Under första halvåret på marknaden var det mycket svårt fatt få tag på ett Switch 2-kit för utveckling även för större studios, men i slutet av 2025 sades problemen vara lösta. Det är också vad vi på Gamereactor hört från flera studios så i dag är det mer en fråga om vilja om man ska släppa ett projekt till konsolen, snarare än den tidigare situationen där ett enda kit ofta var öronmärkt för ett enda spel.
Häromdagen pratade vi med Vermila Studios om deras speciella utvecklarhistoria, eftersom de var bland de allra första att använda Unreal Engine 5. Och även om de vill släppa sitt indieprojekt till Nintendos hybridkonsol, passade det helt enkelt inte att göra det vid lanseringen. Vissa utvecklare har pekat på svårigheter med UE4 och UE5 när det gäller Switch 2-konverteringar i väntan på uppdateringar från Epic Games, men det verkar inte gälla Crisol: Theater of Idols.
Vermila Studios David Carrasco grundare kommenterar:
"For sure, consoles are always in your mind, and Switch 2 is definitely one of our targets.
But it came out very far into production. And we started in 2020 more or less, where Switch 2 was merely a dream, let's say. So for us, being such a small team, having three coding developers, thinking about creating a specific version for Switch 2 would be, for me, very daring to say. But it's definitely in our minds, and we hope that we could make it happen at some moment."
Vi ville vi även få lära oss mer om utvecklarnas erfarenheter av UE5 och banbrytande tekniker som Nanite och Lumen. Carrasco sade:
"We were actually some of the first studios. If you go back to the presentation of Unreal Engine 5, they had a slate, big slate of studios, worldwide studios using Unreal Engine 5 and we were one of them. So we were able to use it from the very start, much before many others, which means we had a lot of pain during that time. A lot of things didn't work as they should, performance wasn't there, many features didn't work properly... But at the same time, we were learning while the engine itself was being developed. So we had a chance to grow with it and to become very, very familiar.
So using Nanite or Lumen was very useful for us. We've been able to extract a lot from it, especially, for example, when we use Lumen. The fact that we can dynamically light up certain locations without the need of baking those lights and being able to do that in a fairly dynamic way, it makes it much more easy for the production. And at the same time, it gives you more artistic control because you can retry very quickly and make sure that you fine tune every scene to your liking. And with Nanite, for example, you can set up more complex scenes and you don't need to worry about those level of detail. And in the end, you have much more production work to make the same amount of stuff. So in the end, you end up with less assets that have more levels of detail. In our case, we were able to make more. Taking into consideration how many people we are, it definitely helped us accelerate the production."
Crisol: Theater of Idols släpps till PC, Playstation 5 och Xbox Series S/X den 10 februari.
