Porting...

Sp0tted

I have a question about "Porting." There's been talk about porting Season 1 onto the Wii... and about people being pissed that Brutal Legends isn't going to be made for a PC.

How difficult is it to port a game to a different system?

I'd assume making the game would be the hardest part, how difficult could it be to port or transfer it over to work on another system?

jmm

Difficult is not enough.

Three things (And probably ignoring/forgetting a lot of things):

First, you have different hardware and OS - You have to rebuild from scratch components like the rendering engine (which depends heavily on hardware and/or OS)

Second, some code might explode just by touching it (Trust me, I'm on the middle of porting code of a 500K+ code lines project from an older compiler version to a more current - same platform). Changing platforms its trouble times five.

Third, different platform different mindset. Some things that work on a platform won't necessarily work on another platform.

Sp0tted

Thanks for the info, jmm. It makes sense, now.

Emily

The difficulty depends on the platform you're coming from / going to. Porting CSI from PC to Xbox 360 was fairly painless because the Xbox 360 and the PC are pretty similar under the hood.* Porting it to the Wii was a lot harder because the Wii is completely different.

Now that Telltale's tools work for Xbox 360 and Wii, the porting process should be somewhat easier for us in the future. But as mentioned, if you're not designing with the console in mind to begin with, it still might not turn out to be a great port.

*I can say that because it was finished up a few months ago and I have a short memory. And also I'm not a programmer.

Jay33e

Whilst we are on the subject of porting, any plans for the PS3?

Emily

We've talked about it, but we're not doing it at the moment.