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Vblank discusses the crazy level of work going into Retro City Rampage 3DS
A portion of a WiisWorld interview with Brian Provinciano of Vblank...
DS: Can you tell me about the process of porting RCR to Nintendo 3DS? From a consumer perspective it is a unique system, (dual screens for instance,) and with that in mind were there any new goals or challenges for you as a developer?
BP: The 3DS version's required more work than previous versions, simply because of there are so many differences. The game screen needs to be cropped much more to fit the screen without the sprites being too small. This means going through every mission and tweaking/tuning to account for less of the screen being visible. I also needed to move the HUD and UI elements to the second screen. Finally, it's required a fair bit of RAM and CPU optimization work specific to the system. Writing cross platform code sometimes means writing code that isn't as optimized as it could be, but guarantees pixel-for-pixel consistency between systems. The reason you do this is because the more code that's the same between platforms, the less testing you need to do. You can assure that if a bug doesn't occur on one that it won't occur on the others, or if it does occur on one, it can be reproduced and fixed on another. In the case of the 3DS for example, I had to write a new renderer that used less CPU, and a new shadow renderer which used both less CPU and less RAM.
Full interview here
DS: Can you tell me about the process of porting RCR to Nintendo 3DS? From a consumer perspective it is a unique system, (dual screens for instance,) and with that in mind were there any new goals or challenges for you as a developer?
BP: The 3DS version's required more work than previous versions, simply because of there are so many differences. The game screen needs to be cropped much more to fit the screen without the sprites being too small. This means going through every mission and tweaking/tuning to account for less of the screen being visible. I also needed to move the HUD and UI elements to the second screen. Finally, it's required a fair bit of RAM and CPU optimization work specific to the system. Writing cross platform code sometimes means writing code that isn't as optimized as it could be, but guarantees pixel-for-pixel consistency between systems. The reason you do this is because the more code that's the same between platforms, the less testing you need to do. You can assure that if a bug doesn't occur on one that it won't occur on the others, or if it does occur on one, it can be reproduced and fixed on another. In the case of the 3DS for example, I had to write a new renderer that used less CPU, and a new shadow renderer which used both less CPU and less RAM.