Become an Operant on the move with ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies on Steam Deck! Our espionage RPG has been Steam Deck-verified since its release, with our development team making several adjustments to offer the best experience even on a smaller device.
An example of this was the choice to use Vulcan for rendering to bypass the Steam Proton translation from DirectX, which raised the framerate by up to 23%. Detailed testing highlighted scenes with complex visual effects, which could lead to framerate drops. These were then targeted for optimisation to benefit players on all platforms.
When it comes to resolution, the developers targeted 800p rather than 720p for the best presentation from the available screenspace. This meant rendering in 16:10 instead of the more common 16:9 aspect ratio and much of the UI has been altered to adapt to this benefitting PC players with a wider range of screens too.
"The team was keen on making ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies a great experience on Steam Deck," says Dr. Kay Ross, Head of Engineering at ZA/UM Studio. "Any optimisations we make for the platform also help people on all other ones too, both in performance and accessibility. For a game with large amounts of text to digest, making the font scalable makes it more readable for the smaller Steam Deck screen. It is then also more readable for anyone on desk-bound platforms who might require larger fonts for any other reason."
The framerate is limited to half the refresh rate by default to extend the time the game can run off battery in handheld mode. This means 30fps for the LCD models and 45fps for the OLED model. However, players have the option to increase the framerate in the settings by rendering at full refresh rate, effectively doubling the frames per second.
"By optimising scenes, VFX, lighting and assets to run better on the Steam Deck, those areas also run more smoothly for everyone. It was a satisfying and successful collaboration between programmers, technical artists, and artists."
Get up to 20% off ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies now in the Steam Summer Sale: