LogInMartin Griffiths shared some insights on porting Thatgamecompany's 2012 adventure game as part of a two-person team.
As you know, it's always a rare and delightful occasion when seasoned veterans of the game development industry spill the beans on the techniques and workflows they employed back in the day to bring our beloved titles to life.
Over the weekend, Martin Griffiths, a brilliant Game Developer and No Man's Sky's Engine Programmer, did just that, treating the community to an entire Twitter thread worth of insights regarding the porting of Journey, an atmospheric 2012 indie adventure game developed by Thatgamecompany.
According to Martin, porting Journey from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4 was an integral part of his formative learning as a PS4 engine coder. Described as an "exceptionally technical port", the project took nearly a year and a half to complete with a team of just two people. The port's success eventually drew the attention of Martin's former colleague, who by 2016 had already joined Hello Games, leading to Martin's role as the Engine Programmer for No Man's Sky.
Martin explained that a key aspect of porting Journey to PS4 was upgrading the PhyreEngine used in the original PlayStation 3 version. This upgrade had the added benefit of supporting both PS4 and PC, enabling the team to run a basic version of the game on Windows for rapid iteration, several years before the official PC version of Journey was released.
Furthermore, the developer shared a picture demonstrating the game in question running on PS Vita, mentioning that they wrote thousands of lines of ARM assembly code in an effort to make Journey work on the handheld. Ultimately, however, they abandoned the project after only achieving around 14 FPS.
As a cherry on top, Martin pointed out an interesting connection Journey's PS4 port has to Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century mathematician and writer often regarded as the first computer programmer. He explained that the office where the project was developed was once part of the Lovelace estate, and Ada herself lived just a few hundred meters away in Horsley Tower.
Ada King, Countess of Lovelace by Alfred Edward Chalon (possibly)
We highly encourage you to visit Martin Griffiths' Twitter page to learn more about Journey's porting journey.
Earlier, Martin also delivered a planet-sized flex and showcased the power of No Man's Sky's game engine by visiting three separate planets in under a minute without any immersion-breaking loading screens:
Don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.