Game accessibility! What platforms should a game actually run on? Do you want it to run on a toaster oven while you wait for your bread to be made, or do you require a brand new top of the line graphics card with realistic ray tracing?
All questions I’ve, not really, had to consider the last few days. My good friend and kind fellow Chad has recently given me the go ahead on porting a game he helped create: Hisato no Saku. I don’t plan on rewriting the whole game and coming back to him with some ad revenue bitcoin mining beast. Rather, my goal is to make the game playable and enjoyable on as many platforms as possible. So far, I’ve come up with a very rough list of ideas for what I will aim to do to the game over the coming days:
- Port to Linux
- Add controller support
- Rewrite the renderer to OpenGL 2 (for maximum compatibility, it’s a 2D game)
- Add in window scaling/resizing
- Clean up some of the CPU Usage (better battery life on handheld devices)
Currently the game is relatively small, and only taking up just over 10 mb of disk space. Which is pretty great! It’s also surprisingly efficient when it comes to runtime as well. As it stands, the game itself uses 4.3mb of ram during proper gameplay. I think it stands as testament to the quality of code Chad is putting out.
All things considered, compared to previous professional ports I’ve worked on, this is a dream of a project for me! I even have complete source code! And access to the guy that wrote it!!!
Over the next few evenings I’ll be streaming the port of this game. Hopefully to show some of the process that goes into professionally porting a game to different platforms! This alongside the longer form development of my personal game is always a treat for me. As well as porting the game on stream, I’ll be writing a rough outline of general causes of suspect for porting games, so you can do it too!
