My Fantastic Ranch
Console adaptation, platform compliance and a cross-platform achievement manager on a fantasy ranch management game published by Nacon.
The game
My Fantastic Ranch: Unicorns & Dragons is a management game from Piece of Cake, published by Nacon and released in November 2022. You run a ranch of magical creatures, training them and teaching riding and aerobatics lessons while managing resources and reputation.
My contributions
- Adapted the game for 8th and 9th generation consoles, with full platform compliance.
- Built a cross-platform achievement manager with direct SDK integration, and oversaw console certification.
- Improved internal tooling and automation, and optimised GitLab CI build pipelines.
Why it was interesting
Console porting is where a game meets rules it cannot argue with. Each platform holder has its own certification requirements: suspend and resume, controller disconnection, save data integrity, user account switching. Every one of them is a code path that never runs on PC.
Achievements are a good example of why an abstraction earns its keep: every platform exposes the same concept through a completely different SDK, with different unlock semantics and different failure modes. Writing that once, behind one interface, is the difference between shipping on four platforms and maintaining four games.