Q: What is it like developing on Xbox Series X?
A: Transitioning development to a new console platform, like Xbox Series X, is usually very painful. You have to deal with new tools, new workflows, new ways of thinking.
This time around the team at Xbox brought me a new toolset called the Game Development Kit, which they already had up and running on Xbox One.
This meant that we could make the transition much earlier. In fact, we started doing the groundwork for Xbox Series X development long before we even received the hardware. This kind of thinking from Xbox allowed us to get a real head-start on next-gen development, so after receiving our early Xbox Series X hardware, we were up and running really quickly.
For me, the most important thing in making a videogame is the relationships. Working with Xbox, is a partnership – the team at Xbox is committed to helping us make a great videogame and they’ve shown that to me again and again. That means being open and honest about our experiences; what we’ve loved and perhaps even what we’ve found difficult in development has had meaningful, visible impact on the updates that I get for the tools for Series X. (Shout out to our development partner at Xbox, Richard Hackett! Thanks Rich!)
I’ve never worked on a console launch where, while we’re still months away from release, the tools have been this mature, this stable, this easy to work with.
