#11 Running on handheld devices

It’s summer — the perfect time to load up some games on our Steam Decks and Switches. Good news: Exographer is fully verified for both devices. But what does it really take for a game to run well on small screens and modest processors?

Not much, at least for a 2D game, if you’ve kept those limitations in mind from the start. In the end, here are the main differences between the lighter (portable) version of Exographer and the standard one. The first two relate to graphical performance, while the last focuses on user experience and interface.

• The interactions between the character and its environment required sophisticated shaders involving reshaping our pixelated world via continuous graphics. In the example below, the photosphere repels the rock through a real-time animation. These shaders were simplified to run smoothly on Steam Deck and Switch. 

• In the same spirit, two levels were adapted because they contain fancy animations. The spinning core of our so-called Source (middle image below) was decreasing the FPS and it was degraded. We also removed a warm mirage-like effect from our Glowing Forge, since it was slowing down the character. 

• In Exographer, the player opens a tablet in which there is a lot of written information, see above. The display was adapted, so that the text is more readable: all the titles and tabs are larger, for instance. Moreover, we had from the very beginning a focus mode where you can look at one single enlarged element (bottom deck screen), in addition to having all of them on the same screen (top computer screen). 

We also had quite a cool unexpected surprise: the mouse controls were automatically ported to the touch screen on the Steam Deck, allowing us to switch from GamePad controls for the platforming part to Mouse controls for the puzzle part. Just the perfect way to play Exographer. 

And at the end, it was such a pleasure to play our own game on a portable device, here for the very first time, in a train…