There's two sides to console development. There's the software certification side, which is what you asked about - all of the cert requirements and fixing console-specific and certification bugs like using the proper glyphs, using the copyrighted terms, and so on. The other side is actually setting up the software at the engine level to interface with the hardware drivers and utilize the game hardware. This tends to be the really crunchy programming work done by senior software engineers who really love playing with hardware.
All software needs to interact with the actual hardware at some point - there must be data sent to the hardware and the hardware has to operate on those data. There are often many layers of abstraction between the hardware and the software - most programmers don't need to think about how the math is done, only that the math is done. It's the experts who work with the hardware that do what they can to squeeze additional performance out of that hardware in the time they have allotted to do so.
One such example would be back in the PS3 days. The PS3 famously had a bunch of "synergistic processing units" (SPUs) that could do a bunch of math very quickly, but required a special half-float format to operate. Most game dev teams didn't bother to utilize those SPUs for that reason - it took a lot of additional effort to set up the software to store data in that format, send them to the SPUs for calculation, and then convert those data back to the normal floating point precision numbers we usually use. Some teams like Naughty Dog's Uncharted team, however, took full advantage of the SPUs and used them for the post-processing effects to make Uncharted 2 look so good.
This is the other side of console development - writing code to take advantage of the specific hardware bells and whistles and squeezing out better visuals and performance from the hardware that's waiting to be used.
[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]
Got a burning question you want answered?
- Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter
- Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on BlueSky
- Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr
- Frequent Questions: The FAQ