Little King’s Story PC – Localization Blog #1

Little King’s Story’s story

So we just launched our PC port of Little King’s Story last Friday on August 5th, and it appears that quite a few people are having some performance issues. We had hoped to have a patch by now that would do the talking for us and lay most of the concerns to rest. However, with the Japanese porting team already out for their Obon holiday break, we wanted to touch base with you all and let everyone know that we’re aware of the issues, as well as clarify how we plan to address them going forward.

The main thing we want to focus on is stabilization and optimization so that the game plays as intended, doesn’t crash anywhere, and that it runs smoother at a constant frame rate for any PC that meets our minimum specs. What we will not be doing is adding mouse support as the Wii game did not support the Wiimote’s pointer and doing so would work against the design of the original game, and we will not be trying to perfect the game running at 60fps.

Why even include the 60fps option at all if we knew it didn’t work properly, you may ask? That was one that we debated internally, and in the end the winning argument was that giving more options to the player is always better, just as long as they were warned of the dangers (hence the “Not Recommended” statement). PC players are a resourceful bunch, the argument went, and why restrict them if they want to see what happens when trying to run the game at 60fps and possibly tinkering with it themselves?

Creating a “cheap and dirty port” was the last thing on our minds when initially wanting to port to PC, and we’ve already spent more money on this project, which was originally supposed to release in January, than most of the “finished” games we license from Japan. Little King’s Story on Wii was an absolute gem and one of our favorite games that we’ve worked on; anyone who follows us on social media knows that the onii has been our unofficial mascot for years; so we here at XSEED took it upon ourselves to create and fund a PC port as our first ever project overseeing all aspects of development directly, in the hopes that the game would finally find on PC the wider audience that it deserved.

When finding a company to port the game, while we were aware that some Japanese companies may not be as well versed in creating games for PC as Western developers, our thinking was that if there were any useful notes left in the Wii game’s code by the original Japanese development team, it would be vital for the porting company to be able to read them since the developers are no longer available to consult with. It also didn’t help that from a technical standpoint, games from Wii can be more challenging to port to PC than from other platforms.

With the lack of any game build updates I hope this helps clarify what happened behind the scenes here on how this PC port came to be and our thinking behind it. We knew it wouldn’t be perfect when it launched, but after working on it for over a year and finally progressing to the point that it could run well on all our PCs in the office, it appears our conclusion about being ready for the big leagues was a little premature, and something that we hope to start addressing next week with the porting team.

Ken

Team Leader at XSEED Games