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PlayStation Mobile Developer Interview: Super Crate Box | PSNStores

PlayStation Mobile Developer Interview: Super Crate Box

Posted by on October 3rd, 2012 | 0 Comments | Tags: ,

Vlambeer has brought their ever popular game Super Crate Box to PlayStation Mobile. We had a chance to ask them a few questions prior to launch, mostly about what the process was like in getting their game up and running on the service. If you want to hear more about the game itself, check our impressions or this post from the PlayStation Blog.

Q: With Super Crate Box for PSM, what features of the platform are you taking advantage of? Is there any thing you’re looking to add at a later date?

Obviously, the main feature we’re taking advantage of is the lowered certification requirements. The idea behind PSM seems to be to allow small developers to try interesting, experimental things with Playstation Vita and Playstation Certified devices and the lower certification requirements definitely make PSM an interesting platform to develop for and to keep track of after its launch.

Q: How was the process involved with bringing Super Crate Box to PlayStation Mobile?

We were on a bit of a restricted time-frame, so it was quite a stretch to get the game done within two months or so. For a non-release development toolset – we used version 0.99 of the SDK, so it still had minor issues we had to work around – the entire development environment was amazingly stable and user-friendly.

Within a matter of days an early build of Super Crate Box was up and running. It took us a few weeks to get it to the level of polish anyone would expect from the game, but compared to bringing it to iOS it was a breeze – especially as during iOS development we spent weeks tweaking the on-screen controls. We could use that to our advantage now during development for the Playstation Certified devices – but we definitely consider the Vita version the best mobile version of Super Crate Box.

Q: Was it difficult to develop the game with multiple styles of device in mind? (Phones, tablets, vita.)

Not really, we obviously had a button-controlled version on PC/Mac and the touchscreen version on iOS. Since the PSM development toolkit took care of a lot of things for us in terms of controls, we didn’t have too much work making sure it works on everything.

Q: Can we expect more PSM support from Vlambeer in the future?

Potentially. We’re a bit impulsive, so we never quite know what is up next. We definitely enjoyed working with Sony, we enjoyed playing our game on the Vita (and Rami got hooked on Sound Shapes and Gravity Rush too) and we enjoyed the short development cycle. Our experiences developing for PSM were more than positive and we’re always more likely to return to positive experiences.

Q: The PSM SDK is being updated in November, what improvements are you hoping for, if any?

Leaderboards and similar features would be much appreciated. Competing platforms, like iOS, offer a great set of default features including leaderboards and multiplayer.

Q: How has Sony been with regards to helping you guys with PSM? Have they been more hands off, or have they been doing everything they can to make sure your experiences with the platform have been positive ones.

Like said, Sony was great. They’ve done everything they can to make sure our experiences were good, going as far as to having someone drive over during the weekend to borrow us a Vita after ours was stolen during the Eurogamer Expo last week. During development they’ve tried to fix every bug we ran into that was caused by the development toolkit as soon as they could. We couldn’t be more surprised that working with one of the big three was as pleasant as it was.

Q: Finally, when is Super Crate Box coming out, and do you have a price you can announce for the game yet?

Super Crate Box is launching together with Playstation Mobile tomorrow, October 3rd and will cost around $4.

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We would like to thank Rami and Vlambeer for taking the time to chat with us.