Mastiff shares the challenges of bringing Gurumin 3D from PC to 3DS

A portion of a Miketendo64 interview with Mastiff's Bill Swartz...

Miketendo64: “And since we mentioned being Gurumin to Steam, a feat that amazed fans with what you were able to pull off, let’s talk about Gurumin 3D. how does the Steam version compare to the 3DS one you’re bringing out?”

Bill Swartz: “Gurumin was originally a PC game. Releasing it on Steam took some work since we needed to update the game for modern versions of windows, and add Trading Cards and other Steam specific functionality. But all-in-all I suppose you can think of it as altering a suit and Gurumin on 3DS required reweaving the fabric of the suit. Because memory and processor cycles on a PC are basically infinite (of course not literally, but PCs are fast and have a ton of memory) there was no need for Gurumin to be computationally efficient. That was fine, and allowed the developers to focus on producing a fun and attractive game. However, the 3DS has limited memory and only has so much processing power, but double the processing challenge if you are going to take advantage of 3D. If you are displaying in 3D, and to release a 2D game on 3DS is a bit of a waste in our eyes, you need to essentially draw on two screens at once, one for each eye. That means if you want your game running in 30FPS your program needs to do the same work that on a PC would be required for a 60FPS game. The programming team had to spend a tremendous amount of time finding ways to improve drawing efficiency so images could be produced at the necessary speed with enough processor cycles left over to allow the controls to feel fast and responsive. It was a huge, huge pain. The upside though was I did learn how to say “frustum culling” (a series of techniques to stop the program from drawing objects that aren’t in the area of view) in Japanese. It’s Shisuidai Karingu or, if you are just talking about detection of objects in the field of view, Shisuidai Hantei. Glad I could share, I feel better now.

Another issue was controls. When I got started in the industry people use say “The U/I is the game.” I don’t think that’s entirely right, and the phrase isn’t heard much anymore, but there is some truth to it. Making a game built for a mouse and keyboard feel good with 3DS controls took a lot of time, a lot of thought, and a lot of trial and error.

For all those challenges I’m very proud to say we got to the finish line with a game that users will love, one that lives up to the potential of Gurumin.”