Hate to interrupt everyone getting all hot & bothered about the forthcoming Switch version of Call of Duty: Declassified (with free Road to Victory eShop code) it's important to remember that we need all the early portable Call of Duty entries first. We need to revive Operation Rain(ingCOD)fall to
convince n-space to give VR a break & bring Switch people the DS FPS heat! 
LATE EDIT: You're right I got them confused.com with
nDreams for some nReason. Actually looking up all the studios that worked on portable Call of Duty games, they're
dead, they're all
dead! Even when they
nStigate a rebrand they're still dead (what's with all the lower case n developers anyway?) or
suffered a fate
worse than death. Must be some kind of handheld Ju-On curse.
Signs are looking very good for Nintendo's upcoming consoles, even moreso with every publishers looking for additional revenue streams currently.
Every company ought to already have a back catalogue strategy & be wading knee deep in the archives to Built the (Intellectual Property) list. The current economic situation & next-gen Switch launch provide extra incentive to do so with greater urgency. There's gold in dem porting hills! Following up on a
post earlier in the year...here's another studio for Nintendo to hire.
Not sure why people are questioning if new hardware we know nothing (officially) about is up to the (unspecified) task when the Switch has been used by many developers to good effect (Doom, The Witcher 3, Alien Isolation) plus lesser known examples like Rebellion Developments studio Rebellion North widely praised Switch versions.
Extra, extra, read all about it!
How Rebellion North are spreading their wings with best-in-class ports and original projects
Our "Sniper Elite 4" Journey: Lessons in Porting AAA Action Games to the Nintendo Switch
Sniper Elite 3 Ultimate Edition: Switch vs PS4 Tested - A Superb Conversion!
Zombie Army 4 - Switch vs PS4 - A Next-Level 'Impossible Port' - DF Tech Review
Nintendo can identify games with quality ports on Switch, seek out the studios responsible & investigate the possibility of offering contract work for new projects.
Eternal Darkness Reboot?
Vladyslav Popushoi, Project Lead of the UE4 Department at
Pingle Studio, shares his team's experience with their successful port of the PC version of Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach to Nintendo Switch.
The legacy version works at 120fps on PC, but there are some drops to 60fps. But it is okay because the player could hardly notice it due to the measured tempo of the game. The game also used a lot of memory due to some big-size textures, animations, light maps, etc. All these things required a lot of optimization to run the game on Switch.
Our QA team prepared a report for all the locations. We took a fragment of one of the most loaded locations and downgraded the graphics to the absolute minimum to see how the game performed. Then, we increased the quality bit by bit: extending the textures, calculating the AI of NPCs and enemies, baking the lights, etc. When the picture was good enough for the Client and us, we determined the approximate acceptable quality level and understood what needed to be done to get to it.
To sum up, the biggest challenge was managing the memory. The project made us make a lot of original and creative decisions. As a result, the game build took 8GB instead of 79 GB. Also, the Switch version of the game turned out to be the most stable of all the other platforms' versions, which the original developers highlighted.
Pingle Studio website has a
Five Nights At Freddy's Security Breach case study entry which summarises the article with bullet-points that idiots like me can (sorta) understand. Even if (like me) you don't understand some (or any) of it, worth reading in full as its a useful look into how a studio can problem solve & port a PC game that was never built with Switch in mind.
Challenge
Solution
- Research the game performance via profiling;
- Detect that the game uses hard references content uploading logic, which loads a lot of unnecessary content (it works for platforms with more powerful hardware, but not with Switch);
- Optimize the content uploading pipeline for all the Hard References in the game.
It also has other case studies for prior work (including
The Eternal Cylinder that Vladyslav Popushoi is credited on their barren mobygames entry). But for the purposes of this Switch discussion, Pingle Studio ported
The Nightfall,
PC Building Simulator,
Strayed Lights &
Paleo Pines. The studio was also contracted by team17 to work on DLC/post-launch support for
Golf With Your Friends: The Deep &
My Time At Portia. Company blog also has some further reading with a few relevant examples linked below for anyone (still) awake reading this.
Engine & SDK Updates
Updates to the SDK base tend to come unexpectedly, the team must be working with the latest version available. Difficulties can arise when an SDK update comes midway during a porting process. The difficulty of working through that situation depends heavily on what engine the game is using.
If your title is using Unreal Engine, this situation is generally easily resolved as Unreal Engine offers avenues that make changes fairly straightforwardly. Unity, on the other hand, involves a lot more hands-on time to resolve those changes without introducing too many bugs. To sum up, factor in the possibility of these updates in your schedule as well as the cost of porting a game to Nintendo Switch.
GPU Optimization
Generally, with porting a game to Switch, Graphics/Performance is the part most users and reviewers focus on and it’s a pivotal part to get right.
There is no getting around it, GPU optimization on the Switch requires you have access to very skilled technical artists who specialize in optimization. If your team or outsourced team can focus on shader optimization as well as asset optimization, you’ll be on track for a solid porting experience.
Memory Limits
Potentially one of the biggest hurdles of porting to Nintendo Switch is the strict memory restrictions. Your game can only use up to 3.17GB of memory. This needs to be understood before the process begins, as the goal is to find ways to make the contents fit within these hard limits. This can prove more challenging and more time-consuming with large open-world games.
Compatibility
An easy rule of thumb when deciding whether to port to Nintendo Switch or not, is how hard will it be to port the title over? Generally, if a game’s mechanics, art style, and content can remain mostly untouched but just require optimization for the Switch hardware – that means the game is ideal for the porting process. Whilst you can still port games that don’t meet that criteria, those titles often require a lot of reworking of the systems of the game and those compromises result in a less desirable port.
Further Reading (for anyone still alive ):
