Add another one to the notch, boys. Creator of Thomas Was Alone is working on an upcoming title for PC, Mac and PlayStation systems and he's taking his knowledge of game design to the next level in order to compete with the big boys. This means that he's targeting a smooth-as-a-Turkish-oil-wrestling-match 60 frames per second and crisp-as-a-cut-leaf-during-spring 1080p resolution on the PS4.
Speaking with Gaming Bolt, developer Mike Bithell commented about his progress on his upcoming title, stating that...
“Honestly, I’m going to aim for 60 frames per second and 1080p. I’m actually developing the game on a four year old laptop. So I think and I’m pretty confident that we can hit that. Games feel better at 60 FPS so I’m going to do everything I can to hit that.”
This is the truth. A lot of console gamers have become complacent with sub-30fps gaming, especially from open world action titles like Sleeping Dogs, Assassin's Creed or Grand Theft Auto V. It was one of the main reasons why I ended up switching toward PC gaming... you get better resolution and frame rate without having any of the gameplay sacrificed.
For this new generation of gaming the Holy Grail of 60fps at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 progressive scan. Many developers are targeting this measure for several high-profile upcoming titles, and it's also something that indie devs seem to be targeting as well.
Some of you might be wondering what's so important about 60 frames per second and why it's such a hard thing to achieve. Well, it requires additional processing power to render twice as many frames as the standard 30fps mark. You can literally see the difference thanks to a video comparison by PC Games Hardware.
As for the resolution... during the whole resolutiongate fiasco a lot of people said they couldn't see the differences, but you really would have to be near-blind to say such a thing when you're comparing full-screen, undoctored images, where more than double the amount of pixels are being rendered. There's a fairly clear image of the resolution difference that you can see below.
In simple terms: 60 frames per second gives you really smooth gameplay and a resolution of 1080p gives you a really clear image. There are some additional techniques such as anti-aliasing, which also removes some of the jagged edges across surfaces, or rather, it sharpens the edges of surfaces in order to bring as much clarity to the image as possible.
The thing is, all of these visual techniques require a lot of horsepower from the device trying to render these things.
Bithell isn't just taking advantage of the PS4's horsepower, though. He also wants to make good on the PS Vita's touch-pad functionality as well, in order to bring thje full experience of the gameplay to life in every measure possible, stating...
“Like Thomas on the Vita, we tried to do a lot of stuff to take advantage of things like the back touchscreen because it would be different. It’s nice, because Sony don’t force me to use all this stuff because it’s there. But if something comes up such as with the touchpad…we will discover things for sure but I’m not going to force them.”
The stealth-action game, Volume, is presumably scheduled to release sometime in 2014. It's an indie game... so the release date is about as reliable as a drunkard proposing marriage. But we'll keep you posted on any news as it becomes available.
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