Stefan Gagne's Fiction Factory

25+ years of novels, games, and other creative fiascos.

Consolation Prize

by

We’ve been asked this quite often — “Will Arcade Spirits be coming out on Switch or PS4 PS VITA or XBox One or Ouya or Intellivision or the Fairchild Channel F?” Console gamers like their story-driven games too, and it’s perfectly understandable to want a port.

Let me say up front we are NOT ruling a console port out. But I figured this week, I’d let you peek behind the curtains and see why isn’t not as easy as checking the ‘Compile Switch Version’ box and hitting OK.

Arcade Spirits uses the open source Ren’Py engine, which is a wonderful Python-powered system that gets you up and running quickly when making a visual novel. It’s powerful and customizable and has many of the features we needed right out of the box. We didn’t have to code our own save game system, or our own history buffer, or any of the standard visual novel systems — it just does it for you without much fanfare.

Alas, one thing we hadn’t realized when deciding to use Ren’Py is that there are no console ports of the engine. It’s open source, yeah, but requires Python, OpenGL, and a host of other tidbits to be ported before it can even consider the possibility of starting to maybe work on another system.

It’s not impossible — anybody with enough know-how and skill could probably port it. But so far nobody has, so we’d be starting from square one on a task we are woefully unprepared for. There’s a reason I picked a scripting system for this game instead of coding it down to the metal in assembly, folks. I ain’t that amazing at coding.

(UPDATE: A new wrinkle in the works. For a Switch port, it’s not enough to port the engine — since it’s not based on Unity, essentially every individual visual novel would need to be one whole and cohesive project with a complete dev kit and development contract, and likely still need to involve Renpy’s development team. So it’s a much taller ask than I had anticipated in the first place. Not sure if this is the case for PS4 but it’s likely the same issue. Fortunately there is a UWP version of Renpy in the works, so XBox One is possible, but still a long ways off and may have other hurdles.)

So, what’s the alternative? Basically, moving the whole kit ‘n kaboodle over to another visual novel engine, one which already has console support. Notably any system designed for Unity would do the job. But porting a game, even one as “simple” as a visual novel, is difficult. How do I do the customized visual effects and UI, when I don’t know enough to customize Unity to my needs? What about future localization efforts? It’s a tough sell, especially when we’re releasing in Q1 2019.

That leaves us with three options. Figure out how to port Ren’Py (or hire someone to do it), figure out how to port the game to another engine (or hire someone to do it), or let it slide for now and maybe switch engines before starting a sequel.

I won’t say what option we’re taking because, well, we don’t know! Right now we’re focused on getting the Win/Mac/Linux version out the door in good shape, so you have a quality game from day one. But… if that game sells well enough, if it’s clear there’s a burning hunger for Arcade Spirits… who knows what may happen?

Comments

  1. Speaking as a Linux user of over a decade, That the game is supposed to run on Linux is already more cross-platform support than I would expect from a novelist making their first foray into interactive fiction(or at least, speaking as someone who discovered City of Angles shortly after it was completed, went back to read your older novels after finishing Lucidity, and caught up with Floating Point around the time of Exodus 2 or 3, I’m not aware of any prior Interactive projects on your part). Perhaps I should give running the public demo another try. Could you possibly link me to a list of dependencies for this game’s engine? I rely on an application written in Python for daily computer use, but the last time I tried running the demo, I got a bunch of error messages I didn’t bother debugging at the time.

    Speaking as a blind person, I’d be ecstatic to actually be able to play this game(and somewhat disappointed you didn’t go more retro and make it a text adventure rather than a visual novel, but I let that slide since text adventures are a long dead genre as far as the mainstream is concerned and has even fewer options for those without the programming chops and dedication to code everything from scratch), and since, as far as I know, none of the major consoles have any system-level accessibility features that would even allow a blind person to launch a game unassisted, I’m not too bothered by the lack of console ports, and I would think blind readers a smaller market than several major groups of non-English readers, so I wouldn’t expect special effort put into making the game accessible. But again, if I can get the game running on my Linux box, I’m thinking chances are good the engine exposes text in a way a screen reader can get at.