Once the port is visually recognizable, the company barrels into another self-explanatory phase called "first playable." The team will start re-connecting the controls and enough subsystems so the player can walk around the world. You might not be able to fire any weapons, though, or kill anything dangerous. "But at least you're moving around in the world, and it's starting to be more of an interactive experience," Traub said.

By this point, the team is intimately familiar with the game and how it was made. They get to see every trick and workaround that is, ideally, imperceptible to the player. "It's not a spaceship, it's a Hollywood set of a spaceship," Traub explained. "And if you turn the camera 15 degrees to the right, you see a grip standing there with a microphone." For Traub, it's like watching a 'making of' documentary for your favorite movie. You can appreciate the time and craft that went into its development, but you'll never truly believe in its world again.

Sometimes, Panic Button will bring in quality assurance (QA) testers at the first playable stage. The game will be in rough shape, but the team wants to be sure that what has been implemented is working correctly.

Next, the company aims for feature parity. That means implementing and polishing every system that is necessary for the final release. The difficulty of each addition, and the order they're tackled in, differs depending on the project. Rocket League is a predominantly online game, so that functionality might have been required for "first playable." For a title like Doom, however, which has a single-player campaign and a fun but secondary multiplayer mode, it could be tackled later. Panic Button will often use this time to improve the visuals, adding shaders, lighting effects and complex particle systems. The team will also tackle the audio and figure out when, and how to load different parts of the game.

"Some games just try and do a static load upfront," Traub explained, "and other games are doing streaming as you progress. The different bandwidth challenges may complicate that, so we might have to do levels of compression to make it load faster, or we might have to be more aggressive about background processing." Video games use lots of tricks, including elevators and slow, narrow passages that force a cinematic shimmy, to hide sizeable load times. Panic Button has to match the timing of those sequences or add minimal obstructions, such as a jammed elevator door, to keep its load times from standing out. "We definitely have to watch for things like that," Traub said. "It's always entertaining, all the tricks and airlocks that games put in."

Once the port is effectively complete, Panic Button will go through pre-submission and submission with Nintendo. Finally, once the game has been released, the team shifts into a live support mode, reacting to player feedback and releasing any optimizations that weren't quite ready for release day. "As much as everybody tries to QA things internally ahead of time, the reality is modern games are obscenely complex animals, and once you throw a million players at something, they're going to find even the tiniest crack," Traub said. "So paying attention to what's being reported out there, if anybody's having problems, or if there's chatter about problems, then that's something that we can investigate."

Doom was released for the Nintendo Switch on November 10th, 2018; Rocket League came out four days later. Most critics praised Panic Button's technological achievements, while noting that the definitive version, with fewer technological compromises, would always lie on other systems.

The team then moved on to Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, another first-person shooter published by Bethesda. The experience with Doom "gave us a little bit of extra boost out of the gate," Traub said, but ultimately the game had its own challenges and systems to contend with. There was also one instance where the developer just had to insert a new building into the level to hide objects that would have required Herculean rendering. "There was one shot, one camera angle, that was just killing us," Traub admitted. "So we just simply put a building in there that was a big occluder, and that saved the day."

"There was one shot, one camera angle, that was just killing us. So we just simply put a building in there that was a big occluder, and that kind of saved the day."

Again, the port was considered "a technical marvel" and "something to behold." Panic Button's reputation then skyrocketed. It started receiving more inquiries and RFP (request for proposals) from other studios and rights holders. That meant the company could be more selective and pick up projects that were both interesting and challenging for its employees. "What we're not doing is picking the ones that make us go, 'That's easy, we know we can knock that out of the park.' We're actually picking the ones that make us go, "All right, that's hard, but we're pretty sure we can do it,'" Traub explained.

Panic Button has since ported Warframe, a free-to-play online shooter, and Hob, a colorful adventure game by Runic Games, to the Switch. It's also ported Subnautica to consoles and helped Electric Hat Games release To The Top, a first-person parkour platformer, on PlayStation VR. The company has kept busy, though its fans are understandably excited for two upcoming projects in particular: Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Doom Eternal. These two games are still in development and considered by Panic Button as co-development ("co-dev") projects, rather than a typical port.

The company's eight-stage process remains the same. Working in a co-dev model does provide some unique advantages and disadvantages, though. If Panic Button has a question, for instance, it's easier to reach out and talk to the person who worked on that particular level or system. "I say potentially, because some projects cross the finish line gracefully, and other projects cross the finish line on fire," Traub says with a chuckle.

With a typical port, that person might have moved onto another project or left the company entirely. "It depends on the amount of time that's passed," Traub said. "We've had some ports where we're working on something that shipped years ago, and there's a lot that's been lost to time and legend." A co-development model also means that the game is still being worked on. It's a moving target, and if the other developer makes a sweeping change it can impact Panic Button's work too. "Every project is different, and every group is different, so every one is an adventure," Traub added.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood, developed by MachineGames and Arkane Studios, has two protagonists and will offer a co-operative multiplayer mode, unlike its predecessor. Doom Eternal, meanwhile, will have new locations, weapons and traversal mechanics -- including a quick-dash and deadly grappling hook -- that increase the tempo and blood-pumping action. "They are easily among the most challenging projects that we've worked on," Traub said.

Games of this size and visual fidelity are normally considered beyond the Switch's modest hardware. Panic Button has demonstrated, though, that it's possible to bring 'triple-A' games to the portable system. The company has already set a high bar -- the question now, it seems, is how much farther it can be raised before Nintendo gives them a hand and releases a Switch successor.