You might remember my previous adventure with The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED], and also many previous wrestling matches with the Nintendo Switch, so why not put the two together? :)
When I first pitched Leonard Menchiari on doing a Linux version of his game, I showed him my Patreon page, to demonstrate the wacky business model I do here: patrons pay for ports, not the original developers. The newest game on my page at the time was A Dark Room for Nintendo Switch, and this was of immediate interest to him, having been on the search for a way to get his game onto the console.
While the original The Eternal Castle from 1987 was written in machine code--not even assembly language, those crafty programmers!--the "[REMASTERED]" version is built with GameMaker, which was a new experience for me in general, but I plunked down the cash for a Linux license and, as an impulse buy, plunked down considerably more cash for the Switch license, too. Leonard and I made a deal that the first revenue from the Switch game would pay back that investment in the GameMaker license, which was bold, because neither of us had any idea how to actually get a game published on the Switch.
While this was going on, Nintendo (who mostly sends all applications for Switch access to /dev/null) found Leonard's application stuck to the edge of their digital trash can, where it was holding on by its fingertips, and approved him, giving him the power to self-publish the game without going through a third party.
Beside one stretch where I bricked my devkit and had to send it off for repairs, we worked tirelessly on the game, having an initial cut late in 2019, and something that looked pretty good around Christmas.
One thing I learned from this experience: all my talk about Unreal and Unity and GameMaker, and how great it is that you can just click the "export to some foreign platform" button and poof, your port is done? I won't be talking like that anymore! This was a lot of work! Not only do you need to polish and tweak for the platform, a million little anvils fall out of the sky and land on your head as you go along.
We submitted the game to lotcheck, where it is scrutinized by Nintendo before they approve it for publication. We would fail for something silly, and resubmit it, a week or more lost each time. There was incorrect metadata, misunderstandings about how controllers are meant to be configured, and bugs. Oh god, the bugs! We had a godawful bug that kept popping up, that we would fix, and then it would show up again, but only when the lotcheck tester was standing there with his finger hovering over the "REJECT" button. We killed that bug like six times in fun and interesting ways. I started having that nightmare where someone is chasing you and you run forever, knowing all I can do is keep going. I assume somewhere in the world, a collection of game testers chat every day on their coffee break about what a fucking moron I am that I kept sending them a build with what looks like the same crash bug.
Then, finally, I put in a ridiculous fix--the true sacrifice to the Gods of Game Development is you abandoning your unwillingness to compromise--and the lotcheck people didn't dump the game out for awhile. It just sat there, listed on the website as "in testing," with no further comment. We assumed they all got furloughed due to the pandemic. But then without warning, and without the choir of angels I always assumed Nintendo used for notifications, we got a simple email saying we were approved. Leonard asked me if he was reading it right. I wasn't sure. NO TAKEBACKS, i screamed at my inbox.
Next thing I knew, Leonard was setting up the storefront and contacting game journalists, and a breath after that, preorders were live, and now here we are.
The game will be available for download on the 15th, but you can buy it now and it will trickle down to your Switch on the appropriate day. I'll be posting a few download keys on Twitter on the 15th, but I'm also going to do a few on Wednesday the 6th (LATER TODAY!). Fun thing about Switch download keys: they download the playable game right away instead of waiting for preorders to end! Keep an eye out!
If you don't get a download key: please buy the game; unlike most games I work on where my expenditure is time, I would really like to recoup my personal GameMaker investment:
...but while that license's 12 months trickle by, if anyone has a GameMaker 2 title they'd like ported to the Switch, drop me a line. I learned a lot about how to do it from this project and have the scars to prove it. :)
Want to play the game in all its CGA glory on a handheld device that's 250 times more powerful than the supercomputers of 1987? Hit up the Switch storefront here!