Sony’s handheld gaming platform PlayStation Vita may have gained a bit of ground in the recent times with reports of its seamless support for the newly released PlayStation 4, but that doesn’t take away the fact that it hasn’t done anything substantial as such when it comes to sales charts. On launch, the handheld was seen as a revolutionary new gaming gear where a number of developing companies were more than willing to indulge in developing stuff for it. However, it seems like the handheld has left behind a bit of bad taste in the mouths of a number of concerned developing teams and the London-based Super Icon is one of them.
Creative Director Richard Hill-Whittall of Super Icon, known for developing Indoor Pub Games Sports World for the handheld, was recently in an interview with Gamingbolt where he described how the Vita has financially ruined both him and his company.
“Our first Vita development experience has been an interesting one. Personally it has financially ruined me; so many months of development all funded by not taking any wages. Developing a Vita engine, along with a fairly large game (it may seem simple but there is a lot of stuff in Sports World),” Hill-Whittall stated.
“During the course of development my relationship with SCEE has been badly damaged, the stress and worry off the scale.”
He added that all this has been a part of a really good learning experience, “and it has forever changed my approach to development. No more developing and maintaining our own engine, trying to support new platforms and features. From now on it is third party all the way, using development systems such as Unity.”
Additionally, he spoke about how the process also damaged his relationship with Sony, on a whole. He stated: “Sony TRCs (Technical Requirements Checklist) are in short, a complete and utter nightmare. Again I really feel for Steve, I think his head actually melted at one point due to the extreme levels of pedantry associated with implementing the TRCs.”
“There are just so many eventualities and scenarios you have to factor in to properly implement the TRCs. Also we tackled many of these at the end of the project, when we were both heartily fed-up with the whole thing.”
“Sony QA was an exercise in frustration too. When you desperately need to start earning money from the game, hitting QA is akin to running into a brick wall. The testing process is slow, and each resubmission adds a few weeks to the time it takes to get the game out. In total it was about two months or so of back and forth with QA before we were approved,” he added.
“One particularly frustrating round was the one where they only found one single issue, a MF (Must Fix) bug, which they found on day-1 of testing. 10 days later they conclude the testing with no more bugs found. Yay we thought, quick fix and we’re sorted. We resubmitted with the fix, and then on day-1 of the resubmission QA found one new MF issue, then no more.”
“Steve and I were convinced by this point that Sony hated us, and they were never going to let Sports get through!”