Comments on: PlayStation Mobile: The Story of Super Crate Box

By: JonJonXD

JonJonXD — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 21:57:05 +0000

I bought this without a second thought.

Great game and it deserves the support.

By: tha_rami

tha_rami — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 10:01:38 +0000

@20 The PSM SDK should be available pretty soon, if I’m not mistaken. We definitely encourage you to go take a look. PSM runs on Vita and certain Playstation Certified phones and tablets – Playstation 3 is not part of the spec.

–

Thanks everyone. We’re extremely glad with how much love Super Crate Box seems to be getting and if you have any more questions, we’ll check back here but also on our Twitter (@Vlambeer) and Facebook (facebook.com/Vlambeer). You can always mail us with more specialized questions through one of the addy’s at vlambeer.com.

By: tha_rami

tha_rami — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 10:01:23 +0000

@17 Thanks so much! <3

@18 The reason the unlocks are there is more to ease you into the game. If we'd start the game with the discgun available, nobody would ever score 10 crates. Except for Wario64. Maybe.

@19 We were extremely happy Sony considered us to sort of spearhead their new platform. It turns out Vlambeer has a lot of fans within Sony America & Europe – even so far that they were having an in-house contest (784 seems to be the highscore at the moment). Either way, they've been a blast to work with, especially being – indeed – just two guys that make up Vlambeer.

Sony never treated us as less than a full-fledged developer. When our Playstation Vita showcasing Super Crate Box at Eurogamer Expo in the UK was stolen, one Sony employee drove out during his weekend(!) to borrow us his personal Vita. We couldn't be more happy about cooperating with them, which definitely surprised us.

Thanks for your support – we hope to be able to bring you critical lot a whole more games to bicker about some day in the future.

By: tha_rami

tha_rami — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 10:00:59 +0000

@7, @8, @9
Super Crate Box PC was made by two people – me and JW. Together, we are Vlambeer. We’re two guys and we know how to make PC games from scratch. For the iOS version, we needed to get help in the shape of Halfbot, but we had all the time we needed. We want to make sure people working for us aren’t wasting their time, so we had to charge to be able to pay them their due. For the PS Vita / PSM version, we had two months and we ended up getting Mark’s help, amongst others, to work with a SDK we never worked with and create a full, polished version of SCB in just under two months.

We wanted to pay him and others properly for their hard work – in some cases people were basically working two full-time jobs for months.

So we’d argue it’s not greed: we release free games all the time (we have on of the only free games on Steam, Radical Fishing, Dinosaur Zookeeper, KARATE, Yeti Hunter, FFFLOOD, the original LUFTRAUSER) – we just want to be able to buy our meals & pay our rent and we’re happy. However, for people that work with us, we want to make absolutely sure that working with us was the best way to spend their time and they get what they deserve for their hard work.

By: tha_rami

tha_rami — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 10:00:38 +0000

@2, @5, @14
Leaderboards and Trophies are not currently part of the PSM development toolkit or SDK. We were contemplating adding them in for launch (we needed to hit the PSM launch date, so we had a really limited amount of time) – but instead we opted to focus on the core gameplay. Futurlabs implemented leaderboards of their own, we’re choosing to wait for Sony’s official solution. That way, your leaderboards and trophies will work the way they’re supposed to with your PSN-profile when those functions launch.

@6 Really glad to hear you like it. The timing is as close to the PC version as we could, but we found the shoulder buttons seem most reponsive for shooting. Use those?

By: PrimeroIncognito

PrimeroIncognito — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 06:23:42 +0000

You can just pretend that it has trophies.

By: Elvick_

Elvick_ — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 06:22:29 +0000

Now I understand why 2000+ is a lot. This game is fun. Super fun, but it’s quite difficult. Stupid disc gun and flamethrower. I found it almost unplayable on my Tablet, but it plays super smoothly on the PS Vita.

Thanks for a super fun game!

@20:
3. No.
4. No.

Don’t know about the other two.

By: EmperorLawlight

EmperorLawlight — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 01:23:27 +0000

No trophy = no buy.

By: plaztiksyke

plaztiksyke — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 21:37:57 +0000

Loved hearing about the back story. A couple of questions about this game, and PSM in general:
1. what’s the native rendering/asset resolution?
2. what audio codec/bitrate is being used?
3. are there trophies?
4. does it also play on PS3?

If the native rendering resolution is decent, the audio is higher quality than the crap Unity defaults to, has a couple of trophies, and plays on PS3 then it’s worth a little more money. Then again, there’s also the physical sticks and buttons which made me love Pix’n Love Rush and other games even more than I did on iOS.

On the other hand, if it’s sub-480p resolution, awful-sounding 128kbit/sec MP3, no trophies, and has no PS3 support, then Sony has just shot themselves and indie developers in the face.

I’m a fan and want to be a cheerleader for this, but we need more information to do so :)

Thanks!

By: lisatsunami

lisatsunami — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 20:57:38 +0000

@ Rami, your post is very interesting: first, Sony reached out to you, so that must make you proud. Second, but should be first, there are only 2 of you in your company? plus the new guy who drives a bus during the day? That really says a lot about the small indie developers who as a whole are revolutionizing the gaming industry.

Thank you for sharing your backstory and best of luck to you and other indies like you on this new platform. We Vita owners are a pretty demanding, critical lot, so please excuse the daily bickering.