available to the whole world.
The game has a strong following in Japan and a fairly keen player-base in the west, with over 2.5million downloads worldwide: https://twitter.com/arcaea_en https://twitter.com/arcaea_jp
It is also consistently in top-10 rhythm games on both the App Store & Google Play in Japan and numerous other countries.
Here’s some (top level) gameplay by a fan on YouTube:
Some background on development:
I am the main developer of the game which is available on iOS and Android, the project is approximately 3 years old now since it’s conception and back in them days I made the (somewhat regrettable) choice to use Cocos Studio & 3D features of cocos2dx and have been stuck with them since.
While cocos2dx provides a lot of conveniences and is a great way to get started, the 3D support and support for external tools has been very rocky…
We release new content and updates, building on game contents, functionality and game support constantly to this day (in an approximately 1-2month cycle), so I’m always very passionate to express my interest in keeping support for the use-cases that cocos2dx supported 2-3 years ago and for making upgrades to new versions/ new renderers portable to those of us on existing projects rather than just benefiting new users who can throw away their environments and migrate to new ones!
The strongest point of cocos2dx has always been to provide engine functionality comparable to other engines (at a low level) and provide so many conveniences (platform abstraction, scene graph, many useful models such as: transitions, layers, support for csb flat files), without the heavy overhead of a fully 3D, prefab-based engine like Unity, so for v4 onwards to cut back on this functionality (especially the limited 3d support) would be a great loss to the engine landscape…
We even obtain 120FPS on iPad Pros using cocos2dx with no customisation to the renderer! Something nearly unimaginable in Unity!
Whichever is latest at it’s cancellation, no modifications (it’s not even possible since it is closed source).
Studio is mainly just used as a WYSIWYG editor for ui scenes, most of the connections and dynamic layouts are finished through code.
We’re a very split team over sound, level design, programming, server development, however in terms of just app development it’s just the one dev: myself.
No PC version planned at the moment, leap motion also wouldn’t quite work for our use case as we often have notes above each other (not trackable with leap)
The audio engine is FMOD, it’s a bit of a pain to make play nicely with cocos’ ndk build, but works great once sorted.
@Guykun Thanks for your reply. So maybe VR version? I guess it should be easier to control all the movements. It could be “simpler” version of the game.
Currently, I’m doing my senior project in rhythm game development. But I’m struggling at object perspective (tap, hold, slide note come from far to near). Could you please give me some hints in this problem using cocos2dx?
