GamingBolt had a chance to speak to Alex Preston of Heart Machine, animator and lead developer of the upcoming crowd-funded action RPG Hyper Light Drifter which fuses elements from The Legend of Zelda and Diablo. Given the wide range of devices that Hyper Light Drifter will be releasing on, including the PC, Xbox One and PS4, we asked Preston about his thoughts on the architecture for all current gen consoles.
The main discussion has always been which platform is easier to develop for, especially since the PS4 and Xbox One are most similar to PCs. Was the Xbox One easy to develop for and were there any issues arising from its eSRAM? Did Preston and his team face any challenges from it?
“No, um, we’ve felt that the PS4 and the Xbox One are both pretty easy to develop for- I mean, consoles are practically PCs this day, architecture basically boils down to that, it’s not really different from say, a PC you’d buy on Newegg or whatever.
“They’re both powerful pieces of hardware, and we don’t even need our game to take advantage of that power, we just need room to do things because we have a lot of things going on – so that’s why we skipped 3DS, for example, because it’s very old hardware and underwhelming with its power – but Xbox One and PS4, they’re essentially good PCs, so they’re not that hard to develop for. We’re using the same tools – Game Maker – and they’re able to export the game with relative ease to each platform. It’s not even like the Xbox 360 and PS3, or the original Xbox and the PS2, where it got really complicated because the hardware was so unique. These are much, much easier to get stuff on.”
Hyper Light Drifter will be out later this year so we’ll see for ourselves just how well Heart Machine has taken advantage of each platform. What are your thoughts on Preston’s statements? Let us know in the comments.