Making TMNT: Splintered Fate more than a port
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise has been captivating audiences for four decades.
Each generation has grown up with different iterations of the characters across mixed media, including comics, animated shows, live-action movies, and, of course, video games.
The most recent iteration comes from Super Evil Megacorp, who partnered up with Paramount Game Studios to launch TMNT: Splintered Fate on iOS last year.
Super Evil's director of product management Tom Westall tells GamesIndustry.biz that working with Paramount on such a big IP has been very rewarding creatively.
"Paramount have been really supportive as partners – they know what they're talking about when it comes to TMNT and have been investing a lot in the IP recently," says Westall. "They've been interested and keen to get involved with what we're doing."
Splintered Fate was initially made for Apple Arcade, but Westall says internally the studio "always wanted the game to be something more than that," leading to a multiplatform release this year.
Porting Splintered Fate to other platforms began at the beginning of February this year. It was launched on Switch in July and on PC earlier this month.
While the timeframe for porting the game may seem short, Westall says there was no external pressure from Paramount. He says any pressure they felt was internal, especially since they self-published the game for these ports.
"We hold ourselves to high standards. This is the first game for Super Evil on Switch and our first proper foray on PC. We wanted to make sure we made a great impression with the players, so the quality belt was always really high for us.
"There's always those pressures; being a smaller studio, we have to jump on every opportunity that makes sense for us."
Super Evil's lead game designer Daniel Stansens is especially proud of what the team accomplished in successfully producing a cross-platform title.
"It's great to see a game that we have put a lot of care and time into going onto the PC market.
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