Compulsion Games didn't encounter any problems bringing Contrast to Xbox One

Jul 1, 2014 07:00 GMT  ·  By

Compulsion Games, the developer of the recently released Contrast for the PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One, has talked a bit about the differences between the new-gen consoles (PS4 and Xbox One) and how, besides the GPU, things are relatively the same.

Contrast launched last fall for the PC, PS3, PS4, and Xbox 360 and was even offered for free to new PS4 owners as part of the PlayStation Plus service, alongside fellow launch game Resogun.

Recently, the game finally appeared on the Xbox One platform and, in honor of this achievement, developer Compulsion Games organized an AMA on Reddit.

Among the topics discussed was the ever present PS4 vs. Xbox One debate and what big differences are between the two consoles.

According to the studio, the GPU is main advantage of the PS4 but, seeing as how Contrast didn't require that much graphics power, the studio didn't encounter any major problems in the development process.

"We didn't really see that much difference between the Xbox One 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)," the studio said.

"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."

What's more, because the platforms are similar, the porting process for the Xbox One went along quite smoothly. The fact that Compulsion released the game after a pretty long period of availability for the Microsoft console also meant that the software development environment was better than at its launch.

"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."

Contrast is now available across all platforms and Compulsion is expect to debut another project in the future.