Hi all, Robert here, this time to talk about - Steam Deck!
Yup, that's right: we got the opportunity to test our game on Valve's fancy new piece of hardware, and I have to say: it's a pretty powerful device, and with all the optimizations we'd already done for the other consoles, The Hand of Merlin already runs on Steam Deck at a smooth 60 FPS. Some of you - the lucky ones - may already have a Deck in their hands, and if you do, you'll notice that Valve assigned us a yellow "Playable" tag. But over the last few days, we've been working on getting the few reported (minor) kinks out, so that we can have that nice green "Verified" tag. So let's unpack the journey of porting to Steam Deck, as short and pleasant as it was. First things first, we've already been working on supporting Linux natively. Although we haven't ticked the box to make this official on the store page yet, the native Linux (and macOS) executables have been available for some time now, and a few of our dedicated fans have been helping out with compatibility testing. This means we do not require Proton (a Windows emulation layer) to run our game on SteamOS / Steam Deck. In other words, there's no risk of an emulation layer introducing bugs or instabilities, plus there's zero overhead, which improves both performance and battery life. Secondly, the biggest gruntwork was updating our Steam API support from a fairly old version (that came by default in Serious Engine 4) to the newest one required by Steam Deck. This allowed us to correctly identify the input controls: both the touchscreen and the gamepad, and I have to say - planning ahead really helped us out here. With Steam Big Picture mode already supported via our dynamic UI scaling system, font legibility was no issue at all. Having already done full gamepad support, once we updated the Steam API, the controls also Just Worked(TM). Fortunately, Serious Engine also already has built-in support for touch input, and it helps that our UI does not require more than a single mouse button for most operations. There was just one small but important tweak we had to do: if using the touchscreen, you now always get a small confirm / cancel button before executing a move or attack action. This really helps prevent mistaken actions. On top of this, our engine works just fine with multiple input sources, so switching between the touch and gamepad controls on the Steam Deck felt really smooth and seamless, so much so that I found myself using the right analogue stick for quick and precise camera panning, and the touchscreen for most UI interactions. And finally, as I talked about in a previous blog post, we had done some significant optimizations in a push to bring the game to consoles. To properly support Steam Deck's hardware, all we had to do was correctly identify its GPU and set up appropriate default graphics settings. And voila - smooth, stable 60 FPS! Well, unless of course you limit the FPS from the Deck's Quick Access menu in order to preserve battery. But even if you do - the visuals won't change. The game will look just as good, but the battery will last longer. So, there you have it. Full support for Steam Deck incoming. :) For any questions or comments, find us on Steam Discussions or our Discord server. Robert