American Arcadia

Overview

American Arcadia is a puzzle-adventure game that mixes a 2.5D platforming game with first person puzzles to deliver an amazing story full of misteries, stunning environments, action and a thought-provoking storyline.

My role in this game was to deliver the best experience possible for all the current available consoles on the market, those being Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One/X/S and Xbox Series X/S. I worked alone with the project producer since the beginning of the development on consoles, but one coworker joined the porting team to help with the development of the Nintendo Switch version. Later, another developer substituted the first one and helped to speed up the process to finish the Xbox versions.

Since I was the only developer who worked on this project from start to finish, I took the role to lead and help my team in anything I could while we tried to meet our deadlines.

Biggest challenge I've faced on this project?

Old gen consoles were kind of a nightmare because this game was not really designed with a hard disk drive in mind (Nintendo Switch has a flash memory, but you could still play the game from an SD memory card). The result was a lot of work put into the multiple instant loadings and seemless transitions of the game for Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One (the first one being also a headache in terms of both GPU and CPU performance in a lot of scenarios).

Biggest lesson I've learned on this project?

Well, I've actually never had so many problems with videos and media players in any project. Ever. This port really helped me understand how media reproduction works on PC and consoles, and why you should avoid playing a lot of media files all at once!

Platforms

Nintendo Switch

PlayStation

Xbox