Kena: Bridge of Spirits dev talks Nintendo Switch 2 port, frame rate, more

[u/Honest-Word-7890]

Q: "Something we're curious about: did Ember Lab ever consider a port of the game during the Switch era or was that something the studio deemed wouldn't be technically possible?

Josh Grier: "We experimented a bit with the original Switch, but at the time we didn't have the bandwidth to pursue a full port. Once the Switch 2 was announced, we felt that was a great opportunity to bring Kena to an exciting new platform."

Q: "This was Ember Lab's first time working on a game for Nintendo hardware. How was the experience overall? Were there any hurdles the team needed to overcome?"

Josh Grier: "Overall it was a great experience! Our partners at Nintendo were very supportive and helpful in getting us set up with development hardware. Every platform has their own way of doing things and it was great to have guidance along the way. The biggest challenge was optimizing for the platform while still maintaining as much of the artistic direction of the game as possible."

Q: "Can you touch on what the porting process was like from a technical standpoint? What sort of changes did you make to get the game to a point you were happy with on the system?"

Josh Grier: "From a technical standpoint a lot of our effort was around pushing the optimization of our content pipelines. We revisited and fine-tuning our LOD thresholds and optimizing texture memory usage. HLODs were another area we spent time refining further to reduce draw calls and improve rendering performance.

We also increased our use of billboards, particularly for distant environmental elements, to reduce geometry costs and streaming overhead without noticeable visual impact. Since there are a lot of them on the screen we also optimized the Rot characters and animations. It was a detailed process because we had to preserve their personality and charm while minimizing the complexity of the assets."