Nintendo Switch Development Tools Have made the “Wicked Hard” DOOM Port Easier Than Ever Before

Compared to the Wii U, the Nintendo Switch has been getting infinitely more support from third-party developers. That's not just Nintendo hyping their own message, countless developers have raved about how much easy it is to develop their games for Switch.

Today, developer Panic Button joins that long list of developer praises. They're currently working on their Switch ports of Rocket League and DOOM. The team's Director of Development, Adam Creighton, went on at length about how development tools have improved while talking to GamesRadar.

"We have a long history developing for Nintendo hardware, and the Nintendo Switch has far better development tools than previous generations. The tools are integrated with Visual Studio, which is new for this generation of hardware, and being able to write and debug code through VS is an enormous improvement."

He said that the SDK and tools are constantly getting big improvements too, even beyond their initial launch.

"Process and tools-wise, other consoles have arguably catered explicitly to third-party development for a longer period of time, over multiple hardware generations- That said, we’ve seen the ‘gold standard’ in game developer support flip from one generation to the next, we are early in the Switch’s development cycle, and the SDK and tools themselves are constantly getting big improvements."

Lastly, he talked about the Switch port for their latest title DOOM. The game is scalable, thanks to how they built it for PC, and that makes porting it more straightforward. He has mentioned that the port has still been "wicked hard".

"It’s been hard. Wicked hard. But I would expect it to be. This is a title that is so frenetic and action-packed and gameplay-pure that getting it to work correctly on the hardware is really important to us, and we spend a lot of time trying to make sure it measures up from the lens of ‘does it feel like Doom?’"

So technically, the difficulty in porting DOOM is less on Nintendo and more on the developer being a perfectionist for their creation. Who can honestly be upset about that?

Doom launches on Nintendo Switch on November 10. The game will only run at 30 FPS but has had multiple accounts of looking impressive regardless.