Oceanhorn 2 Developers: Our First Attempt At Developing A Switch Port Only Ran At 13 FPS

Earlier this month, developer Cornfox & Brothers had confirmed that they were bringing Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm to Nintendo Switch later this year. Apparently, however, the journey to get there wasn’t exactly smooth-sailing!

In a recent development blog post, Cornfox & Brothers detailed their work on getting their game to work with Nintendo’s hybrid console. While they had built the game to run at a decent 30 fps across various mobile devices, they ended up with just 13 fps on the Switch at first!

“Our first Switch iteration was only running at 13 fps. On iOS, our target during development was 30 fps. When Apple Arcade was first announced, it wasn’t clear which device would be the oldest (it ended up being the iPhone 6s). Targeting 30 fps allowed us to maintain a high resolution, and most importantly, stable battery life.”

“…We were puzzled: the game was already optimized for mobile devices. What did we miss? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Modern Apple mobile devices have a more powerful CPU than the Switch – that allowed us to overlook many cases where resources were not efficiently utilized.”

Of course, Oceanhorn 2‘s team have made a lot of optimizations for the game since then – which should result in a “highly-optimized port” for Switch at launch. The details are quite technical, so you can read up on the full extent of these improvements over here.