Ikenfell: Porting a Handcrafted RPG Engine Across Three Consoles at Once

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Title: Ikenfell
Release Date: 2018, 2020
Developer: Happy Ray Games
Publisher: Humble Games
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
Engine: Custom C# engine (SDL2 / OpenGL)

Ikenfell is a turn-based tactical RPG from Happy Ray Games, a game about troublesome magic students navigating a school full of dark secrets, with timing-based combat mechanics reminiscent of the Paper Mario series. What makes it technically interesting from a porting standpoint is that it runs on a fully custom engine, hand-built by sole programmer Chevy Ray Johnston in C# on top of SDL2 and OpenGL, complete with a Lua scripting layer for events and puzzles and a custom map and scene editor. Sickhead handled the PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch ports, all three shipping simultaneously on launch day. A custom engine is never a given. It means no existing console abstraction layers, no community knowledge base, no off-the-shelf SDK integrations to lean on. You’re working directly with the codebase as the author wrote it, understanding its rendering assumptions, its input model, its event system, and then translating all of that cleanly to three different pieces of hardware at once. Getting a bespoke engine like this through three separate certification pipelines in parallel, each with their own requirements for input handling, system calls, and performance targets, is exactly the kind of work that looks invisible when it goes right.

Sickhead Games is the leading game porting studio, skilled in porting Unity, Unreal, Godot, and custom engine titles to every major console and handheld including Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and mobile. We’re trusted by solo indie developers and major publishers alike to handle everything from codebase assessment to post-launch support, bringing great games to the audiences they deserve. Satisfied clients and partners include Humble Games, Sony Interactive, Nintendo, Annapurna, Good Games, ConcernedApe, MegaCrit, 17-Bit, Maddy Makes Games, Zachtronics, Keen Software House, Thomas Happ, Pocketwatch Games, EXOK, Young Horses, Taito, Jaleco, and Microsoft. We’ve ported over 100 releases including Stardew Valley, Slay the Spire, TowerFall, Axiom Verge, and Space Engineers, and also specialize in bringing retro console and PC games to modern audiences like Grandia, Enclave, and Jaleco Sports titles.