From the development side, it wasn’t more effort to get Giana running on the Wii U than it was to port her to the X360. The TCR side was a bit simpler, but the low level engine side was harder. The Wii U has some PC-like dx10/dx11-like systems like geometry shaders, however, when we started working on the port, we already had our game released on the X360, and going from a console release to Wii U is easier since the consoles have very similar performance characteristics. Another helpful factor is the amount of overlap when it comes to controller support, interfaces, user management and suchlike (even though every single engine system needs to be rewritten to support it).
The effort we spent porting to the WiiU was comparable to migrating to some other major platforms, even though we had much more experience with those. All in all, the experience was very similar to doing an Xbox 360 port early on in the console’s life cycle.
Our “time to triangle”, which is the time it takes to get good performance with the final rendering techniques, was around 1 month for 2 programmers. This included doing the porting work needed for every other major system such as sound, input, etc. Doing all of the lotcheck requirements took about an additional 1-2 months for 2 developers (1 programmer and 1 tester on average).
On the tech side, having DX11 level features is pretty useful, which makes large parts of the system compatible with our other platforms. Overall the hardware itself is slightly faster than the other current-gen consoles. One very nice advantage the console has is the additional usable memory you have. Having that extra memory made development much easier compared to other current-gen platforms.
