Overall development from the concept stage to code:
So, while hard at work on the way the game looks, the team was also down to the nitty gritty iterations of gameplay. Over the months things have changed quite a bit in all the key areas of the game. There have been builds featuring options (like Gradius or R-type), meaning some small drones circling around the ship and adding firepower to your ship. For a long time we only had one central tower where the player had to deposit both humans and green energy cubes to generate power ups.
In this version the humans run around a treadmill and build the weapons for you that idea was abandoned because it made the gameplay gravitate too much around the same spot. Experiments with a weapon shop worked great, but the idea was abandoned because it slowed gameplay too much between phases. We were also planning a World Map to track players progresses that was axed because it felt like an unnecessary layer between the player and the action.
The gameplay elements associated with humans have evolved over time as well: for instance we used to have normal humans, special humans, and even expiring humans all that is pretty much gone now, with the possible exception of the Throwing Human button, born as part of a refill-human-energy mechanic and kept because it was just fun to use.
One of the most crucial choices we had to make involved the twin-stickness of Resogun: we experimented with the possibility to shoot at 360°, but it didnt feel right because it turned the player into some sort of moving turret move a bit, shoot in every direction, move again so in the end we settled for left and right. If we had made the opposite choice back then, youd be playing a very different game now.
Creation of high definition assets optimized for 1080p:
Talking about 1080p, the lack of SD limitations means that we were allowed to design enemies, humans and pick ups in a specific way, using maximum contrast between blocks, shadows, etc. To make a long story short, if the game was working at a lower resolution, all these elements would literally look different in shape. The same is true for texts and particle effects: at 1080p we were able to communicate effectively abstract concepts without stealing estate from the gameplay.
Challenges faced due to PS4′s slower CPU speed/Core Speed and targeting 60fps:
One of the main advantage of consoles over PC is that, independently from the CPU speed, the console-specific libraries are usually much faster than comparable libraries on PC. Reaching 60fps was our goal from the beginning, because it makes the gameplay so much more fluid. It wasnt a terribly hard result to achieve: all game code is heavily multithreaded, so all available PS4 CPU cores were put to good use.
