In summer 2020, Unity provided support for Moon Studios when they were working to port Ori and the Will of the Wisp to Nintendo Switch. You can learn more about how we worked together to scale the project for this target platform in this case study.

Moon Studios and Unity Accelerate Solutions (formerly Unity Professional Services) analyzed sections of code together, finding ways to tweak the particle systems and reduce memory usage. “When you’re targeting 60 fps on Nintendo Switch, you have to make sure every single aspect is optimized, including simulation, streaming, rendering, and graphics,” says studio founder Gennadiy Korol.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps pushes the Nintendo Switch very hard in terms of memory use. The Accelerate Solutions team helped Moon make sure they were getting the best from these layers, focusing on native memory allocation. 

Working with the team from Moon Studios, the Unity team measured the number of allocations from the different allocators. They also looked at the amount of memory allocated from each, which showed that the game was filling up some of the bucket allocators before even reaching the start of gameplay.  

Increasing the size of the bucket allocator allowed extra room for small allocations that happen when playing the game. Allocating these small blocks from the bucket allocator gives the game a performance boost, helping it to hit the 60 fps target. The small allocations no longer come from the dynamic heap allocator, so this allocator contains just large blocks of memory. The allocator is less fragmented, which keeps the game running smoothly for longer.  

Following the collaboration with Moon, the Accelerate Solutions team worked with the Optimization team, who developed the memory allocator customization feature that is now available in 2021 LTS.