Cascade Countdown
7A hand-tracked physics arcade game for Apple Vision Pro, built on Godot. Live on TestFlight.
The story
Emissive cubes cascade through spinning bumpers and a prism splitter onto tilted catch plates in your immersive space. Reach in and pinch to grab and throw. Every collision is a synthesized chime pitch-snapped to the key, so the chaos harmonizes into a tune. Built on Apple's official upstream visionOS contribution to Godot — a device smoke test on real Vision Pro hardware measured a locked 90 FPS across 23 measurement windows, with continuous physics racking up hundreds of collisions per run. Getting there took 8 TestFlight builds: a rejected privacy manifest with unsubstituted template variables, a near plane nudged down to Apple's 0.1 minimum, and a grab bug that looked like a left/right-hand asymmetry but was really several stacked issues plus noisy hand-tracking input — collapsed into a single THUMB-only grab-by-point with sticky release. The project also produced a reusable build-switcher script that flips a Godot visionOS project between device and simulator builds from one command, later adopted by other visionOS projects on the fleet.
Highlights
- ✦Locked 90 FPS immersive-mode physics on real AVP hardware, measured across 23 test windows
- ✦Pinch-to-grab-and-throw, collapsed from a buggy left/right asymmetry into one THUMB-only grab-by-point
- ✦Procedural soundtrack — collisions synthesize chimes in key
- ✦8 TestFlight builds — including one rejection fixed by patching an unsubstituted privacy-manifest template
- ✦Reusable device/simulator build-switcher script, later adopted by other visionOS projects
- ✦Beginner-friendly ELI5 wiki walking through how it was all built
Docs · live from GitHub wiki
Cascade Countdown
A hand-tracked physics arcade game for Apple Vision Pro, built on the Godot game engine via Apple's official upstream visionOS XR contribution (PR #109975).
▶️ Watch the 30-second trailer
Click to play (30s, sound on). Pinch to grab & move, real ↔ virtual hands, the immersion dissolve, two-hand scaling, and the high-score celebration — then scan the on-screen QR to install free from TestFlight.
⚠️ Not affiliated with the Godot Foundation. Cascade Countdown is an independent app by Alex Coulombe, built with the open-source Godot engine. "Godot" is a trademark of the Godot Foundation.
🛠 For developers — how we built this
This wiki is a beginner-friendly (ELI5) walkthrough of how Cascade Countdown was built — for anyone curious about Godot, Apple Vision Pro, or shipping a hand-tracked physics game on real hardware. No XR experience assumed. Start here:
| Page | What you'll learn |
|---|---|
| Getting Started | What Godot is, why Vision Pro needs a special build, and the big picture. ← start here |
| How the Game Is Built | The "build everything in one script" approach and a tour of the moving parts. |
| Hand Tracking, Explained | How a mid-air pinch becomes a grab — and the noise problems we solved. |
| Procedural Audio | The soundtrack is synthesized live from the physics, with zero sound files. |
| visionOS Gotchas | The silent failures that cost us days — so they cost you minutes. |
| Build and Deploy | The copy-paste command pipeline, explained flag by flag. |
The full technical reference (engine-build steps, citations, every limitation) lives in the repo README. The wiki is the teaching version; the README is the spec.
▶️ Just want to play it?
Join the public beta → https://testflight.apple.com/join/bw1aeExJ
Install Apple's TestFlight app on your Vision Pro, open that link, tap Install, then launch Cascade Countdown from your Home View and put the headset on.
What it is
Glowing cubes cascade down through spinning bumpers and ramps onto tilted catch plates in your room. Reach in and pinch to grab and throw any cube into the goal ring. Keep cubes alive and bouncing to rack up points, then poke START for a 30-second time attack with a procedural soundtrack — every collision is a synthesized chime snapped to the musical key, so the chaos harmonizes into a tune.
How to play
- Grab & throw — pinch (index + thumb) near any glowing cube; it sticks where you grabbed it. Flick and release to throw it into the goal ring.
- Score by longevity — a cube kept bouncing is worth far more than one dropped straight through. Keeping cubes in play is the winning strategy.
- Bubble = transmuter — send a cube through the floating bubble to turn it into a sphere; landing both a cube and a sphere pays a mix bonus.
- Resize the goal for a multiplier — two-hand-pinch the goal ring. Smaller = harder = bigger multiplier (up to ×4).
- 30-second time attack — poke START. Beat your high score for fireworks and a crowd cheer; top the online leaderboard for an even bigger celebration.
- Control panel — one grabbable panel: HANDS (mesh / both / real Persona arms), START, MUTE, GESTURES, SKY (immersion toggle), RESET.
Beat your personal best and the whole room celebrates: fireworks bursts, cyan confetti, and a synthesized crowd cheer.
- Source + full README: https://github.com/ibrews/godot-avp-cascade
- TestFlight beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/bw1aeExJ
- Built by: Alex Coulombe (@ibrews)
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