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Unravel Two, the co-op focused follow up to one the most charming platformers we've seen in quite some time, proved to be one of E3 2018's most memorable reveals, but that announcement would have been delayed by more than six months had a Nintendo Switch port been figured into developer Coldwood Interactive's plan.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, producer Michael Gill reveals development started on the sequel around two years ago, and while Switch would indeed make an ideal home for the multi-coloured Yarnies, it would have been a serious stretch for such a small team.

Even those controllers on the side are the same colours as the Yarnies - it's incredible. It's a machine made for Unravel Two. But we run at 60 frames per second, that's really important for us and we want to keep that framerate. To keep that on Switch, and to keep the graphical quality [would have been difficult].

For Gill, it all comes down to resource management and the Swedish developer would have struggled to maintain its 60fps goal and keep its graphical fidelity on Switch, at least in the time frame it was given.

We're also using a heavily extended version of [Sony's] PhyreEngine, and we had to port it to Xbox One ourselves. It doesn't have support for Switch yet, so we would have to do that port and the engine work ourselves, and we're a really small team. We only have two engine programmers across the whole team, and they mostly work on updates for the game so we just didn't have time.
"We really wanted to be able to release this week, but if we had to do a Switch port it would have taken another half a year or so.

So no Unravel Two, at least not yet, but it's comforting to know that so many developers want their games to appear on Switch, even if the feat of porting it seems a little daunting at first. Share your thoughts on this story in the comments below...

[source gamesindustry.biz]