The Art of Switch Galaxy Ultra on PS4, PS Vita

Greetings, PlayStation.Blog — Gary from Atomicom here with an update on Switch Galaxy Ultra, our insanely-fast, reaction-based arcade game that’s been developed as an update to our critically acclaimed PlayStation Mobile title Switch Galaxy.

We’ve been off the radar a bit as we had our heads down squeezing every last drop of art, code, and blood into the game and it’s shaped up to be something we’re very proud of. Both the PS4 and PS Vita versions are running in super smooth 60 FPS with the PS4 version at 1080p.

Both feature online multiplayer with two modes of play for up to four players, and we’ve incorporated cross play so you can compete against your buddies across PS4 and PS Vita. We also have cross buy and cloud save so everyone with a PS4 and Vita combo is getting a real treat.

Finally, there are also seven player ships, all fully upgradable and a ton of fiendishly fast levels — plus an endless survival mode. If that wasn’t enough, we also have an awesome twenty two-page comic that unlocks as you play through the game. More on that shortly.

We’ve been working with WipeOut Co-Creator and Psygnosis art legend Jim Bowers, who has taken time out from working on movies such as Skyfall, Prince of Persia, and The Golden Compass to get involved with designing our new start/end cities.

Finally we would like to share a bit more about the comic and I will hand over to the designer, Darren Douglas. He’s another WipeOut veteran and published Judge Dredd Artist, so you’re in safe hands… I think!

Over to you Darren:

My first love (after Daphne from Scooby Doo) is drawing comics and, having made the first tentative steps into that professional arena, I was keen to continue. Luckily, Gary’s not as dumb as I look and he said the magic words: “comic book.”

Personally, I’m more a fan of pulp sci-fi with the emphasis on the “fi” over the “sci,” and what I like to call “blue collar sci-fi” which is relatively normal people thrown into situations with a sci-fi twist. So I started with Glynnie Vance, a human driver for hire with a back-story vague enough that we could throw anything at him as we went along.

So the first version of Glynnie I came up with was, on a whim, a sort of Lemmy in a trucker hat.

He was stocky and beefy, and I was asked to make him a bit sexier and come up with a sexier name than “Glynnie!” And in slimming him down and trimming his chin fuzz we wound up with… argh, no, yet-another-muscly-bald-guy-main-character-for-a-video-game!

Now he would need a boss, an ear to bend while out in space. Since this would mainly be in the form of a voice on a hotline, I thought I could get away with anything at the other end. My idea of a brain in a jar was (thankfully, in hindsight) kyboshed in favor of someone a little sexier, and Amur was born.

But something about the isolation of the brain-jar-girl really appealed and the idea that his boss would be trapped by circumstance in one place, while Vince galaxy hops really began to feel like something interesting. Making her insatiably curious about the universes she’ll never get to travel and playing that against Vince’s universe-weary cynicism became the focus of their interplay.

The pencils are done the old fashioned way with, uh, pencils, but are then scanned in and colored with Painter and Photoshop, and it’s here that the final decisions get made.

We also added a series of interludes, a new extro, and introduced a new character in Herve — the devious second in command to Amur that leads up to an ending that I won’t spoil, but which leaves us open to explore almost anything from here on out. Assuming folk are interested enough to see what will happen next, that is!