Continuing our talk with Supergiant Games creative director Greg Kasavin, who is currently bringing Transistor to the PlayStation 4 and PC, we asked how the development team was using the 8 GB of GDDR5 RAM that the PS4 provided. Considering that the PS4 has more RAM than your average PC, it was interesting to note the improvement of visuals over Bastion.
“Transistor has a lot more animation and visual effects than our first game so it’s somewhat more memory intensive. We barely got Bastion running smoothly on the Xbox 360 at 720p so having a much bigger memory budget this time around means our artists don’t need to take as many shortcuts creating the characters and creatures for this game. While memory constraints can lead to some creative solutions, we’re nonetheless very excited to have more breathing room on the memory front now.”
On being asked what was Supergiant Games’ relationship with Sony – since Transistor was one of the first indie titles to be announced as a timed exclusive for the console – Kasavin stated that, “Transistor is making its console debut on the PlayStation 4 and will be available on the PC on the same day, so the game is not exclusive to any platform.
“Part of our decision to work with Sony and come to the PS4 first comes from how open and understanding Sony has been around our needs as a small team. They played the game at PAX East where we showed it for the first time, and really liked what they saw of it so we started talking after the show. They put a lot of faith in smaller teams like ours, as evidenced by the prominent placement we got as part of their E3 lineup. We’re self-funding and self-publishing Transistor, so our relationship to Sony is similar to, say, our relationship to Valve with Steam — we are working on a game coming to their platform.”
Transistor will be releasing in 2014 for PS4 and PC.