
We just got Death By Scrolling running on the Switch. We had to do some optimization because we were doing stupid stuff with rendering the tile map. Modern PC machines are so fast these days that you can do a lot of stupid stuff and it doesn’t matter. Back in the day (queue angry old man) I had to count cpu cycles and every byte of memory was precious. Nowadays memory is basically infinite.
But it’s different for consoles, they do have a limited amount of memory and you do have to pay attention to performance.
One thing that really bothers me when I play Switch games ported from PC or other consoles is the lack of care over font size. Things that look good on a big monitor or TV are unreadable on the Switch (and the Steamdeck).
We’ve taken great care to make everything big enough to be readable on handhelds, but it’s a real pain. As a designer you want to cram enough information on each screen, especially for RPG-ish games.
People get used to html/css rendering and how good it is at flowing to fill space and around images. Games often don’t have text rendering engines that are that complex (using a html/css engine internally is overkill).
One of the big upgrades I want to do to my engine is better text flow rendering, it will never be as good as html/css in the browser, but it could be a lot better/easier. It’s one of the things I’m envious of Godot.