Changing game engines in the middle of a project is no small feat for a developer, but that is what Norwegian studio Red Thread Games set out to do with its crowdfunded episodic adventure series, Dreamfall Chapters, which is a continuation of the story from the cult classic adventure games The Longest Journey and Dreamfall.

According to Red Thread founder Ragnar Tørnquist, he believed the switch from Unity 4.6 to Unity 5.2 was necessary, but it nearly destroyed the studio. While he was happy with the gameplay and story of the first few episodes of Dreamfall Chapters, Tørnquist said he was dissatisfied with its technical performance.

“When it came to performance, however, the game stumbled,” he said in an article for Medium. “It was — this is an understatement — not fantastic. Even with above-recommended hardware specs, many players suffered suboptimal frame-rates and memory-related freezes.”

Tørnquist explained that he had four goals in mind in changing to Unity’s newer game engine (from his article):

• To improve development speed, build processes, and game editor performance and stability;
• to increase in-game performance — frame-rate, memory usage, stability;
• to facilitate for forthcoming ports to new platforms, primarily PlayStation 4.
• In addition, Unity had announced they were discontinuing development on the 4.x branch of their engine in order to focus on the 5.x branch.

“F—k it, it was worth it”

Despite feeling that the move was necessary, actually switching to the new engine was not a simple task, and Red Thread faced enormous challenges in moving to Unity 5.2.

“Some days, I didn’t think we would [finish the move],” Tørnquist admitted. “Part of me believed this was the end of the road for us, forever stuck in a muddy ditch, hood propped open, engine smoking, as we watched our finances run down and our players vanish in a cloud of dust up ahead.”

The studio eventually persevered, however, and the new engine port has been pushed out as a free update for previous episodes on Steam.

“The new engine has provided us with the tools we needed to not just improve internal production pipelines and optimise performance,” Tørnquist said, “but also to up the stakes when it comes to visual quality — particularly in terms of lighting, shaders and materials, and visual effects.”

“We’ve also effectively future-proofed Dreamfall Chapters — at least for several years — ensuring that we’ll benefit from upcoming bug fixes and 5.x engine updates. The desktop versions will reap the rewards of future improvements, and we’re also in an excellent position to bring the game to new platforms. Like PlayStation 4.”

Tørnquist concluded, “F—k it, it was worth it.”

Images courtesy of Red Thread Games via Medium