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The Adventures of Elena Temple developer explains porting process and state of the eShop

by yoshiller
15 May 2018
GN Version 5.0

The following information comes from an interview on seafoamgaming.com with Catalin Meru, the developer of The Adventures of Elena Temple:


Q4: Speaking of the Switch version, how did contact with Nintendo start on bringing the game over to the platform? Last year interview after interview came out about how iron-fisted Nintendo were with indies that were new to making games or indies that were just wanting to port their older games, unless they were Japanese and publishing on the Japanese eShop. (Plantera DX had to wait in Japan for a while to get released over here despite it being a western made game) Did you end up having any similar difficulties getting the game ported to Switch, or did you manage to come in at a recent time where they weren’t nearly as strict as they used to be?

A4: I don’t want to get into too many details, I don’t want to breach the NDA by mistake, but what I can say is that the people I worked with from Nintendo were just lovely super helpful people. For me the process of onboarding and getting the game on the store was much easier than I expected, especially after having made this opinion over the years that self publishing on consoles is tough as hell. It seems to me Nintendo has opened up a lot to indie developers. If it weren’t for them, I don’t know if I’d have continued my indie adventure after seeing the poor results the game had on Steam.
But, like I said, things look good on the Switch, at least for my very low expectations – let’s just say that if I make 10k units, I officially declare this an insane beyond my wildest dreams success, but I have quite a few more success levels under that value too!

Q5: In regards of the porting process, was there any Switch features you enjoyed tinkering with the most? I felt some clever HD rumble usage in the game, although it was light, and the video capture tool was available from the get-go, too. Was there anything else that may have been tinkered with, but didn’t make the cut?

A5: Porting went very smoothly for me as the game was made in Unity. I spent more time tinkering for the Switch version, like you said, particularly with the HD rumble – it was definitely the coolest feature for me to play with. Support for the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller was another big thing. I can’t think of anything that I wanted to put in the game specific to the Switch, but had to cut it.
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