I recently talked about the Steam release of Smith and Winston but I didn't realise until late last night, that the developer actually made a very interesting blog post about supporting multiple platforms.

Interesting enough, that it warranted an extra post to talk a little about it. Why? Well, a bit of a situation started when game porter Ethan Lee made a certain Twitter post, which is a bit of a joke aimed at developers who see Linux as "Too niche" while practically falling over themselves to get their games on every other new platform that appears. This Twitter post was shared around (a lot) and some developers (like this) ended up mentioning how Linux doesn't sell a lot of games and it continued spreading like wildfire.

There's been a lot of counter-arguments for Linux too, like this and this and this and this and a nice one thrown our way too. Oh and we even spoke to Tommy Refenes who said the next SMB should come to Linux too, so that was awesome. Additionally, Ethan Lee also wrote up a post about packaging Linux games, worth a read if you're new to packaging for Linux.

Where was I again? Right, the blog post from the developer of Smith and Winston about how they support Windows, Mac and Linux. They go over details about how they do so, from using SDL2 which they say "takes 90% of the pain away from platform support" to the cross-platform rendering library bgfx. It's just a really interesting insight into how developing across multiple platforms doesn't have to be overly difficult.

I especially liked these parts:

I’ve been writing games and engines for 30+ years so none of this is new, I have a lot of experience. But you only get the experience by doing it and not making excuses. By forcing the game through different compilers (Visual C++, Clang and GCC) you find different code bugs (leave the warnings on max). By forcing the runtime to use different memory allocators, threading libraries and rendering technologies you find different runtime bugs. This makes your code way more stable on every platform. Even if you never deploy your code to a non windows platform just running it on Linux or macOS will expose crashes instantly that rarely appear on Windows. So delivering a quality product on the dominant platform is easier if your support the minor platforms as well.

They also clearly mention, that they might not even make their money back on the Linux port of Smith and Winston. However, they're clear that the other reasons (code quality, easier porting to other platforms and so on) do help make up for it. This is a similar point the people from Stardock also made on Reddit.

See the post here in full. If you wish to check out their game, Smith and Winston, it's available on itch.io and Steam in Early Access.