Esports

Update #56: Nintendo Switch & PC

Parkasaurus · published 22 Dec 2021, 17:51 UTC

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Big news friends! Parkasaurus is coming to the Nintendo Switch early 2022!
Bringing Parkasaurus over was a challenge the two of us had always wanted to do ourselves. Playing the game on the Switch feels pretty fantastic – and I don’t think anyone else would have given the same love to the port as we did. Wait wait wait, so how does this relate to the PC/Steam version? Well, the controller support required for the Switch (a TON of work) is coming to Steam, along with some other cool tidbits I thought to talk about:

Fence helper
Guest skeleton optimization
Multi-threading NavMesh
Controller Support

Fence helper

In the video, one can see two fence helpers. The blue bar that appears showing how the wall aligns is currently in the game. We now added a floating tile that helps the player not lose track of the cursor location. This makes creating fences with a controller or mouse snappier and quicker.

Guest skeleton optimization

Who knew the skeleton in the models of the guests took up so much computing power! Maybe some of you knew. Each guest had an entire animation skeleton that the game had to keep track of. Multiply this by 200, 300 guests, and that is a lot of wasted CPU! Now all our skeletal animation was converted to vertex animation so the GPU could help out. This means more guests on screen, which also means we can raise (or remove) the guest cap.

Multi-threading NavMesh

We’ve improved the rebuilding that occurs every time an object is placed in Parkasaurus. The game is broken up into regions that get activated more or less depending on the point of view of the player. This results in a much snappier and lag-free experience building the perfect park.

Controller Support

Everyone said controller support was a lot of work. Did we listen? NO! Was it a lot of work? YES!
Adding controller support to us meant more than just being able to play Parkasaurus with a controller – we wanted the experience to feel as good if not better than keyboard + mouse. We underestimated how complex the interactions are between all our UI windows that have to be solved with a controller. The video below looks simple, but we had to decide and work on the ordering opening/closing windows. Phew.