Compulsion Games: “Power of the Xbox One” makes Contrast the tightest version of the game

On June 26, 2014 (which was yesterday), Contrast — the puzzle/platformer from Compulsion Games — released on the Xbox One. It originally launched on the PlayStation 4 as one of the two free titles for PlayStation Plus members. It's also on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

Compulsion Games thinks very highly of Contrast on the Xbox One — so highly that they've included a dev note to the purchase page on the Xbox One. It reads:

Dev note: Hi everyone! Thanks for checking out CONTRAST. We're really excited about the Xbox One version. It is the tightest version of the game we've made, and has had the advantage of the improvements that we've made since the initial launch of the game and the power of the Xbox One (believe it or not, dynamic shadows make for a pretty power hungry game).

During an AMA on Reddit yesterday, Compulsion Games addressed answers about porting Contrast from the PlayStation 4 to the Xbox One. They were asked, "How was the process of porting from PS4/PC to Xbox One? Are the SDK's similar?"

Compulsion games replied:

Well, for both the PS4 and the Xbox One, we had to port UE3 to each platform. We're pretty experienced with that sort of thing, but because the architectures between PS4 and Xbox One are fairly similar, it took us less time to get things running on Xbox One. […] Also, by the time we got around to working on the Xbox One, the SDK and tools had had time to mature a bit. This made the whole process smoother than trying to ship a game at the same time as a hardware launch.

One other thing I found interesting during the AMA was when they were asked, "What's your thoughts about the custom CPU Microsoft ordered to AMD? How is it working with it? Since the GPU is weaker, we can assume games will be CPU based?"

They responded:

We didn't really see that much difference between X1 and the PS4. It's true that the GPU is a bit faster on the PS4; but seeing as it wasn't really the bottleneck for us (Contrast runs pretty stable on the platform), most of our experience with porting to the console was about avoiding stupid mistakes (like misusing the APIs). Although we have some custom filters and shaders to give it a unique look, we don't really rely so much on the hardware, but more on the artistry of our modelers and animators to give it its look.

For the full AMA, you can read it HERE.

You can follow Senior Editor Lance Liebl on Twitter @Lance_GZ. Or you can email him at LLiebl@GameZone.com.