Are you making a game for Nintendo Switch?
Which game engines do the best selling indie games on Nintendo Switch use?
To answer this question, we first have to find out what the best selling games for Nintendo
Switch are.
Well lucky for us, Nintendo released this information!
On Dec. 25th 2019, as a part of their Indie World initiative, Nintendo released a video
featuring their top selling indie games!
In this video we’ll go through each one and find out which game engine they used!
We are Ask gamedev and these are The Game Engines Used for Nintendo Switch’s Best
Selling Indie Games
Welcome back!
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Alright, let’s get started!
In Nintendo’s video, they listed 15 titles!
Today we’ll be looking at 10 of them, only because Castle Crashers, Terraria, Torchlight
II, Ori & The Blind Forest, and Downwell were all originally released many many years ago
in 2008, 2011, 2012, and 2015 for the last two respectively.
Without further ado…
1.
Cuphead
If you’ve been watching us for a while, you know we’re big fans of Cuphead!
We’ve talked about Cuphead at length in previous videos, and we’ll probably continue
to do so for a long time!
If you haven’t heard the story though, here’s a quick recap:
Cuphead was started by two brothers, Chad & Jared Moldenhauer, who quit their jobs,
remortgaged their homes, and put it all on the table for Cuphead - a run & gun, tough-as-nails,
action platformer, featuring hand-drawn art & animation, in the style of 1930’s Fleischer
Studios cartoons.
They launched in 2017 and it all paid off!
Cuphead has since won a slew of awards.
Just to name a few: Excellence in Art and Excellence in Animation
from the South by Southwest Gaming Awards Outstanding Achievement in Animation, Outstanding
Achievement in Art Direction, and Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition
from the 21st Annual DICE Awards And Best Art Direction, Best Independent Game,
and Best Debut Indie Game from the 2017 Game Awards.
Since then, it’s been Cuphead-fever, with DLC on the way, a Netflix show announced,
and most recently a Cuphead Mii Fighter costume in Smash Bros!
So which engine did Studio MDHR use?
Believe it or not, the 2D masterpiece was made with Unity!
According to a post on Unity: As well as helping StudioMDHR process the
massive amount of their exquisite art, Unity’s out-of-the-box features such as the Sprite
Renderer, Sprite Packer, 2D Physics, and particle effects ensured that Cuphead’s stunning
results were a sure bet.
Next up on the list:
2.
Untitled Goose Game
Untitled Goose Game is a comedy stealth title where you play as a horrible goose who gets
to irritate a town full of people.
To better illustrate what this means, some of the missions include:
Make someone break the fancy vase Trap the Boy in phone booth, and
Make the Man spit out his tea.
Inspired by Super Mario 64, Hitman and a stock photograph of a goose, the title was developed
by House House, a 4-person team based in Melbourne, Australia.
A relatively new studio, the team at House House had only one game under their belt prior,
2016’s Push Me Pull You.
The engine they chose to use for Untitled Goose Game: Unity.
So far, that’s two on the list for Unity.
Their other tools included Blender for modeling and animation, FMOD for sound, Git for version
control, and a basic spreadsheet for production.
When Untitled Goose Game was announced, it received a huge amount of attention, and that
buzz continued all the way through to its release in late 2019.
When it launched on Nintendo Switch, it topped the sales charts in Australia, the UK, and
the US, with over 100,000 copies sold.
By the end of the year, it had sold over a million copies across all platforms.
The title’s greatest achievement though has to be winning “Game of the Year” at
this year’s DICE Awards, edging out Death Stranding, Control, Disco Elysium, and Outer
Wilds!
From the developers of Starbound, and the publishers of Stardew Valley, the next game
on the list is:
3.
Wargroove
If you have fond memories of playing the Advance Wars series back in the Gameboy Advance days,
then you’ll feel right at home with Wargroove.
Wargroove is a beautiful pixel art, turn-based tactics game, inspired by, you guessed it,
Advance Wars.
Wargroove takes place in a fantasy world where you play as one of 15 commanders who lead
a squad full of interesting creatures and characters.
The game has a full campaign, an arcade mode, and even a map editor.
In terms of development, this is the first title on the list to use a custom game engine.
For Wargroove, the team used Halley Game Engine.
