Armature Studios have taken up the challenge of porting Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night to Wii U, looking to defy widespread belief that the Wii U can’t handle Unreal Engine 4. And, they’re to share exactly how they did it once they’ve finished.
Epic Games had once described Unreal Engine 4 as “supremely scalable,” before suggesting that their older Unreal Engine 3 was “a really good fit” for Wii U.
That resulted in games such as Batman Arkham City: Armoured Edition and Mass Effect 3: Special Edition ported across, with Epic’s vice president Mark Rein later remarking that Unreal Engine 4 wouldn’t support Wii U, PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.
“It turns out that a people have shown a ton of interest in our plan to port UE4 to the WiiU and PS Vita,” Armature wrote on in Bloodstained’s Kickstarter update. “Since they’re not officially supported platforms, it’s going to be a lot of work to get Bloodstained and UE4 on these platforms, but we are up to the challenge.”
They continued, “Since the community got these platforms off the ground, we figure that it’s best to let the community have them back when we’re done. As a result, after the release of Bloodstained we will share, for free, the UE4 WiiU and Vita code with any developer authorized to develop on those platforms! Thank you all very much for this opportunity!”
Discussing this further with in a Gamasutra interview, Armature’s technical director Jack Mathews expands: “The first steps for any project like this is to do whatever you can to just get the code building on the target hardware while documenting everything you had to disable or remove to get there. Once you’re at that point, it’s then about putting the pieces laying on the floor back into place, slowly making those pieces work on the new hardware as you go.
“We’re very familiar at this point with hardware features of the Vita as well as the Wii U, so a lot of it is going to come down to working within those hardware feature sets to facilitate as much of the UE4 feature set as possible. From there, we’ll end up doing a lot of performance profiling and tuning, and adapting our focus on optimization as the development of the game unfolds.
“We will do this and when we’re done, anyone who wants it (and is allowed by first parties to have it) can have it. It’s that simple.”
[Thanks GamesIndustry International]