#23 VitaIslandViews – Ratalaika Games

Hi VitaIslanders!

Mid 2019, and Vita releases still coming every week, project #VITA2020 seems to be possible 😉

Today I have an interview for you with one of the most active Vita supporters out there – Adrian from Ratalaika Games!

Enjoy!

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Hi Adrian,

thanks a lot for taking your time for this interview, I know you are busy.

Here my questions:

1. Can you tell us a bit about Ratalaika Games, who is in team, where based and what do you do?

I’m Adrian, Ratalaika Games S.L. CEO and one of the programmers :).

We’re a few people form around the world focused on porting games & engines from PC to consoles!
We’ve people in Spain, America, India…

2. Why do you still try to port every game to Vita, while other devs and publishers have left us already?

I think we do mostly because it’s the only consoles I regularly play xD! So I like seen the games we do there.
I imagine that if I still enjoy other people from around the world will too!
I was playing RE Revelations 2 yesterday and managed to complete the 3rd Chapter with Moira & Claire.

3. Is it still feasible money-wise to port games to Vita?

This is really complex question… If you are targeting PSVita alone most probably no…
But if you are targeting all consoles, like we do, it’s really interesting, you can try to do PSVita 1st, squeze the performance as much as possible, and even if you fail all that performance work will be used for Switch anyway haha.
If you manage to do it then excellent!!

4. Which games are personally your favorite games on Vita?

That’s really complex… Due to my line of work I rarely play any indie games at all, I’ve 8h/day of that already…
So I enjoy AAA stuff or narrative stuff, where I can focus on the story more than the gameplay. I’m playing RE Revelations 2 these days and planning to start Dragon Quest builders JP edition soon to improve my JP reading skills! 

5. Which engines do work nicely on Vita from your experience? I heard Unity can be quite “hungry” and slow down performance.

Well, native code. C++ it’s what works best. Any other engine has it’s pros/cons. Unity gets slow due to it’s a really big engine, and can easily drop performance wise if not coded smart.
GameMaker 1.4 has really poor debugging tools for PSVita so it’s a pain to optimize…

We’re more confortable with our in-house engines such us Construct2, Adventure Game Studio or Ren’Py.

6. What do thing of gaming as a streaming service for the future? Do you prefer physical copies yourself?

As a gamer, I think it may end up like TV-streaming, either you have a bunch of subscriptions to different platforms or you don’t get all you want and see what your friends want…
As a dev, if you are paid by “play-time” many many games wont be viable, that’s cool for AAA like DETROIT: Become Human where you need 10/12h to do just a single run, but what about “bus/subway time killers”?
Like Super Destronaut DX, you boot it play for 10/15m while waiting and move on, those games won’t make enough money to be worth making most probably…

7. You have already brought us several physical games to Vita with Eastasiasoft and PlayAsia, anything still planned to come there?

Oh yeah! We’ve more games planned to come this year :). And always actively trying to push more and more lol!

8. Can you describe your upcoming Vita games in 2-3 lines and tell us why you think they are fun?

Cybarian:

This one is some sort of Beat ’em Up? I guess but where button smashing is not possible!

I think the non-button smashing really adds a lot to the game and forces the usage of combos and all unlock-able skills!

Attack of Toy Tanks:

I always enjoyed the “play with toys” kind of perspective in games.

I loved old PSX LEGO games, I think the one I loved the most was one u played as a pizza-delivery skater guy.

Also loved Re-volt from PC where u played racing but with toy cars. So I really loved the idea of shooting my fellow mate toy tank XD.

Paradox Soul:

It’s a nice & cute metroidvania, I always liked them. This one is thought for people who dont have time for the >10y they normally need.

Bouncy Bullets:

This one is a mix of FPS and 3D platformer in a over-cute world, I think what I like the most of it is the aesthetics. Like having all colorful environment but going around with a machine gun.

9. You have a couple of games with very easy platinum trophies, others are more difficult-what are criteria to choose the trophies for a game? And can we expect a really hard platinum in one of your games?

We normally adjust by amount of skill needed & price, for expensive games we ask for more, for cheaper games we ask for less.

It’s hard to please everyone in this aspect with each game we get complains on both areas “make it harder” / “make it easier”, so we try to balance stuff.

You want hard/long/full completion? We’ve some games with those. You want easy/quick/no-skills? We’ve those too.

Personally, I like getting a platinum here & there when I really enjoy a game (I did it on Spyro 1, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc) but I find really annoying when that’s only for high-skilled players!

I’m not a high-skilled player so been left out due to Ive to beat the game without dying even once, or needing a full-replay because I didnt spoke to some guy really annoys me.

It seems like a cheap strategy to increase play time =/.

10. When can we buy out Ratalaika Games merchandise? 🙂

We’re doing some tests for production of plushies, but the 1st model came up a little ugly I feel…

I think we’re gonna need to change the eye most probably XD.

11. What does VitaIsland refer to and what do you want to tell us?

I think it refers to the community surrounding support for a great device that gives us lots of entertainment and fun!

I think a TL;DR; for anyone reading this would be, we’re gona keep trying to make PSVita games for all 2019 and 2020, we’ve many engines ported to C++ that will allow us to bring games for long time, so even it’s not super cool AAA games these will have waaay more love <3.

Ratalaika Games have been awesome Vita supporters, you can check out a list of their games here, if you want to support them make sure to pick up Cybarian, which releases this week, and/or some of their previous titles (many of those are currently on sale on European PSN) 😉

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Limited Run Games will be releasing Pix the Cat on Friday! One of their many E3 announcements.

Here’s the full list of upcoming Limited Run Games Vita releases:

• Guacamelee!: June 14, 2019

• Mutant Blobs Attack: June 14, 2019

• Pix the Cat: June 21, 2019

• Super Mutant Alien Assault: July 5, 2019

• Atari Flashback Classics: July 2019

• Revenant Dogma: 2019

• Deadbolt: Q3 2019

• Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken: 2019
• Rocketbirds 2 Evolution: 2019
• Super Meat Boy: 2019
• Damascus Gear Operation Osaka: 2019
• Damascus Gear Operation Tokyo: 2019
• Metal Slug 3: July 12, 2019
• Papers, Please: 2020 (#VITA2020 😉

VitaIslander Sandeep has created a nice video about them, check it out here

Please note that those will be the last Vita games from Limited Run Games since Western production has finished.

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Kid Tripp

Some nice and shiny PS Vita Trophies have popped up this week! This might indicate us a soonish release for our favorite handheld!

You can read my interview on it here:

#22 VitaIslandViews – KidTripp

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I have created a VitaIslandViews leaderboard on TrueTrophies – feel free to join: https://www.truetrophies.com/leaderboard.aspx?leaderboardid=442

On TrueTrophies, you can sign up for free, check your trophies and stats about those. You get also once a month an email with a summary of the trophies you collected that month. The mentioned leaderboard tracks per month by the way, so that everybody starts with same chances every month 😉

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That’s it for today VitaIslanders! Thanks for reading as always, any feedback let me know here or on Twitter! Have a great week!

Yours,

@LastRealGamer