CrossCode delayed to 2020 on Switch, porting studio shares status update
Posted on December 2, 2019 by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Switch eShop
CrossCode, a 2D action-RPG, was announced for Switch at the start of this year. The original plan was to have the game ready by the end of 2019. Radical Fish Games has now officially confirmed a delay, and we also have an update from Deck13 – the studio handling the Switch port.
In its status report, Deck13 mentioned that it “underestimated the amount of work a bit”. The team also had to consider performance after translating the original HTML5 code.
Here’s the full explanation from Deck13:
Michael here from Deck13. Publisher of CrossCode and the folks who are porting the game to consoles. And yes, we’ve been reading your tweets. Your posts on reddit. Your messages on Facebook. The outcalls on Discord. And we’re pretty sure there have been some Tik Tok videos, too. And as promised via Twitter, we’ll talk about the state of the console versions a bit. Also Switch, yes.
First of all: We’re still working on it and we’re making really good progress. That being said, we hoped for a 2019 release earlier this year. And – as you can see – this did not work out as intended. We underestimated the amount of work a bit. Or, in other words, it became… complicated. Especially the performance became a major challenge. Lea would say: Why?
That’s why: CrossCode is written in HTML5. And that means that there is tons of JavaScript. And live compiling it in a Chromium Browser is causing security issues on consoles and is forbidden on most platforms as hackers could attack the hardware through that. So we had to find a solution. Which is basically an interpreter which translates the code but locks it up in a cage. That also means: We had a performance bottleneck. As the code was read by the interpreter and then translated into something the console would understand and then read by the console. It is like watching a movie in a movie in a livestream. Yet: We have it under control now. We’re still ironing out the last issues, fixing some broken bosses and quests (which also have to be interpreted which means the interpreter must be able to read them etc.). But we’re getting there.
More details can be found in this video, where Robert, who is working on the interpreter, is sharing some details:
How? How can we not mention Switch. Well, we’re doing it now: We’re focusing on the Xbox right now for no specific reason but just to focus on one platform. Technically, with the way the interpreter is working, the step to other platforms is rather easy from there. Okay, for the Switch we need to do some further optimization, but that’s, compared to the rest, just some minor stuff. After that we’ll “just” need to pass the certifications.
When will CrossCode release on consoles? We’ll announce that once we have a fixed date set. Expect an announcement on a rather short notice here as we are, obviously, also in discussions with the platform holders about that. To shorten the wait, we’ve prepared a small trailer for now:
