One of the main cross-platform winter releases of this year – a retro project about nostalgia for the 80s and the difficult boxing fate of Punch Club – will appear on the Nintendo 3DS portable console.
This was announced by Nintendo in a press release dedicated to the company’s participation in the PAX West event, which will be held in Seattle this September. Nintendo noted that it will bring Pokémon Sun, Pokémon Moon, Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past to the event, as well as Punch Club, among other projects.
App2Top.ru I talked with Alex Nichiporchik, CEO of tinyBuild, publisher of Punch Club, about working with Nintendo.
The most important question is, when can Punch Club be expected on the Nintendo 3DS?Alex Nichiporchik
By the end of the year.
How much has the game changed during porting?The interfaces have completely changed.
I had to change my mind. After all, here you have a unique interface – the lower screen is a touchscreen on which all interactive elements are displayed, and the upper one is great for combat.
This is the first tinyBuild game on the platform. How long were negotiations with Nintendo going on (and how easy was it to negotiate with her at all)?It’s easy to work with Nintendo if you’re close to them (we’re 15 minutes from their office in Redmond).
Were there any technical conditions set by the platform? Can you name which ones?Like all platforms, preference goes to the use of unique technologies.
Specifically, the discussion was about Street-pass.
How much and how exactly is working with Nintendo different compared to, for example, Steam or PSN?Steam – an open platform
PSN is closed, like the same 3DS. The only difference is that the SDK is completely different, the platform requirements are different. You have very limited console power, and the usual export from Unity does not work. I had to rewrite everything from scratch.
Unity, on which Punch Club is made, supports 3DS, but this, to put it mildly, is rarely used. Why do you think, the platform is very interesting, there seems to be no oversaturation of content there?Because it’s impossible to just “export” a game from Unity to 3DS.
The support is very minimal – more precisely, the optimization requirements are very strong. It turned out to be easier to rewrite from scratch. Today, developers don’t think much about powerful code optimization, because modern hardware – even phones – have power with a margin, and here you need to work with a 750 MHz processor.
And the last question: what pricing policy do you plan to adhere to on the new platform?We don’t know yet.
Recall that the Punch Club title was released on iOS on January 8, 2016. In the first 10 days, the game brought the authors $ 1 million. tinyBuild announced that the game earned $2 million at the end of February this year.