In the last article, we talked about the release candidate and the work that goes into it, namely fine-tuning, technical compliance and bug-squashing. In this final article we will cover what comes next, when a build is almost ready to be released to the world.
For each platform, there comes a time when you must prepare for the dreaded process of submitting your game. The one process that is out of your control is when you finally upload and submit the final code.
You may have a few sleepless nights worrying about how many bugs have been reported or if the game failed even before it entered testing; and yes, this can happen!
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Fine-tuning
Some of the most common areas for fine-tuning are the loading times and memory footprint of the game. These are areas where a PC can have a noticeable advantage over consoles. Games, especially smaller PC only titles, often do not need to pay a lot of attention to the amount of memory that they use, or the time it takes to load a map. Most game PCs these days have fast hard drives or SSDs, and a lot more internal memory than is available on the current generation of console platforms.
Loading times can easily fluctuate two to five times depending on both disk and CPU usage. While 30 seconds is probably fine for a PC game, one-to-two-minute loading times will not provide a great player experience.
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In the previous two articles, we covered the straightforward port stage of the adaptation process and then went onto describing all the different types and approaches we identified for it over the years. You can refresh your memory on straightforward ports right here and on this page. Now, let s move on to the next stage in the process, which we call the tailored build.
The goal of the tailored build stage is to conceptually and technically match the game to the target platform in such a way that it plays and feels as if it were designed for this particular platform from the start. We tailor games because we want to leverage any platform specific features to the maximum extent, and we aim for these versions to be the best versions to date.