Through June and July 2016 we carried out a second engagement for Blazing Griffin on The Ship: Remasted, separate from the AI work we had done over the previous winter. This one asked a different question: what would it take to build and run the game on Linux and Mac?
It was a question a lot of studios were weighing at the time. Valve was pushing Linux hard — SteamOS, the Steam Machines that had gone on sale the previous November, and the Steam Controller alongside them. For a studio with a PC catalogue, the practical question was whether its games could follow, and what finding out would cost.
We set up build processes for both platforms, checked that players on different systems could play together, and reported back on what each would need to reach a standard worth shipping.
The Ship: Remasted released on 31 October 2016 for Windows, macOS and SteamOS + Linux.
A decade later the question looks better than the hardware that prompted it. Steam Machines never found their audience and were discontinued. Valve kept working at the underlying problem, though: Proton arrived in 2018 and the Steam Deck in 2022, and running Windows games on Linux went from a specialist pursuit to something a great many people now do without thinking about it. Studios asking in 2016 how their catalogue would behave on Linux were asking early rather than wrongly.
Image: Steam Controller (top) by Les Orchard, used under CC BY 2.0 and cropped. Photographed in February 2016, it shows the retail Steam Controller of the period rather than any hardware used on this project.
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Our earlier work on the same game, developing its AI, has its own entry.
Further reading: The Ship: Remasted on Steam.