Mark Scheurwater

Playstation Mobile - Super Crate Box

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At the start of the summer in 2012 I heard that Vlambeer was looking for a C# programmer for an undisclosed project, I applied. Thes project happened to be porting Super Crate Box to the Playstation Mobile platform, which runs on the Playstation Vita and certified Android devices. The project had to be made in one month, as the game had to be shown on GamesCom 2012 in Cologne, Germany.

Working on a platform which has not been released yet was a great challenge. One of the difficulties was that during the first 30% of the time I was given, I did not have access to an actual devkit, apart from a windows emulator. As I already knew how the final game had to be, I knew exactly how to optimise the game from the start. Working with PSM (still in beta back then), I stumbled upon quite some bugs and undocumented stuff in the API. But lucky for me, PSM had a forum with some highly active Sony developers, which made this job a lot easier.

Apart from the tilebased 2D renderer (by Sony) I wrote the framework myself, including physics, collision, level, GUI etc. As the original game was written in GameMaker, I had to make my own assets from scratch. I wrote a small txt parser that converts my own made txt files to compact binary data. This allowed me to make the levels quick and easy, while on runtime, the levels could be simply streamed into memory (although not as fast as C++...).

Having never done actual physics and collision detection (apart from some quick 'n dirty stuff), I planned quite some time on this part. Luckily the physics itself did not take much time, although I did have to optimise quite a bit as the PS Vita couldn't handle the massive amount of flamethrower fire (Strangely the Xperia Play had no problems).

I redid all the graphical assets, combining all the objects in tilesets. Due to the limitation in the PSM 2D renderer, and the fact that the original assets were not power of two (all different sizes), and every object had it's own texture, this was quite a challenge. In the end I managed to get down to just a couple textures for the entire game (not including level specific ones).

Working with an actual QA department was awesome. I did not have to spend hours on debugging and looking for rare bugs. Instead Sony gave me a list of issues which they found.