Perfect Strategy to Develop Games for Consoles

 Gaming apps have been in great demand and have expanded their influence from kids to adults. The mobile game app market grew at a rate of 14% in 2020 and generated USD 78.6 billion in the same year. People just love to paly games and the good thing is that its craze has now reached far beyond age barriers and is tempting a wide population. Launching a superior quality gaming app can really prove be a steady source of income for you that you can cherish for the rest of your lifetime. The only thing is people don’t know how to approach and develop a game that can take people’s excitement to whole new level. Well, in this world of technological innovations, there is hardly anything that you can coin as impossible. This blog will guide you on the strategy to develop gaming apps for consoles in a straightforward and convenient way.

Getting Started with Gaming App Development

You can’t just develop a game using conventional app development methods. You need a game engine to develop a gaming app for consoles. The game engines are specialized software which assist in game app development and offer various comprehensive tools to proceed with the process uninterruptedly. Unity is one of the most efficient game engines to develop exceptional games for consoles.

Register with Platform Holders

You need to register with certain platforms like Microsoft Xbox One, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch to develop a smooth and fluid game for consoles. The submission requirements for each console are available as soon as you register. You may need a static IP address for certain platforms or register a domain name. Check for your requirements and then proceed. Platforms like Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony require registered developers to sign a Non-disclosure Agreement NDA.

Set Up Your Development Environment

To get started with Unity game development, each version of Unity is compatible with a particular console SDK version. Once you register for a platform you can easily download this console SDK version and get started with the game development with your Unity version. We strongly recommend you to move to the relevant LTS branch as it will help you a lot in bug fixes and SDK upgrades before submission.

 

Other Hardware Requirements

Unity Extensions: When you use Unity Editor, it gives you extension for each console that guides Unity on how to build your scenes and deploy your game to a development kit. However, if you have developed any game on Unity, you must be familiar with this kind of workflow.

Run Your Game on Console Hardware

Running your game on Unity Editor may be totally different from running it on console hardware. An Android game development company thoroughly goes through this crucial phase. The specs differ a lot from your PC to console specs. This includes clock speed, save and load times, the available RAM. Nintendo offers 4GB RAM, PS4 has 8GB and Xbox One has 12 GB. Keep running your game frequently on devkits and test on the lowest available specs. This will help you in figuring out baseline performance and place content accordingly.

Profiling with Unity

The profiling tools offered by Unity work across all consoles and this helps in testing and iterations on consoles. You can easily monitor garbage collection allocations in your script and keep good track of them. This will reduce your memory footprint and will help in avoiding CPU spikes when the garbage collector functions.

Deep Profiling

Deep profiling is searches through each code and helps to find out different allocations. The volume of data often makes this process slow and to avoid this situation, use it to profile isolated areas like performance spikes.

Using custom profile makers is another alternative of deep profiling where you ca simply place profiler.beginsample and then sample through all logical groups or in any part of your script code. You can also nest a ProfileMarker to get a better idea of what’s going on in the game and just make sure that every beginsample has a matching endsample.

Platform-specific Native APIs

Unity offers a set of plugins with platform specific native APIs that makes it easy to add support for console-specific features. These plugins are available with their own set of documentation and source codes.These plugins also provide interfaces between some console-specific features and Unity features. Game developers copy these libraries into their project’s plugins folder to use them.

 

Organize Content & Code

You need to clarify certain questions before organizing content for your game.

Features of your game that are platform-specific and

How will you patch game content?

You can use unity addressable to support dynamic game content. Asset bundles which were introduced with Unity 4 are highly useful to separate content from the app install. This helps console game developers in delivering regular content updates to live apps with small initial download size.

The Compilation Work

Developing console games in Unity requires IL2CPP scripting Back-end. The Unity convertor translates the IL output into C++ code which compiled into a native library that a player imports and executes. These compiled codes are ready to use for CPUs to execute them directly.

After thorough testing and debugging, your console game is ready to deploy. You must plan for its effective launch in market so that it creates a buzz in the market as soon a sit is launched.