Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach dev on the challenges of bringing the game to Switch
"the most stable of all the other platforms' versions"
Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach was originally released in 2021, but it didn’t make its way to the Switch until earlier this year. Any time a developer has to port an existing game to new hardware it presents something of a challenge, and this was apparently no exception.
In a new developer blog, Vladyslav Popushoi of Pingle Studio shares his experience working on this particular title. Check out a snippet below, in which he details exactly how the process began of getting the PC game to run on the Switch’s more limited resources.
We had a released PC version, and we realized that bringing it to the portable device would require a lot of simplifications. We needed to balance downgrading the game so it could launch on Switch and decreasing the visuals.
To solve this, we developed a so-called Beautiful Corner approach. The game has a relatively big game world - the supermarket. It feels like an open world in the Metroidvania game series.
Our QA team prepared a report for all the locations. We took a fragment of one of the most loaded locations and downgraded the graphics to the absolute minimum to see how the game performed. Then, we increased the quality bit by bit: extending the textures, calculating the AI of NPCs and enemies, baking the lights, etc. When the picture was good enough for the Client and us, we determined the approximate acceptable quality level and understood what needed to be done to get to it.
Popushoi concludes by saying, “the biggest challenge was managing the memory. The project made us make a lot of original and creative decisions. As a result, the game build took 8GB instead of 79 GB. Also, the Switch version of the game turned out to be the most stable of all the other platforms’ versions, which the original developers highlighted.”
Click here to read the full piece for more insight into the development process of Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach. You can also find the game on the Switch eShop right now to see exactly how it turned out.
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conangiga
8M agoI feel like many developers take the big space of blu-rays as granted and don't care about the file size at all. That's okay if you go physical but a huge pain for download only games and people who have gone completely digital. I mean, there's something wrong with you if you think that it's A-OK for your 1 TB hard drive to be full after downloading barely 10 games.
While the Switch comes with many restrictions it at least makes the devs reconsider how they approach their game's file size.
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