Frobisher Says Dev Happy With Vita Dev Tools, Sony Support

Honeyslug, the indie developers behind offbeat mini-game collection and planned PlayStation Vita launch title Frobisher Says, says Sony's tools have made the development process "very smooth." Sony has made a concerted effort to open up development for the upcoming Vita, pricing development kits way below the historical average and even agreeing to loan kits to independent developers. In a recent interview with Gamasutra, Honeyslug developer Ricky Haggett said the Vita development kit was easy to set up and integrate into the Visual Studio development environment. And when a problem does pop up, Haggett said Sony's help has also been excellent. "We found the level of support we received from Sony's dev support team to as good for Vita as it was for PSP‭ ," he said. "They reply promptly and get to the heart of the problem,‭ ‬which helps issues get resolved really quickly.‭" What's more, Haggett said the processing power available in the Vita -- which is much more than is required for such a simple game -- has allowed the team to focus on tweaking the gameplay rather than the engine. "All the time we've saved by not having to optimize our engine to make graphics fit is time we've spent working on the fun stuff instead‭ ‬--‭ ‬timings of animations,‭ ‬honing the jokes,‭ ‬and most importantly,‭ ‬refining the gameplay to make something which plays and looks fantastic," he said. Haggett goes on to say that developers used to making touch screen iOS games in C++ should have no trouble transitioning to the Vita development environment, and that understanding multi-touch development issues "will certainly be useful for Vita development." The full interview, which discusses difficulties in subtly communicating control cues and managing the Vita's wide array of input methods, will be available on Gamasutra tomorrow.