BlitWorks, a game porting and publishing studio, sat down with The Vita Lounge recently to talk about bringing games to PlayStation Vita.
Having worked on Badland: Game of the Year, Super Meat Boy, Dragon Fin Soup, and Bastion for PS Vita last year, BlitWorks PR Manager Geraldine Abuliak said Bastion has been one of their toughest ports yet:
It’s been probably the hardest port to date, and it’s been a continuation of our previously hardest port (Fez), since the technology we’ve used has been an evolution. But we finally got the performance we expected, it’s really smooth. This game really deserved to be played on the Vita, but not at the expense of sacrificing quality, and we’re quite happy with the results.
When BlitWorks is porting titles to Vita, Abuliak revealed that the biggest obstacle is the system’s performance, but it can be overcome with lots of optimizing:
The number one difficulty is having to deal with the performance of a mobile platform. All the titles we’ve worked with, were developed for much more powerful platforms. When you see the Vita performing like a PS3 or a X360 is because there has been a good deal of work optimizing the performance for the particularities of the Vita. It’s not so powerful unless the code is carefully adapted.
What BlitWorks likes about the Vita are the tools for debugging and analyzing performance, which are better than the ones they have for PlayStation 4 right now. “Actually, without those amazing tools it would have been impossible to get so much out of the hardware,” Abuliak said.
Unfortunately, not every port is perfect, and BlitWorks is “not happy at all with the version that is currently published of Dragon Fin Soup.” Since they had to port it while the game was still in development, things were “terribly difficult.” In the future, BlitWords hopes to get it to a stable point and patch it.
Abuliak finished up by teasing that “we have a few Vita projects on the pipeline, but we can never reveal them,” as it’s up to the publisher when they’ll be announced.
[Source: The Vita Lounge]
