The big Sony news out of GDC right now is Project Morpheus, the new virtual reality headset for gaming, among other things. However, there are also some smaller announcements that were likely drowned out in all of the excitement. Shane Bettenhausent, Developer Relations at SCEA, announced via the PlayStation Blog that Sony has partnered with middleware vendors GameMaker: Studio and MonoGame to bring new development tools to the PS4.
The GameMaker: Studio solution will allow for easier ports from PC to PS4 for titles such as the recently announced Home. Meanwhile, MonoGame makes up the C#-based open sourced engine suite and has had a hand in the development of the recently launched Towerfall: Ascension. It will also be helping to bring indie titles Mercenary Kings and Transistor to the PS4.
Additionally, fully integrated solutions for Unity are now available for PS3 and PS Vita, with early access for PS4 reportedly coming in April 2014. The post also revealed that SCE’s Authoring Tools Framework will now be available as a free, open source download from GitHub. Evidently these tools were used in some big name titles such as The Last of Us and Beyond: Two Souls.
All the newly announced tools are available or will become available for all licensed developer partners.
What are your thoughts on this expansion of developer tools? Let us know in the comments.