Chucklefish CTO and lead programmer of Wargroove, Rodrigo Monteiro, stated in a series of tweets
“
- Sometimes Unreal/Unity/GM/etc are the best choice
- Sometimes custom engine is the best choice - Anyone saying "always go for engine x" is
wrong”
Then went on to say:
Wargroove is a custom engine.
Would have been more work to implement in Unity than in Halley.”
Halley Game Engine is a lightweight game engine written in modern C++.
It is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, and you can find it on GitHub.
We’ll leave a link in the description.
Wargroove launched in early 2019 to rave reviews with Desctructoid giving it a 9/10 and Game
Informer giving it a 9.25.
Three days after launch the team announced that they had already recouped the cost of
their development, and that they would continue to improve the game.
4.
Katana ZERO
Katana ZERO is a stylish neo-noir action platformer that features some beautiful pixel art, solid
action platforming mechanics, and a brilliant story.
You play as Subject Zero as you navigate the neon world completing assasination contracts,
equipped with array of moves and weapons, and the ability to slow down time.
Katana ZERO is the first solo-developed game on this list!
That’s right, Katana ZERO was developed by Justin Stander under his label Askiisoft
over the course of many many years.
While Justin did have some help, he handled design and programming on Katana ZERO almost
exclusively.
What started as a two-year project that focused solely on gameplay, expanded into a 6-year
project filled with narrative and an in-depth story.
It was inspired by revenge stories like Oldboy and John Wick.
Just wanted to deliver what he calls “hypnotic zen of violence” through action-based combat.
Justin’s engine of choice?
GameMaker Studio 2.
Katana Zero launched on PC and Switch in April of 2019, and within the week it was announced
that over 100,000 copies have been sold!
In less than a year more than 500,000 copies were sold generating $5 million in sales!
It was a smashing success both critically and commercially launching Justin onto Forbes
2020 30 under 30 list in games.
For more games made with GameMaker, check out our GameMaker showcase video here.
5.
Baba is You
Baba is You is a top-down puzzle game where you manipulate logic operators in order navigate
the world and solve puzzles.
Objects and rules are all block-based, and you control a character that can move these
blocks around to change the logic of a level.
For example you might be able to change 3 blocks that state a rule like “wall” “is”
“stop” to “wall” “is” by moving the “stop” block, allowing you to now
walk through walls.
It’s smart, it’s innovative, and the game features over 200 levels.
Baba is You is yet another solo developed title on this list!
It was developed by Arvi Teikari, under the label, Hempuli.
The game started out as a game jam game from the 2017 Nordic Game Jam, where the theme
was “Not There”.
Arvi won first place at the jam, which prompted him to release a full game.
Arvi’s engine of choice: Multimedia Fusion by Clickteam.
Why?
He answered this quite well in a AMA on the NintendoSwitch subreddit:
“I used MMF2 because I've grown extremely used to it over the past...
11-12 years?
When I first started making games, I migrated from Game Maker to MMF2's predecessor The
Games Factory due to not understanding Game Makers scripting language, and since TGF filled
my needs then I stuck with it.
I've been meaning to look at other tools for years, but once you know the strengths and
weaknesses of a tool (and there are enough other people to offer support in times when
you don't), it can be very hard to move on.
Baba is You launched to immediate success with PC Gamer giving it a 90/100, and Polygon
ranking it as their #4 Game of the Year in 2019.
6.
My Friend Pedro
My Friend Pedro by DeadToast Entertainment is an insanely over-the-top adrenaline-filled
action parkour platformer, whose devs describe it as “a violent ballet about friendship,
imagination, and one man’s struggle to obliterate anyone in his path at the behest of a sentient
banana.”
The game’s not just about clearing a room full of bad guys though.
It’s about clearing a room full of bad guys in the most stylish way possible, by using
acrobatic moves, the environment, objects with the environment, and ability to slow
down time.
The game actually has its roots as a Flash game.
It looked quite a bit different back then, but still retained the charm found in today’s
version.
Somewhere along the way they decided to do a 3D remake, and we’re glad they did!
In terms of an engine, My Friend Pedro is the third game on this list that’s made
with Unity.
If you’re interested, the devs at DeadToast kept a great devlog where you can read about
their experience with the engine.
