[promo title=”A good, hard look at The Swapper on the PS4.”[/promo]
I had the privilege of having a chat with Curve Studio’s own Rob Clarke at EGX Rezzed last month, and he was kind enough to share some interesting information about the upcoming PC indie port ‘The Swapper’. Can this atmospheric port be adequately handled by next-gen console hardware? Surprisingly enough, the answer is yes – albeit with some cautious words from the team who are producing it. At EGX Rezzed in Birmingham, the gaming public were given their first real taste of next-gen indie gaming for the PS4. Most of the indie games on display were proven hits already, like Titan Attacks and FEZ, which seemed like lip service to the indie sector more than anything else. But then there were also games like The Swapper and Shadow Warrior, which are by no means simplistic indie titles.
The Swapper is a game about cloning and ‘swapping’ bodies in order to solve complex puzzles in a derelict but beautiful space environment. Its design is quite unlike the retro graphics style that has become endemic to the indie sector, using a series of photographs taken of real objects to create a supremely hi-res environment overlaid with fluid character models. It demands a surprisingly large amount of graphical processing power. On PC, The Swapper clicks along at a silky frame rate with minimal loading times. The assumption for a console port is that there is some form of compromise, but looking at the PS4 version it’s very hard to see the difference.
“With The Swapper it’s been really great because it’s been the first chance we’ve had to really push the next-gen hardware at all,” says Rob Clarke from publisher/developer Curve Studios, “It’s been a really interesting experience, being able to utilise eight gigs of RAM on the PS4.”
Porting The Swapper to the PS Vita has been slightly more challenging, apparently: “The Vita is roughly about as powerful in terms of hardware as an iPhone 4S. So bringing [The Swapper] onto the Vita has been the real challenge. If you compare the Vita and the PS4 development, the PS4 development uses a language called Mono, so it hasn’t been as easy moving The Swapper over as it would have been in Unity and there’s been a hell of a lot of optimisation even for PS4. But there’s just so much more hardware there that it becomes nearly a non-issue with PlayStation 4. You bring it over and you can make tweaks for the way the lighting works, the way the effects work.
“I think we first got The Swapper running from scratch with the PC code at 60 [frames per second] after about six weeks. With the Vita version we’re still working on it. We’re not actually showing it at Rezzed because it’s running at 20fps right now and we want to get it up to 30fps – and we will. We’ve got so much skill now, having worked with the Vita over the last year. Our tech guys are brilliant and they can make this happen, but it’s been a much bigger project getting it to run on the PS3 and Vita than it has been on the PS4.”
Controlling The Swapper on the PS4 might seem overly ambitious for those gamers who are used to having their pet mice and keyboards, but the mechanics have been translated really well. A degree of slowness is to be expected (aiming with a mouse is always going to be faster than with a right analogue stick) and thankfully this fits into the gameplay, as the actual ‘cloning’ element slows time down to allow the player to plot their next course of action.
It is one of the few demanding indie games whose translation to console appears to be seamless.
“If you’re indie and you’re thinking about working with PlayStation,” Clarke advises, “I would definitely consider the PS4 as a starting point. If you’ve got a 2D game, be wary, because the Vita is not built for 2D and there’s a lot of optimisation that you need to do. If you’re a talented engine programmer it might be very simple, but if you’re more into the gameplay or programming side of things there’s probably going to be a lot more work there.”
The Swapper is scheduled for a PSN release in May.