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ABZÛ creative director says porting the game to Switch 'was not an easy undertaking'

by rawmeatcowboy
27 November 2018
GN Version 5.0

ABZÛ is an absolutely gorgeous game no matter how you slice it. The game is like an abstract painting come to life, and the dev team used every bit of PS4 horsepower to display their vision. Wondering how in the world the game made it over to Switch? ABZÛ creative director Matt Nava explains in a Reddit AMA.

“The underwater environment posed a lot of technical challenges... We had a fantastic dev team at Room 8 port ABZÛ to Switch, and it was not an easy undertaking. the game simulates tens of thousands of fish and an equally large amount of dynamic kelp leaves. It also has a unique fog accumulation technique that allows different spaces to have different colors and densities volumetrically. All these critical features were originally designed for the powerful specs of the PS4 and PCs, and hard to be drastically optimized to run on the Switch. I'll be honest- a lot of the team was astounded that Room 8 was able to pull it off! I am super happy with it, it runs great and the game feels like a great fit for the Switch.

Yes there were some pretty low level code optimizations, especially for the fog. There were also optimizations to the visuals, mostly LOD distance tuning. Fortunately, we were able to do extensive tests to make sure that there are no major LOD pops with the new settings!”

[Link]