I Am Setsuna devs on the process of releasing the Unity-based game on Switch
At Unite 2017 Tokyo, a special panel was held about how the Unity-based I Am Setsuna was brought to Switch. The talk was highlighted by the appearance of Usuke Kumagai from Tokyo RPG Factory. Yuichiro Kitao and Tomoyuki Kurino from Gem Drops were present as well. Gem Drops was involved with programming, graphics and planning support, and the localized version for the Switch version of I Am Setsuna.
To begin, the team heard that Nintendo’s new hardware – known as NX at the time – supported Unity. In order to accumulate know-how on methods of the hardware, the process began of porting I Am Setsuna to Switch.
It was planned early on to release I Am Setsuna within a month from Switch’s hardware launch. By Fall 2016, Unity’s optimization progressed. Error messages that previously appeared with I Am Setsuna began to be resolved. Then by the end of fall last year, the team was finished with pre-submission to Nintendo. It seems I Am Setuna was the first title to enter this process.
The timeline continues with early winter towards the end of last year. A meeting with Unity was suddenly held, and it was decided that I Am Setsuna would end up becoming a title aimed for Switch’s launch. Nintendo asked for the developers to finish the master version that year if possible.
One slide touched on why the team was able to successfully release I Am Setsuna for Switch’s launch:
– Unity was used
– It was already a multiplatform title (worked on Steam version after PlayStation versions)
– There were no online or versus features
– The title was not requiring high workload (stress / load on the hardware)
– Made good use of a forum from the Nintendo Developer Portal
And finally, one other slide regarding the difficulty of porting existing projects to Switch:
– Need to match the characteristics of the hardware
– Have to get a good grasp on the specs (develop it while paying attention to where the frame rate changes)
– Setting various aspects such as the app’s icon, languages, etc. are said to be very simple
– Good compatibility for titles that have or planned to have multi-platform support on home and portable consoles
I Am Setsuna successfully made it to Switch for launch back in March. The RPG added a free Temporal Battle Arena update last month, allowing you to take on other players’ parties.
