The Banner Saga Console Port Interview

In case you’re interested in the rationale behind The Banner Saga’s console ports and the work that went into them, you might want to give this interview over at Gamasutra a read. Admitteldy, a significant part of the interview will only be interesting with people who are deeply invested in game development, either in an amateur or professional fashion, but I think a few nuggets are worth a read for a wider audience too:

What kind of technical considerations did you have to take into account? What was the biggest technical hurdle?

The Banner Saga engine utilizes Adobe AIR, which made it easy to port to mobile (iOS and Android), but more difficult to port to consoles. We chose to go the route of putting the game engine, almost unmodified, inside a code wrapper that performs on-the-fly translation into the idioms of the target platforms (PS4, XB1, PS Vita, etc.). On PS4 and XB1 this wrapper is called Autodesk Scaleform.

Our engine architecture allowed us to integrate our fully animated characters into the game much more quickly, and to integrate our graphical user interfaces directly into the game code. It allowed us to launch on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android quickly. When we started the project, Unity wasn’t as mature as it is now. Clearly, a project starting off today would benefit from using a core engine that supports as many target platforms as possible (such as Unity).

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From business and production perspectives, do you feel it was worth porting over to console platforms, and would you do it again?

Absolutely worth it. Even though our own process took twice as long and cost twice as much as we had budgeted, it is still only a fraction of what it cost to make the game in the first place. Why spend all the effort making a game and stop short of putting it out on as many platforms as possible?

Also, we feel strongly that The Banner Saga has something special and unique to offer console gamers, both as a turn-based strategy game and as a cinematic story experience. We set a high quality bar for ourselves with this game, and I think it really comes off well as a console living room experience.