The Adventure Pals was released almost 10 months ago now - in April 2018. In this series of technical articles Matt will discuss how the existing game written in Haxe/OpenFL, was ported to Playstation 4, Xbox One and Switch using the somewhat unusual approach of going via Unity. Matt will cover the general approach and dive into some of the technical detail and interesting challenges that popped up along the way including the bizarre “giant tree mode”!



While the game took Massive Monster several years to develop from start to finish, the Unity and console conversion work started in January 2017 where it ran alongside the final game development and was finished in April 2018 when the game launched.

There were over 192 commits spanning 150+ man days of effort over this period and representing a significant contribution to the project - not simply a “porting” task. All releases of the game use our Unity conversion and optimisation with further work applied to target Microsoft Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Sony PS4 and to pass certification.

So let’s get started at the beginning…

Sometime in mid 2016, Jay from Massive Monster got back in contact with me to revive a discussion we’d had a year or so before about using Unity to bring an existing title to console. The concept centered around the fact that Haxe could be cross compiled into C# and I’d had some experience cross compiling games many years back during the dawn of the mobile games industry.

Haxe, OpenFL and Lime

Haxe refers to itself as “The Cross platform Toolkit”. This includes - the Haxe programming language, cross compiler, standard library and tools to allow developers to write applications or games in a nice, modern language which is then cross-compiled to each platform’s language de-riguer; allowing excellent performance with no overhead from a virtual machine.

But Haxe by itself doesn’t include everything needed to write a game, you also need rendering, I/O etc. This is where OpenFL and Lime come in.