Prime Junta
Guest
What complications does console development add aside from ui?
The UI is a big complication in and of itself. The UI doesn't just hang in space, it's intimately connected to the gameplay. You can't just swap one out and not have it affect the way the game plays. This means that there will need to be adjustments in the gameplay to make it possible to create a UI that works on all the target platforms.
Other complications are just things that don't quite work the same way although, perhaps, they should -- the renderer, shaders, memory constraints, performance constraints, API implementations that are theoretically identical but in practice have different bugs, different performance bottlenecks, and different quirks. You might have something that works perfectly fine on the PC but stutters horribly on the console, and might discover that the console problem is actually with something deeper in the code. So you change that, and then have to re-test to make sure your changes didn't break something on the PC.
Similar problems apply even if you're just developing for different OS's -- the UI is the same for all of them, but you will still occasionally run into trouble. In Pillars, for example, the middleware handling dynamic cloth suddenly stopped working on OS X and Linux, and I don't think they ever managed to fix it.
Multi-platform toolkits are fantastic, but they never work 100% perfectly, and the more platforms you add, the more frequently you will run into those times it doesn't quite work.