We’ll be working on a review for Light Fall on Switch, so I got in touch with Bishop Games to talk a bit about the game’s development and its release on the Nintendo Switch.
PS4Blog: Hi! Thank you for joining us today. Could you please get us started by telling our readers a bit about yourself and your work?
Hello, my name is Ben Archer, and I am one of the three co-founders of Bishop Games. We are the creators of Light Fall, recently announced in the Nindies Showcase. I worked mostly in the level design and writing the story for Light Fall.
PS4B: Light Fall will soon release on Nintendo Switch. How would you describe the game to someone who’s never heard about it?
Light Fall is all about freedom. It’s a platformer in which the player controls and summons his own platform. In some way, you can create your own level design inside the levels.
PS4B: How long did it take to develop the game? Where there any particular hurdles or challenges you had to overcome for its Switch release?
Far too long! Because it was our first project, it took almost four years to release. A lot of the hurdles of development were not Switch-related, but two things that took us quite some time were a random crash bug to fix. The bug occurred in between levels and cut scenes. The other thing was that we had to optimize the game quite a bit for Switch. As you can guess, making a platformer requires having fluid movements which are directly impacted by FPS. So, we had to change a couple of things to make sure the FPS was high enough as to not feel any difference between PC and Switch.
PS4B: Now that the game is ready to go, what is next for the team? Are you considering developing some additional content for the game to be made available as free or paid DLC?
We already have the funding for our next game – which we can’t talk about yet – but we are still open to working on more Light Fall content. It will all depend on the community’s reaction. For example, Light Fall offers a fully fleshed-out Speedrun game mode that allows you to compete on the online leaderboards for the fastest times and even race against the ghosts of other players. It is our wish to have this game mode take off with platformer fans and speedrunners. If the reception is great, we would like to release more content related to Speedrun such as level packs, weekly competitions, in-game rewards for said competitions… Who knows?!
PS4B: And that’s all the time we have today. Would you like to add anything else before we go?
I’d like to sincerely thank our fans for their support throughout the development. We are a fairly small team (now five people), and Light Fall is our first project ever. We put our heart and soul into this game, and we just hope people enjoy their journey across Numbra, the world in which Light Fall takes place.
