Why I am Most Excited to Develop for the Morpheus [A letter I wrote to my rep at Sony]

Dear [deleted],

When I first started working with VR, I assumed the Oculus on PC would be my main focus, but working on the Gear VR lately has caused me to become most excited about Morpheus on PS 4 and here are the reasons why.

Developing for the Gear VR has taught me there is an incredible value to developing for a single piece of known hardware, in this case the Galaxy Note 4. Its hard to overstate how great it is that I can push the hardware to its very limit and know that my game will run on all the Gear VR's out there because they all share the very same hardware. I've currently got a private alpha testing site and this has been so helpful as I invite people to test Z0NE. I've had virtually no instances where testers see behavior that is different than I see. I know that when developing for the Morpheus/PS4, I will be dealing with the same sort of situation and that is such a benefit compared to the challenges that I am sure will arise when trying to push out a VR title on Steam to a wide variety of hardware which I can't control.

Developing for the Gear VR has also taught me so much about how to coax very high performance out of a device which has far lower specs than a high end PC/GPU combination. I am amazed at the quality of experience that I have been able to craft through some fairly advanced optimization techniques. Before this time, when developing for the Rift, I had concerns about my ability to port my work to the PS4. Although it is a very capable machine, my best understanding is that does not have quite the horsepower of a top end PC/GPU. However, now that I've got such a great experience running on the Gear VR, I feel I am perfectly positioned to use this work as my starting point for a Morpheus title. Since the PS4 is far more powerful than a Galaxy Note 4, I will be able to load on all sorts of effects an other 'juice' to the PS4 version and I have no concerns that I will hit performance limitations that will keep me from realizing the amazing VR experience I want to deliver.

Finally, I am most excited about the Morpheus because, in my many recent travels to various events from Comic-Con to Pax East to the Engadget Expand expo, wherever I go, I find that console gamers respond most enthusiastically to Z0NE. I am designing specifically with PS4 gamers in mind when I set up the control scheme and the general feel of the game, and they resonate with it in a big way. So, I'm super excited overall and wanted to share this with you, [deleted]. Forward this around to anyone else on your team, if you like. See you at GDC!

James

Submitted February 25, 2015 at 08:37AM by PixelRouter http://ift.tt/1DpRQEe