A few of months ago, I wrote an article for IndieWatch entitled Backward Compatibility in Game Production: A Small Studio View, which can be read here. Now that it has been up for a while I wanted to give a bit more insight as to how we approach this subject at SP Ent. Of course, central to anything we do as a small studio is cost. I don’t mean cost from a cost analysis, ROI sort of angle, though those things do play into anything we evaluate cost on. I mean the effect of a small budget on backward compatibility. Having little to no budget has a huge impact on the hardware and software angle, as discussed in the article. What it really means is that we can rarely afford the very best hardware and software available, and once we purchase it, it usually sticks around for a bit. As you may guess, this immediately makes us a bit backward compatible from the start. Now this can be a good thing from the backward compatibility standpoint as it usually means we will be supported by a broader range of devices. On the flip side though, it means we rarely can target the highest end devices since we can rarely test on such hardware.

I’ll stop there for now, but in the next paw print I’ll examine the darker side of this approach as well as how we hardware test, then adjust compatibility here at SP Ent. Until next time, thanks for hitting the Paws Button. Type at you later.