United Label, an indie publishing division of CI Games, contracted us for this project. Our studio had previously worked successfully with CI Games on Lords of the Fallen, which led to this collaboration. We've built a strong relationship with them and continue to work together, having also contributed to projects like Roki and Tails of Iron.

Beyond Galaxyland is an RPG with turn-based combat that takes players on a whimsical adventure through a vibrant, intergalactic setting. In it, a high school student who is unexpectedly transported to Galaxyland, a refuge for those fleeing an impending catastrophe on Earth.

We had to port the game to multiple console platforms and bring this title to a wider audience while maintaining the creator's vision and optimizing performance across various hardware specifications.

The project involved porting the game to Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. Our responsibilities included preparing the game for consoles, resolving major issues, restructuring to fit hardware limitations, and ensuring compliance with platform-specific standards.

The porting process for Beyond Galaxyland presented several significant challenges. The project encountered more compatibility issues than usual, requiring creative workarounds. Hardware limitations, especially on the Nintendo Switch where memory usage was approaching the system's limits, posed a constant concern.

Time constraints added pressure, as the team needed to fit as much work as possible into a limited timeframe. The original development of the game had spanned several years, leaving us with many outdated systems, plugins, and solutions that needed updating to meet current console requirements.

Maintaining visual fidelity across different console capabilities proved challenging, particularly with lighting and post-processing effects. Some graphical bugs were specific to certain consoles, such as flickering textures or color discrepancies between platforms.

To tackle these challenges, our team implemented a variety of technical solutions and optimizations.

Save file sizes were initially too large, so we optimized them to store the same information in a smaller format. We also restructured the game to reduce download size for players and make future patches more manageable. Depending on the platform, this resulted in a two to three-fold reduction in game size from what it was initially.

Parts of the post-processing stack had to be rewritten and restructured due to compatibility issues and hardware limitations. This made ensuring the game still fit the creator's vision on different consoles more challenging than anticipated.

Lighting posed a particular challenge, especially on the Nintendo Switch. We experimented with various lighting settings, including baking the lighting, to balance visual quality and performance. We carefully managed the number and priority of point lights to reduce draw calls while maintaining visual fidelity.

For platform-specific issues, we employed a few different solutions. To address texture flickering on certain platforms, we utilized the "Enable GPU Instancing" setting. Many shader errors were fixed manually by hand while editing the shader code. In some cases, we created shader copies with overridden color settings to ensure consistency across platforms.

Throughout the process, we prioritized maintaining gameplay experience and parity with the creator's vision while making sure the feel is polished to a mirror sheen.