Suggestion: Port Unreal World to the Switch

[Toaki]

Hi friends,
A quick suggestion: if possible and easy to do, porting the game to the new console Nintendo Switch digital shop, could be a very good boost to sales and popularity.

Why I say this? - Because I have one Switch recently, and the Indie games are making a lot of sucess on it. Some of the most sold games in the eShop of Nintendo are ports of roguelikes and RPG's. Example: Enter the Gungeon, a roguelike dungeon crawler ported from the pc, are in the top 3 mjost sold games at the moment. Other examples of 2D retro indies in the top 5/10: Stardew Valley, Cave Story+, Steam Dug 2, Golf Story, Overcooked, Sonic Mania, etc. (and they are competing with Skyrim, Fifa, Doom, etc.) There a ton of other examples - Switch owners are mainly old guys (30+) that like hard and retro games, and indie titles/roguelikes are good for the portable mode, so they are selling a ton.

An article on Kotaku about this trend: https://kotaku.com/only-two-of-the-current-top-10-most-downloaded-games-on-1819507532

A ton of people that never bought these games in the pc some years ago, are now buying them in the Switch because of the portability or rediscovering them for the 1st time.

The port itself is the hard part, I know it is not easy to do, but the Switch is based on the NVidea Shield tablet, so it is famous for being easy to port stuff to with an easy API, the feedback on the net about that is very good and thats one of the reasons of ports blooming like mushrooms in the autumn in this console.

It could be a good boost to the Unreal World sales, the console is new, with few games/competition in the online shop, and the public of it love roguelikes/rpg's. In the article above and others I have read, some indie companies interviewed say that their sales were much bigger on the Switch than on Steam or any other console. Myself, I never buy digital games on consoles, but are finding myself for the 1st time buying a ton because of the portability, easy of use, and the fact that 2D indie games don't dry thye battery as quickly. I would buy Unreal World for a 2nd time in a blink if it came to the Switch even I having it in .exe and steam format already, and play it even more.

I know that making a port is not easy, but it is just an idea and feedback from a Switch user, while the money making train of this new console is running at full speed for indie games - Unreal World deserves recognition and more buys, and this could be a good medium for that.

Regards

[Puella14]

The Switch is the thing now, I agree. But I think it would be impossible to port this game as it is. Simply because of the buttons. URW utilizes like half of your keyboard and a switch has what like... 8 buttons? Little more? 4 of them would need to be utilized for moving. (It doesn’t have a joy stick as far as I know, right?) I can‘t really imagine how this would work out, without changing the system around a lot and making it very clunky to use, like changing between certain modi (e.g. walking, crafting, skill list) and needing to tap through all the options manually every time.

[Toaki]

Yes, true. I have not tought about the inputs, but I agree, that part would give the most work and a lot to think about. But it is possible, if Civilization was able to port to a console any game can xD But it would need to have the controls remade for sure, with a context kind of menu for the actions. That would take time, and time used for that is time not used for new stuff in the pc version, so it is a gamble. Just a wild random idea, I was playing Switch outside home some days ago and tought to myself: it would be awesom if I could play Unreal World on the move too xD

[caethan]

URW has been in development since 1992.  It's a very long-term project.  It's been primarily a Windows program for a while, and only relatively recently got Linux and Mac ports.  There are only about 10 million Switches sold, and like every other hand-held console, it won't last more than a few years.  I just don't think it's worth spending the development time on porting over to a small market, instead of doing further game development of which there's quite a long list.