PC to mobile or vice versa?

Hey All,

I have a game I've been developing for over a year now which is probably a month or two away (haha who am I kidding) from completion if I go down the original intended route which is mobile.

I also want to release on PC and I have a bit of a dilemma. Should I release on PC first and mobile later?
I seem to recall reading that this was the preferred option as it stopped PC gamers thinking it was "just" a mobile port.

There are a number of decisions I've made along the way which if I had went for PC first I would have done differently and probably would have finished the game quicker - not baking bloody prefabs for a start, so I need to think about changes if I go PC first but if the potential sales are going to be impacted by PC / Mobile first then its something I'm prepared to do.

If anyone has any experience they can share or just some general thoughts, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks.

FYI The game is a 3d procedural dungeon crawler and I was originally going for a Gauntlet meets Smash TV but its probably a little more like Binding of Isaac.
https://twitter.com/PlasticCowGames/status/1124605482830790656

 

I posted a similar question (poll) on twitter put from a development perspective rather than a shipping perspective.
I got some really interesting comments which I thought I'd share here in case anyone is interested.

So the question was is it easier to scale up from mobile to PC or vice versa and although the poll is more favor of PC to mobile, the comments said the opposite.

There were a couple of comments saying that you should ensure your mobile interface is designed from the start to avoid clutter and a comment mentioning its something you need to manage from the start taking in to account modeling shaders & interface.
There was also an excellent thread from Amandine Coget, an engine dev who worked on BF4 / Frostbite (along with porting to mobile) and stated that scaling up was easier than scaling down. Mentioning that the UI for BF4 was not optimised well for mobile causing a load of draw calls, however targeting a weaker platform tends to limit what you do and can often force you to drop neat ideas in either gameplay or art direction.
To summarize, her recommendations were:
- Design with flexibility in mind. Don’t just have “one” art direction: decide on quality knobs early.
- Test regularly on weaker platforms, make sure those run well.
- Have a “fake phone / console” dev variable so you can test mobile / console on your dev machine at all times.

If anyone's interested in the original tweet poll you can find it here and you can find Amandine's retweet here