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Jeremy Dunham

Last week, Psyonix vice president Jeremy Dunham stopped by IGN’s Nintendo Voice Chat show for a lengthy discussion about Rocket League. Dunham went in-depth about the process of putting the game on Switch, and shared quite a lot of interesting information.

For a while, Psyonix was unsure if Rocket League would be on Switch since the system’s architecture is different from the likes of PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. But the team is happy due to the warm reception. Nintendo has also shown continued excitement in having the game on its console, and Dunham says they’ve been “fantastic to work with.”

One of Nintendo’s big E3 announcements last month was the reveal of Rocket League for Switch. Psyonix’s VP of publishing Jeremy Dunham spoke more about the game in an interview with GamesIndustry.

Dunham started out by saying that the Switch version “is a bit of a passion project” and noted how “Nintendo has been very open with giving us whatever resources that we need”:

“It is a bit of a passion project for us and we want to make sure it is done exactly the way we want it to be done. Nintendo has been very open with giving us whatever resources that we need, answering any questions that we have, allowing us to do cross-network play, which is a big deal and very important to us and they had no problem with that at all. That was the very first question I asked them. I said: ‘If we are going to commit to doing this, would you guys allow us to do cross-platform?’ And they told me that if it is important to us, then we will do cross-platform. There wasn’t even any hesitation.”

Switch was made to be compatible with Unreal Engine 4. Unreal Engine 3, however, is another story. The older version isn’t supported as well, which made it a bit tricky to bring Rocket League to Switch.

Psyonix head Jeremy Dunham talked with GamesBeat about porting Rocket League to Switch, which is being done with some help from Panic Button – the same team that worked on the Xbox One version. He said:

“We feel really confident about it. In the beginning, we weren’t so sure. We had to do custom work. The Switch by itself doesn’t have inherent Unreal 3 support. It only has Unreal 4. To support 3, we had to do custom work.”

Dunham also reiterated what we’ve heard previously – that Rocket League will be 720p and 60 frames per second at all times.

“The main compromise we had to make is we’re running the game in 720p rather than 1080p, even on the TV. It’s our opinion that it’s much more beneficial for the game to run fast at 60 frames per second than to look the absolute best. We’ll ship at 60 frames per second for the docked version and the undocked version.”

Dunham also had some encouraging words about the overall state of Rocket League on Switch. The team “didn’t think we would have it running this smooth, this early.”

“We’re actually ahead of where we thought we’d be. We didn’t think we would have it running this smooth, this early. For a while we were concerned about whether we’d have anything to show at E3 at all. We have a very talented team at Psyonix. Our engineers have done a lot of hard work to make sure this runs as well as it does already. We’ve already discovered things in the last few weeks that we weren’t aware of a few weeks ago. It’s already made the game perform incredibly. We’re very encouraged.”

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Psyonix isn’t setting its sights on creating sequels to Rocket League. Rather than turning it into a franchise, the main game will continue to receive updates and released across new generations of hardware.

Jeremy Dunham from Psyonix told Engadget in a new interview:

“We’re not trying to build six Rocket Leagues. We’re not looking forward to when Rocket League 2 and 3 and 4 are coming out. Rocket League is the game we’re gonna keep updating. It’s important to us to keep that going, cross-generation, across multiple platforms without sacrificing anything.”

Rocket League is a similar position as Minecraft. Minecraft itself has been so hugely popular that a sequel hasn’t been necessary, and the game is continually updated and put out on new systems.

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Rocket League

This information comes from Psyonix vice president Jeremy Dunham…

– Even if Rocket League isn’t the most graphically challenging game, it’s very dependent on the physics, which forced Psyonix to trade off marginally better resolution if it meant getting the game to run properly on the Switch version
– Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s success Switch was a huge motivator for the Psyonix team to get it right on the Switch

“In terms of pure greenlighting for when this project started, three months ago. If you wanna talk about when we first started investigating, messing with dev kits, late last year was about when we first started looking at it.”

– Nintendo first contacted Psyonix about a potential Switch outing before the console was even officially announced
– 8-player local multiplayer
– two-player split screen on a single Switch with each player using a single Joy-Con (party style)
– Works with the Switch Pro Controller

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Rocket League has been a bit hit on multiple platforms since its release last year. However, it’s yet to grace any Nintendo console. Wii U is probably out of the question at this point, but NX could be a possibility.

GamingBolt spoke with Psyonix’s Jeremy Dunham about the possibility of Rocket League ending up on the new console. Dunham shared the following on that topic:

Well, the answer to that would be identical to whether or not we would support a hypothetical PS4K. It is certainly something we would consider. We consider all platforms, and whether or not they would make sense for Rocket League, whether or not they fit our timelines, whether or not we can afford to make our games on them. Every new brand new platform you work on, that is development time you take away from adding features to the existing versions of the game, for a version that the public isn’t even playing yet. So these are all considerations we have to make when we bring up new platforms.

But the answer to whether or not we would do it is identical to the hypothetical PS4K- and that is, could we do it? Should we do it? And does the community want us to do it? Those are all things we have to consider, and if the answers are positive, then we would. Now whether or not it would have cross platform multiplayer, our goal for any version of Rocket League going in is to make it cross network, no matter where you are. So really, it would be a matter of understanding our limitations, what they might or might not be in that situation. So in general we would always try to make it work- whether or not we would in this case would depend on whether or not we develop for the platform in the first place, and then whether or not it would be possible.

Thanks to the Jake for the tip.

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