In Among the Sleep, players assume the role of a defenseless two-year old toddler who has lost his mommy. With an unusual teddy bear as his only companion, he wanders off through the eerily dark house to find her. What follows is a haunting search through grim and twisted environments, experienced through the eyes of a scared child.
Images (click to enlarge)
My role in this project
During my internship at SOEDESCO Studios, I developed the Switch port of this title. For the first two months, I worked entirely on my own -- an unusual responsibility for an intern, maybe, but an awesome challenge! Later in my assignment, when my colleagues finished their own projects, I collaborated with other programmers to speed things up.
These are some of the most important aspects of the game I worked on:
- Switch-specific features: input, save data, configurations...
- Profiling: both CPU & GPU, locating problem areas, informing team members
- GPU optimization: textures, shaders, postprocessing, draw calls, lighting and much more
- CPU optimization: script logic, asset management, audio
- File size optimization: texture & audio compression, removing unused assets
- Many, many bug fixes
Nintendo Switch
This was my first console project ever, and I really enjoyed working on this project. It's incredibly satisfying to see optimization work pay off as the stability and performance of a console game improves. Seeing the average framerate benchmark slowly rise up from 7 to 55 frames per second is very rewarding.
On a more technical level, I got lots of hands-on experience with Nintendo's SDKs, hardware and tools, and I'd love to work with them again in the future.