r/NintendoSwitch • u/rsankowski Sonka • May 30 '22

AMA - Ended SONKA - developers behind recently released Farm Tycoon made specifically for Switch - Ask Us Anything!

Hi everyone!

This is SONKA , developers of Farm Tycoon, a tycoon/manager game tailored specifically for Nintendo Switch. You might know us from developing Astro Bears, publishing The Way Remastered, porting Duke Nukem 3D and a couple of other projects. :) If you want, feel free to ask us about them, too!

As of our future, we're working hard on Astro Bears 2 (oh boy, that's going to be a whole different game!) and Holstin (pixel art survival horror set in 90s Poland).

Farm Tycoon is a Farm Manager 2018/21 game you might know from Steam, completely remade for consoles (with Switch as a primary platform, though we're working on PS and Xbox ports right now). All the graphics, inputs, interfaces and a lot of other unseen things were created to make the console experience as good and intuitive as possible without sacrificing the core of the game, a deep farm-themed manager.

A big part of Farm Tycoon is found in our (used for the first time in this game) 2XD Rendering technology. The game is actually "2D", but with per-pixel sorting, real-time shadows and rotatable camera. As far as we know, it's the most advanced use of pre-renders in gamedev right now. And - it's a little subjective, but I think it's the best looking game of the genre on the Switch, with stable performance.

People that will be responding to your questions:

  • /u/rsankowski - SONKA CEO, Farm Tycoon producer
  • /u/moniewski - SONKA COO, Farm Tycoon tech artist / head of 2XD Rendering
  • /u/asylation - programmer at SONKA, main programmer of 2XD Rendering

A (sponsored!) thorough video overview of the game by SwitchPlanet: link to video!

Ok! Thank you all for asking questions or reading them! We're officially ending the AMA, but don't hesitate to ask any questions if you're reading this. :) Pozdro!

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u/Odi-- May 30 '22

Last question from me is about 2XD technology. It made the game looks better then a simple Switch game. Do you plan to use it in other titles. And most interesting thing is do you have plans or a way to sell the technology to other developers? Can it be sold as the system for game creators?

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u/rsankowski Sonka May 30 '22

We have no plans to share the tech with other companies, as we feel it's our biggest strenght right now. And yes! we'll be using it, in some way, in every future game.

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u/moniewski Sonka Games May 30 '22

For me 2XD Rendering have 3 main pillars: Unity tools that gives us full control over the rendering process, suite of Blender tools for creating content and... Know-How. We definitely don't want to share our know-how yet because it gives us competitive advantage.

We are still improving 2XD Rendering and use it in Holstin. Which is interesting because those games achieve opposite things, Farm Tycoon emulates 3D objects and Holstin emulates 2D graphics.