Hazelnut Bastille Kickstarter update goes into detail about the Switch version

The Hazelnut Bastille dev team is hard at work on the Switch version of the game, and they've shared a major status update via their Kickstarter. Check out the full blurb related to Switch below.

Based on where we are in development, we are at a point where we need to start integrating the constraints and special needs of the Nintendo Switch platform into our builds.

The hurdle that we had until recently is that devkits and information related to the Switch are very closely guarded by Nintendo. Nintendo's method of operating is centered around curation and quality control. Their philosophy, as best as I can work, is to offer the customer a very high level of care at every level of their experience, from their customer support, their conscientious first party content, and their selective certification for third party content. Nintendo is also famously tight-lipped about their process for approving third party developers.

Facing this big and intimidating unknown, and in a position where we must not delay integrating the Switch into our development now, I spent a very large amount of time on our presentation for approval for Switch development- admittedly more time than I expected and budgeted for it. We covered the Studio's history, our personal backgrounds, the development history of Hazelnut, our full development outline and projections, our demographic targets and studies, the relationship of the work with Nintendo's design and content philosophy, major selling points, the mechanics and player experience, quirks of implementation on the Switch, our finance and budgeting, our marketing techniques and projections, a guide to our current media, a collection of past gamespress and influencer coverage, Youtube material, and several other areas. It came out to 40 pages of text and another 50 pages of media, all indexed for easy perusal.

Nintendo liked the presentation, and we've been approved to access Switch development tools and material, as well as the devkits, which is exciting! We can't say a whole lot about it, as there is a deep NDA involved, and it would be easy to say too much without meaning to.

Switch Development

Something else that is interesting to note is that our survey is now at 93% reporting, so we have pretty reliable numbers for various things now.

One surprise is that the percentage of users requesting Switch copies for their rewards is QUITE high... approaching 90%. Going into the campaign, we knew that the Switch community would be the biggest block of interest in the work, but I didn't expect 90%. Seeing those numbers has led us to change how we think about the work; previously, we thought of it as a PC build that would be ported for Switch and PS4. But now I think we have to think of it as a Nintendo Switch game with a PC release and a PS4 port. Some things are the same either way- we are still using the same Unity build, and all the builds are going back to a parent build, but it is a shift in how we think about things.

Mark is working on refactoring the code base to prepare it for the console builds... basic stuff like how input and menus are handled, how ticks and the event manager function. Now that we know what the Switch's constraint profile looks like, we can finally start on that. It is sort of a moment where some coding tech debt is catching up to us, which is one thing that has contributed to not so much outward content to see recently.