Porting To Switch - Experiences / Timescales?

Hi,

Would anyone here who has ported a PC MG title to Switch be willing to give an idea of how long the process might be expected to take. I know this is a “how long’s a piece of string” question to an extent but info such as ‘we ported xxx game and it took us xxx’ would be very helpful. Also if there’s any specific pitfalls to look out for.

Info on 2D pixel art type titles particularly welcome!

thanks

Ported Yuppie Psycho To Switch.

You have to get ready for a ride, you’ll have initial setups and “paperwork” to do before being able to start playing a bit with code.

Between learning the porting process, adapting specific cases and having a nice result, I’d say that 3 months is the bare minimum.
If you want another estimate for releasing, then you have to add age ratings, Nintendo lotcheck … you could add another 3 months.

Definitely worth the trip :slight_smile:

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Thanks very much for that info - a very different impression from this thread where Tom suggests most ports should be up and running within a few days!

Are there any particular pitfalls to watch out for would you say, or anything with your game that was a particular bottleneck? I have a lot of experience with porting but have never done consoles, shaders are my main concern at the moment. I only use core .net stuff other than json.net.

Well most of the work will be setting up the environment, getting infos on how to do things and depending on your game complexity, you’ll have some more or less deep changes to do.

Shaders were absolutely nothing of a problem on my side. The only thing i did was limiting a bit some computations to give a bit of relief to the console.

You could be lucky and have things set up in a few days, but I gave you a reasonable timeline for a complex game.
On my side I had to rewrote a lot of things to comply to the monogame console branch, discard external libs ( json.net might be of a problem for you ), optimizing a lot of things that i took for granted on PC, and dealing with native code. You’ll have to deal with very scarce documentation, most of the knowledge being transmitted by chat from individuals having the same problems as you.

It’s not that things are very complex, there is just a lot to do when jumping into the battle.

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Thanks for the extra info - very helpful!

First step - get a dev kit! :grin:

Is Yuppie Psycho done with MonoGame?

I can’t play it because I don’t handle well horror games but boy, I really love the OST.

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Well it’s a bit off topic but the actual game was originally written in Java. I rewrote the whole game runtime in monogame to be able to target consoles and have a more futureproof engine.

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Ha! My engine was originally written in Java too. First J2SE for Applets, later ported to J2ME for feature phones (where it got a lot of use), wrote an emulation layer so I could run it on Android, and then lastly to MonoGame!

Your game looks very cool btw.

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