BETA | VITA DEVELOPMENT An easy touch?
Just how tough is making your first game for the PS Vita? According to a number of Ubisoft studios, it’s a surprisingly welcoming process. Will Freeman finds out more
Ubisoft Reflections director of technology Michael Troughton says the work the studio did on Rayman Origins (above) owes much to profiling tool Razor
THE CLICHÉ ABOUT developing for Sony platforms is a pervasive myth. It’s something we’ve all heard time and again, and even consumers with an interest in the making of games are aware of it. The stereotype? Developing games for a
PlayStation brand system is hard; very hard indeed. While there’s a degree of hyperbole to the accusation, for first-timers in particular, developing for the PS2 and PS3 was – and is – infamously testing. Surely then, the logic must apply to the PS
Vita? Inaccessibly powerful machines, after all, have become something of a speciality of Sony’s. At least that’s what the company’s detractors would have you believe. However, speak with many of the teams who
have now completed Vita projects, and you’ll hear something pleasantly surprising. It may be that making a game for Sony’s new handheld is – relative to the typically elaborate process of development – a little on the easy side.
PURE AND SIMPLE Take the experiences of senior staff at the various Ubisoft teams with Vita projects in the can, for example. For Ubisoft Reflections, Ubisoft Casablanca and Q Entertainment, making games for the handheld marked a big turning point in their perception of Sony’s platforms. “The PlayStation 2, which was a very
powerful system for its time, and the PlayStation 3, which continued that trend with the cell processor and the asymmetrical multi-core approach, were some of the most powerful and complex machines that the
22 | APRIL 2012
market has ever seen,” explains Ubisoft Reflections director of technology Michael Troughton, who worked on Vita releases Rayman: Origins and Lumines Electric Symphony. “Developers had to really apply themselves if they wanted to get the most out of them.” Now, says Troughton, that trend has been
bucked, thanks to the Vita adopting a far more ‘conventional’ structure. Boasting a symmetrical four-core CPU and PowerVR GPU in a single SoC, or ‘system-on-chip’, the device appears to deliver impressive power without obstructing the work of developers eager to build games for the system.
We were pleasantly surprised by the
quality of the development environment. They are fast and really easy to use.
Boujemaa El Hiba, Ubisoft “The Vita has been relatively ‘easy’ to
develop for,” agrees James Mielke, Q Entertainment’s Lumines producer. While Mielke admits a lack of programming experience makes it hard for him to delve into the most technical of details, he has observed his team make very quick work of establishing a build of their game within the Vita development environment.
“When we started Lumines Electronic
Symphonywe were actually able to begin development on PC, and once the Vita dev kits were in our hands, we were able to get the game moved over to our dev units very quickly,” he adds. And over at Ubisoft Casablanca, where
producer Boujemaa El Hiba worked on Rayman: Origins, there is equal positivity. “We were pleasantly surprised by the
quality of the development environment on Vita,” admits El Hiba. “They are fast and really easy to use. The documentation is also good.”
IN PROFILE Such a wealth of optimism is encouraging, but it will take more than familiar architecture to convince some developers that it’s worth betting budget, manpower and resource on making a game for the Vita. Sceptics, however, would be wise to
consider the Vita development environment, for it is that, say the Ubisoft staff, that is a large part of the reason they were so besotted by the platform. “The work we did at Reflections on Rayman Origins and Lumines was targeted at performance optimisations, and the powerful profiling tools available such as Razor were invaluable,” offers Troughton. “Razor goes far beyond any tools available
to other mobile platformdevelopers. It allows you to drill down in minute detail, or examine performance at a higher level, and because a lot of the performance capturing is done in hardware with a memory pool disjoint from the development ram it’s quite non-intrusive.”
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