We’ve been talking an awful lot about the developers at Panic Button lately — but there’s a good reason for that.
They’ve got Nintendo Switch development nailed down pat. After impressing last year with its ports of Doom and Rocket League, it’s moved on to incredible work on Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus; and has also started development on Warframe for the Switch as well.
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Studio head Adam Creighton and technical director Andy Boggs recently took part in a Reddit AMA session to discuss all things Switch and also fielded some Warframe questions.
When asked about how Wolfenstein II pushes the technical limits of the system, Boggs explained, “It always feels like we’re squeezing every last drop out of the hardware when heads down into the project, but after the games ship, we always wind up taking a breath and looking back and saying ‘what if we tried this…’ or ‘I bet we could have optimized ‘, and then we try those things the next time. There’s always something else you can optimize.” To which Creighton added, “More more more.”
They were then asked about working with the Switch’s architecture in general, to which Boggs answered, “A bunch of us having been working on Nintendo hardware for a long time, and everything about it improves by leaps and bounds with each iteration. Outside of the hardware, having good tools makes such a huge difference, and they’re the best they’ve ever been- so I think the indies are spot on.”
Creighton then chimed in. “It’s about tools, documentation, and low-level expertise.
For studios like ours, with big-gun, low-level chops, we’re able to a do lot, compared to devs relatively new to design, development, and optimization. More and constantly evolving tools help us do even more.”
Then there’s the decision making process in terms of what the best projects are to bring to the Switch. Creighton explained, “As far as how do we decide what games to work on, it’s all over the place. There are a lot of things we want to work on, and I spend a lot of time talking to folks about if that makes sense, how do we make that happen, what’s the big win for everyone involved, and then we build a high-level plan and business details around that.
“For other projects, people come to us, talk to us about what they want, we make sure it’s something that we are passionate about. For all of our stuff, we work with them to make sure it makes sense, it’s an interesting technical challenge, and that we can get a quality gameplay experience on the other side.”
You can read the whole AMA here, and even see what the Panic Button guys prefer more — pancakes or waffles.
Meanwhile, you can check out Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus for Nintendo Switch now. Warframe should be available later this year.
