Assault Android Cactus from developer Witch Beam released last month on PlayStation 4 (our review), but the planned PlayStation Vita version didn’t arrive at the same time.
As Witch Beam’s Tim Dawson explained to Games Industry, the Vita and Wii U ports of Assault Android Cactus are being developed in-house, rather than being handed off to another developer. For the Vita version though, they don’t have many expectations from a financial standpoint, but they still want to do it for the fans:
Honestly at this point, the main reason I want to bring it to the Vita is because I like the platform personally. We said we were going to, and we have a lot of people following us because they own Vitas and they want to see it too. At this point, as brutal as it is to say, we don’t have many expectations from it. We don’t think it’s going to be a massively profitable platform to us at this point, but it’s also super-important that we do what we said we’d do.
Dawson also discussed the perceived issues with the Unity engine on PS4 games, such as Broforce:
Unity is a very interesting engine. The power is that it lets people who never could have made games on their own work in 3D space and make modern games, but you can also go wrong with it pretty easily. It’s a difficult engine to always keep good performance because you can do a lot with it, but there are costs there… It’s difficult because people want to read it as an implication of Unity or PS4. The thing is, all consoles and all hardware platforms have different bottlenecks and performance profiles. They’re good at some things and bad at other things. And if you have a game that relies on a bunch of things the machine is not so good at, you get weird performance bottlenecks that were never there on the PC version.
Dawson adds that they experienced many of these issues when working on the PS4 port, but when it came to using workarounds or compromises, working on it in-house helped them.
“The idea of handing it off doesn’t sit well with me,” he said. “It’s a very personal game, and I have very picky expectations about where you can make changes and where you can’t.”
Are you looking forward to the Vita version of Assault Android Cactus?
[Source: Games Industry]
