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Banner Saga dev: Don’t rely on a game engine unless you have the source code
Porting software from one platform to another can be incredibly difficult, and video games are no different. In a recent interview with Gamasutra, Stoic Studios co-founder John Watson talked about the difficulty his team faced when porting The Banner Saga from PC to consoles, and how much easier it would have been if the game had been developed today rather than several years ago.
“When we started the project, Unity wasn’t as mature as it is now,” Watson said. Unity is a popular game engine that allows games to be developed for multiple platforms simultaneously.
He added, “Clearly, a project starting off today would benefit from using a core engine that supports as many target platforms as possible (such as Unity).”
“Do not rely on any software technology or engine for which you do not have the source code”
According to Watson, the custom game engine used to develop The Banner Saga’s played a role in how hard it was to port the game to consoles, but the primary complications arose from its use of the Adobe AIR runtime environment.
“The root cause of complications, however, is the fact that the underlying core technology, Adobe AIR, is a total black box completely under Adobe’s control,” Watson said. “There is no way to obtain source code for their technology. You are at Adobe’s mercy when it comes to bug fixes and feature improvements. For our project, I don’t think we could have launched as quickly as we did using any other approach.”
“However, for developers in general I would strongly recommend: Do not rely on any software technology or engine for which you do not have the source code.”
Despite the difficulty in porting The Banner Saga to consoles, Watson said that he believes it was worth the effort.
“Even though our own process took twice as long and cost twice as much as we had budgeted, it is still only a fraction of what it cost to make the game in the first place,” Watson said. “Why spend all the effort making a game and stop short of putting it out on as many platforms as possible?”
You can read the full interview with Watson here.
Image courtesy of Stoic Studio via Steam Store
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