We’ve been asked this quite often — “Will Arcade Spirits be coming out on Switch or PS4 PS VITA or XBox One or Ouya or Intellivision or the Fairchild Channel F?” Console gamers like their story-driven games too, and it’s perfectly understandable to want a port.

Let me say up front we are NOT ruling a console port out. But I figured this week, I’d let you peek behind the curtains and see why isn’t not as easy as checking the ‘Compile Switch Version’ box and hitting OK.

Arcade Spirits uses the open source Ren’Py engine, which is a wonderful Python-powered system that gets you up and running quickly when making a visual novel. It’s powerful and customizable and has many of the features we needed right out of the box. We didn’t have to code our own save game system, or our own history buffer, or any of the standard visual novel systems — it just does it for you without much fanfare.

Alas, one thing we hadn’t realized when deciding to use Ren’Py is that there are no console ports of the engine. It’s open source, yeah, but requires Python, OpenGL, and a host of other tidbits to be ported before it can even consider the possibility of starting to maybe work on another system.

It’s not impossible — anybody with enough know-how and skill could probably port it. But so far nobody has, so we’d be starting from square one on a task we are woefully unprepared for. There’s a reason I picked a scripting system for this game instead of coding it down to the metal in assembly, folks. I ain’t that amazing at coding.

(UPDATE: A new wrinkle in the works. For a Switch port, it’s not enough to port the engine — since it’s not based on Unity, essentially every individual visual novel would need to be one whole and cohesive project with a complete dev kit and development contract, and likely still need to involve Renpy’s development team. So it’s a much taller ask than I had anticipated in the first place. Not sure if this is the case for PS4 but it’s likely the same issue. Fortunately there is a UWP version of Renpy in the works, so XBox One is possible, but still a long ways off and may have other hurdles.)

So, what’s the alternative? Basically, moving the whole kit ‘n kaboodle over to another visual novel engine, one which already has console support. Notably any system designed for Unity would do the job. But porting a game, even one as “simple” as a visual novel, is difficult. How do I do the customized visual effects and UI, when I don’t know enough to customize Unity to my needs? What about future localization efforts? It’s a tough sell, especially when we’re releasing in Q1 2019.

That leaves us with three options. Figure out how to port Ren’Py (or hire someone to do it), figure out how to port the game to another engine (or hire someone to do it), or let it slide for now and maybe switch engines before starting a sequel.

I won’t say what option we’re taking because, well, we don’t know! Right now we’re focused on getting the Win/Mac/Linux version out the door in good shape, so you have a quality game from day one. But… if that game sells well enough, if it’s clear there’s a burning hunger for Arcade Spirits… who knows what may happen?