PS4 Is A Beast, Sony An Awesome Partner, Says Dev
30 June 2014
While the Italian development scene may have consisted in just Milestone for many sad years, there is now a thriving indie environment with many interesting games being made such as Futuridium EP Deluxe, scheduled for a release on PlayStation 4 and PS Vita some time in July. We’ve reached out to Mixed Bag Games and Mauro Fanelli, Co-Founder of the studio, was kind enough to give us his impressions on working with Sony (Futuridium is a PlayStation exclusive) and specifically with PS4; here’s an excerpt.
Developing on PS4 was a very good experience: the console is a beast and porting the game was very easy. We use Unity as our engine: it’s only thanks to engines like Unity that a small, two person team like MixedBag is now able to manage a multiplatform game on console.Also we kept adding more and more stuff and particles: the game is a lot better than what we showed in the trailers, I think everyone’ll be pretty pleased…Sony is an awesome partner to work with. They’re committed to indie and they helped us in all the possible ways to get both Futuridium and forma.8 on PlayStation.
Even though they’ve been adding more effects and particles, it sounds like the hardware won’t even blink at 1080P@60FPS (with V-Sync enabled):
In the last couple of weeks we kept adding and adding stuff to the PS4 version, it’s like: the game is almost ready, let’s throw everything we can on screen! So a ton more particles than we initially anticipated and all the fancy post processing stuff: motion blur, a complex glow, distortion effects, the fancy chromatic aberration stuff. All at 1080p and rock solid 60fps with v-sync engaged.What impressed me more of the PS4 is that it’s a very powerful, yet accessible and ‘solid’ piece of hardware. Not only is it easy to develop for, but also the player experience is top notch: the OS is fast and responsive, the sharing features are amazing and everything was in from day one. It’s an impressive feat.
Look forward to the entire transcript, coming to you tomorrow.