Sonic Frontiers launches this Tuesday and undoubtedly eyes will be on how proficient it runs on the Nintendo Switch. Game Reactor caught up with the head of Sonic Team, Takashi Iizuka, to find out how Sonic Team accomplished getting Sonic Frontiers running proficiently across platforms. Iizuka reiterated that the game was built using their in-house Hedgehog Engine, which made its debut with the successful Sonic Generations in 2011, and that the team has been updating and optimising the Hedgehog Engine ever since. Iizuka says that one of the benefits of the Hedgehog Engine is that it scales really well across various formats and that he is confident that Nintendo Switch owners will be impressed with the end results.
“It is extremely challenging to develop on this incredibly wide spectrum of hardware. But the good thing is we are using the Hedgehog Engine. The Hedgehog Engine is an internally developed engine we have been using since Sonic Generations, and we have been updating it since 2010 when the game was in development, to really make sure that multiplatform development is as easy as it can be. And we have been working on polishing all of those multiplatform abilities and capabilities of the engine. And as we saw with Sonic Forces, yes, we were able to deliver a game across not only the very low-end spec machines, but also the high-end spec machines.”
“Our artists are making tons of content at very high levels, and if you got this great and amazing high-spec PC, that’s great. But we also want to make sure, that people who are playing on the Nintendo Switch have the same experience. So, we are not necessarily using the same high-end assets, but the Hedgehog Engine is able to reduce it to a size were it’s going to look very comparable on a Nintendo Switch, as it is to a high-end PC.”
