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The Sinking City dev team details the hard work they put into the Switch port, confirm Switch-specific features
The Sinking City is making its way to Switch later this year, and developer Frogwares has been working their butts off to make the port happen. In an interview with Nintendo Life, we find out just how much work has been put into this port.
I want to emphasize that the team has worked really, really hard to optimize the Switch version of the game. It runs at a stable 30 frames per second, and we did our best to incorporate the feedback we have received after the game was released on other platforms.
That includes numerous bug fixes, improvements to the crowd AI and performance. We even made certain changes to combat - the guns now sound more satisfying, and we added new VFX and camera shake effects when you shoot.
When it comes to the sacrifices, yes, there are some. To name a few, we went over the city and removed a few pieces of irrelevant, yet especially taxing content, completely reworked cloth physics and water, and also reduced the number of polygons on certain characters as well as certain visual effects.
Additionally, we switched to FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-aliasing) instead of TAA (Temporal Anti-aliasing). The transition was challenging, but it helped us save around 20 percent of the overall resources. Our first and foremost priority was to keep the artistic integrity of the project, while removing resource-draining but mostly unimportant content, that the player won’t be seeing often on the screen. Overall, we are really happy with how the game looks and plays on the Switch.
It certainly seems like The Sinking City will be a quality port when it comes to the technical aspects. What about extra bells and whistles for the Switch version? Frogwares confirmed that there's plenty to look forward to.
Yeah, several. The game will feature the option of using gyroscope when aiming with weapons, and control the camera when using the boat. Additionally, you can use the touch screen functionality in the menu, mind palace and to pick the dialogue options in conversations.