TripWire Interactive has earned its reputation in the gaming industry through publishing and developing action-packed titles like Killing Floor, Maneater, and Rising Storm. Having previously collaborated with them on Deceive Inc. our proven track record made us a natural choice for The Stone of Madness port. 

The Stone of Madness, developed by The Game Kitchen, is a haunting medieval horror game that plunges players into a dark world of… Well… Madness and mysticism. We were tasked to port it to multiple next-gen platforms, including PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Microsoft Store, and Nintendo Switch. Having previously demonstrated our expertise with Deceive Inc., we were ready to tackle the unique challenges this project would present. 

What initially seemed like a straightforward porting project revealed several complex hurdles. The game struggled particularly on the Nintendo Switch, with memory leaks and resource-intensive plugins causing significant problems. Even 9th-generation consoles experienced performance below 50 FPS despite the fact that the game did not appear particularly resource-intensive on the surface.

The plugin situation proved especially challenging. Both Noesis and Wwise presented platform-specific issues that required careful attention. Noesis had early-stage Switch support with numerous bugs, while Wwise was incompatible with the latest Nintendo SDK versions. This meant working with older SDK versions and dealing with various compatibility issues across platforms.

The game's architecture also led to excessive memory usage, particularly on the Switch. Various UI elements weren't being properly cleared from memory, and the open-world nature of the game meant many resources were being loaded simultaneously, pushing the hardware to its limits.

Our approach to these challenges required both technical innovation and creative problem-solving.

First, we overhauled the game's NPC management system. In the original implementation, every NPC in every loaded scene would continuously update their behavior, calculating pathfinding, field of view, and state changes. While this created a living world, it overwhelmed the CPU.

Our solution was to implement a smart management system that deactivates AI calculations for characters in inactive scenes or beyond certain distances from the player.

To maintain the game's immersive feel while reducing resource usage, we developed an NPC state simulation system. When players return to an area, NPCs seamlessly resume their activities as if they had been active all along, creating the illusion of a persistent world without the performance cost.

Memory optimization required a multi-faceted approach. We applied Switch-specific compression for textures and sprite atlases, implemented increased Wwise bank compression for audio, and completely overhauled the Unity Addressables system for manual asset loading.

This gave us precise control over memory usage, allowing us to load only the most crucial assets based on the player's current context, selected settings, and active campaign.

The rendering pipeline posed another challenge, particularly with the high number of draw calls and SetPass calls. Our solution was elegantly simple: we moved the camera closer to the player on the Switch, which was already desirable for the smaller screen. This reduced the number of rendered objects while maintaining visual quality and improving overall performance.

In the end, what started as one of our most daunting technical challenges became a triumph of optimization and ingenuity. The Stone of Madness now runs smoothly across PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and perhaps most remarkably, the Nintendo Switch – a feat that seemed almost impossible during those early development days.

Through persistence, creative problem-solving, and countless hours of optimization, we transformed a resource-hungry game into a lean, efficient experience that maintains all the haunting atmosphere and dark medieval horror of the original vision.

Whether you're diving into the madness on your next-gen console or taking the darkness with you on the Switch, you're in for a polished, immersive descent into a world where sanity hangs by a thread. The gates of madness are open, and they're waiting for you to step through.