Sony’s consoles and handhelds have always been under the scanner as far as game development is concerned. Their systems are powerful but we all know that they are difficult to develop for. Although, some developers, specifically Sony’s first party developers like Naughty Dog have pushed the system to it’s limits and have seen amazing results in the form of the Uncharted franchise.
The same problem continues with the PlayStation Vita. The system is amazing but unfortunately the lack of software support is disappointing. Oddworld Inhabitants, who are developing Stranger’s Wrath HD believes that performance was their biggest challenge in bringing the game to the PlayStation Vita.
“Performance was the biggest thing really; we didn’t want to compromise the game by doing a half-arsed job getting it on there with a low frame rate, so we spent probably 4-5 months on nothing but optimizing: an example being that the PS3/PC versions have 5 render passes, and the VITA has 2 render passes, as well as a bunch of other stuff. One of the nice things about the VITA was knowing we had a widescreen display so could redesign parts of the UI to fit the complete screen,” said Stewart Gilray from Oddworld to Allaboutthegames.
Good thing that they spent so much time on optimizing the game on the Vita, instead of simply porting it. He was also a bit critical about the Vita’s rear touch panel, believing that not too many people use it.
“Well, we worked on a couple of different things for that, like rope climbing, rowing the boat, punching and binocular zooming. However we’ve found that a lot of people just don’t like the rear touch pad, so we’re adding in an alternate control that negates its usage at all,” he said.
Only time will tell how good Stranger’s Wrath HD will turn out to be on the PlayStation Vita. What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments section below.