Would this be a good choice for a *2D* Music Game?

Hey guys,

Firstly I’d like to apologize if this is the wrong avenue for posing this question. However I’m really trying to decide what to develop my game in right now. I’m experienced in making games in Unity, and now have decent amount of game engine / game programming experience in C++ as well.

I’m planning to start development on a competitive music game extremely soon. However, I face one big uncertainty. What engine should I use?

Like I said, I’m familiar with Unity. But to get the features I want / need I feel as if I need to pay an arm and a leg. However, not only am I familiar with Unity - it has native 2D support combined with several powerful 2D plugins (one of which I already own).

However, Unreal 4 seems like a more cost effective option at the moment. There are many uncertainties here though - how easy is it to plug-in something to allow me to read MIDI event data? Also, how easy is it to do 2D / “pseudo-2D”?

Basically, I was wondering if Unreal 4 would be worth investing in for a 2D music game in the vein of the older Bemani titles. I figure it would be a bit overkill considering the amount of power this engine has, but for something so simple - would it make sense to do it in Unreal if building my own engine (which I could do… but I’m not going to) specifically for this is out of the question?

Thanks a ton!

  1. You can do 2D, look Tappy Chicken example, works very fast even on mobile

  2. You can operate the game with per frame precision with delta time scaling

  3. There no MIDI support by default, you would need to implement that… but there LiveEditor productivity plugin that use MIDI hardware, might be starting point example

)You can modify any courner of the engine, even if there will be issues you can always code thru it somehow

Sweet, good to know. I think I’ll be picking up a subscription soon then! I’ll probably just find a MIDI library that I can hook in!

So, half a year after, have you had any success with MIDI input?