Critadel
I was hired by Nicalis in 2021 to bring this game, which was almost finished at the time, to Nintendo Switch. I took care of all the technical requirements. The initial port ran poorly on Nintendo Switch, with occasional lags and low framerates in most areas.
The bottleneck was mostly in rendering the graphics, I had to optimize for less rendering batches per frame, and get rid of some unnecessary draw-to-texture commands. Since the code was poorly structured with a lot of code duplication, this took longer than expected.
Pikii was handling the localization for China and Japan, but the in-game text in different languages was all hardcoded in GML scripts. To ease the workflow, I wrote a specialized GML parser/patcher in Python to automatically synchronize Pikii’s Google Sheets with the source code. This proved very useful later on as Pixelian Studio released patches on Steam and I had to provide Pikii with an updated sheet so they could re-translate the added/changed texts, and merge them back into the game’s code.
The game was released on October 13th, 2021 for Nintendo Switch in the US and Europe, and on December 16th, 2021 in Japan.
As the PC/Steam version was updated with added content and bugfixes, I had to merge these changes with the console version and also make sure the translated strings for China and Japan were up to date. The update for Nintendo Switch was released on August 12th, 2022.