My Friend Pedro launched in June 2019 went on to sell over 250,000 copies in its first
week.
Near the end of 2019 it was reported that the title was closing in on half a million
in sales!
7.
Slay the Spire
One of the most unique genre fusions on the list, Slay the Spire is a rogue-like, deck
building, dungeon-crawler, released in January 2019 by Mega Crit Games.
In Slay the Spire you play as one of three heroes (each with their own unique card pools),
and work your way through a gauntlet of monsters, earning new cards to help you advance.
Being a rogue-like, be prepared for a lot of dying, but also a lot of learning along
the way.
Anthony Giovannetti who led the design effort and did the programming on Slay the Spire
had been a lifelong card game player and was also a fan of roguelikes.
He thought the deckbuilding genre and the rogule-like genre would have a particularly
strong mechanical pairing, and so he started designing Slay the Spire.
The game was developed with libGDX framework.
libGDX is a free, open source, gamedev framework written in Java.
The title actually originally launched as an Early Access title on Steam in 2017.
It didn’t do too well, moving only 2000 copies in the first weeks.
The game eventually gained popularity through streams, but by February 2018 the game had
more than 500,000 players.
At GDC 2019, co-founder Casey Yano announced that the title had sold more than 1.5 million
copies across all its platforms.
8.
Unravel Two
From EA Originals, Unravel Two is a sequel to the original puzzle platformer, Unravel,
starring the tiny, lovable, character, Yarny.
In the Unravel series you use yarn to traverse the world and solve puzzles - you can repel,
climb, build bridges, swing, and more.
With Unravel Two, they’ve doubled down, building the game around two Yarny characters
to control!
The game’s platforms and puzzles were designed for a local 2-player co-op experience, but
with an innovative swapping system, it’s still just as fun as a solo adventure.
According to an article written by Forbes, the title was created using a custom game
engine, and that was partly the reason why Unravel Two was not a Nintendo Switch title,
to the dismay of many fans.
The developers, Coldwood Interactive, did not have the capacity to port the game, and
stated that it would have taken another year and a half or so to do so.
Well luckily for us, the community was heard and Unravel Two spun onto Nintendo Switch
a year later.
The game currently has a “Strong” OpenCritic rating, and it also won the 2019 DICE Award
for Family Game of the Year.
9.
Blasphemous
Just released in September of 2019, Blasphemous is the newest game on this list.
Blasphemous is a dark and punishing 2D metroidvania style game.
It’s punishing, it has fluid animations, and it’s the most brutal action-platformer
that we’ve ever seen.
In terms of tools, here’s what devs, The Game Kitchen, had to say on Twitter:
We're using Unity ;) #madewithunity Art is made frame by frame, pixel by pixel.
The game comes to us after a successful Kickstarter campaign where the devs raised $333,000 from
almost 10,000 backers!
If you’re interested in learning more about Kickstarter campaigns for games, check out
this video that we recently created on the subject.
Last but not least, from Image & Form, the makers of SteamWorld Dig, SteamWorld Dig 2,
and SteamWorld Heist, comes another entry and a new genre to the universe,
10.
SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech
SteamWorld Quest is a turn-based RPG / deckbuilding hybrid.
You assemble a party of robots, fight other robots, and upgrade your party along with
the way by managing your multiple card decks.
It’s similar to Slay the Spire in that you build a custom deck, then use your deck for
ac tions and attacks in battles.
According to a developer on the team, they use a custom engine.
During a Reddit AMA on the Nintendo Switch Subreddit, when asked, Julius wrote back:
We use our own engine!
It's so fancy it has no name haha!
When the game launched Polygon called it the latest must-own Nintendo Switch title, cementing
itself as another amazing entry in the Steamworld franchise.
So here’s the tally:
Coming in at number 1 is Unity with 4 games!
Next we have 3 games that use custom engines, and GameMaker, Multimedia Fusion and LibGDX
with a game each!
Does this mean you should only use Unity?
Of course not!
While this is valuable reference information, as always we recommend using an engine that
you are comfortable with and supports the features and platforms that you need.
Thanks for watching!
For more Ask Gamedev check out this video on Nintendo Switch development, or this playlist
on console development.