Development studio Virtuos, who are no strangers to the Nintendo Switch, have participated in an interview with Geek and gave some advice.
What they did
In the interview the team has given other developers advice on how best to approach development on Nintendo’s latest platform. Virtous for those who do not know is the company behind Starlink: Battle for Atlas as well as Dark Souls Remastered fior the Nintendo Switch.
Advice
Don’t try to force what worked on other platforms on the Switch. You might need to change your approach to get the most out of the hardware. Common areas to focus should be data compression, forward vs deferred rendering, vertex processing and a scalable threading model.
Teams should also start considering Lotcheck requirements from the beginning, especially for features that involve multiplayer or something non-standard, in order to avoid surprises during the final phase of bug fixing.Nintendo has a pretty sophisticated online system for creating
Lotcheck related documentation, test cases and even automated testing, so take advantage of it. Start preparing these things early, upload a build for automatic test as soon as possible and deal with any issues even before your final crunch.
Don’t forget about Amiibo – if you are considering Amiibo, make the decision early so that you have as much time as possible to design and test full support including extreme cases and failure scenarios.
We wished more developers would be as open as Virtuos when it comes to hurdles and how they approached them. Can’t we all just learn from the things others experienced?
