South Park: Snow Day™

We ported South Park: Snow Day, a co-op action adventure game set in the South Park universe and based on Unreal Engine to Nintendo Switch. The game was developed by Question Games and South Park Digital Studios for PC, with THQ Nordic handling publishing duties.

Our Contribution

Our considerable experience in developing proprietary engines and porting our own games to Nintendo Switch resulted in us being called upon to apply our knowledge and diligence in these areas:

Gameplay Programming

While most of the gameplay behavior was implemented by Question Games, we maintained close contact throughout all phases of development to ensure all aspects of the game would translate well to Nintendo Switch. This included implementing and sharing best practices for performance-aware implementation of NPC behavior and player abilities as well as numerous stability enhancements.

UI/UX Programming

We took care of adapting wide parts of the game’s user experience to support native gamepad interaction.

Platform Services

Unreal already provides fairly strong platform abstraction for most use-cases. This being a multiplayer game, however, necessitated a host of adaptations and specific UX for finding good matches, setting up lobbies with friends as well as associated edge cases.

In addition, we ensured a solid pipeline for rapidly creating and configuring both free functional DLC and premium cosmetic DLC. This was rounded off by us providing low-overhead processes for numerous pre-/ and post-release first party product submissions for western and Japanese release regions.

Optimization

The optimization tasks we performed during this project cover the entire gamut: Blueprint nativization, Gameplay- and AI-code optimization, in-game asset & LOD optimization, all the way to rendering and shader topics. Profiling and optimizing these aspects, we managed to keep the game running smoothly in docked and handheld playing modes while keeping patch sizes throughout development to an absolute minimum.

Quality Assurance

Before the game would go out to THQ’s capable quality assurance, our QA engineers worked embedded with the development team to provide…

Platform Certification Requirements
Test case specifications
Functionality testing
Milestone candidate qualification
Specialized testing around fine-grained DLC ownership scenarios

With a little help…

We enlisted the help of our friends at Zeppelin Studio. They assisted with:

Technical project leadership
Gameplay programming
UI programming
Optimization
Time- and release-critical bug fixing
Build pipeline engineering