Studio Liverpool: Vita is most dev-friendly PlayStation yet

Sony has repeatedly stated that its upcoming PSP successor PlayStation Vita is easy to develop for, and Wipeout 2048 developer Studio Liverpool has told us the claim is fully justified.

In an interview, game director Stuart Tilley tells us: "I think of all the PlayStations I've worked on, which is actually all of them, [Vita is] the easiest one to work with. The guys have given us a really good set of tools, allowing us to get up and running a lot quicker than we have previously, which is really good."

At last month's Develop conference in Brighton, SCEE head of developer services Kish Hirani admitted that Sony's traditional approach to hardware R&D had been insular, but that Vita was different. "This is a platform that has been designed and developed with developers in mind," he said. "It has been created by the developers, for the developers."

Senior engineer Neil Brown added: "We've never had tools at such a mature state before the launch of a platform." Tilley agrees, saying the availability of said tools has been an enormous help in Studio Liverpool's efforts to ensure that Wipeout 2048 is available for Vita's launch.

He said: "We had a smaller team at the back end of last year that got working straight away on the game stuff rather than too much of the underlying tech, which allows us to really start getting the game in your hands as soon as possible."

Of course, as an internal studio it is little surprise that Studio Liverpool is toeing the company line, but it's the first verification of Sony's repeated claims that Vita is developer-friendly. The full interview forms part of the cover feature in our new issue, an extensive look at PlayStation Vita with input from Shuhei Yoshida and Jim Ryan. Edge 232 should be with subscribers any day now, and will be with all good newsagents from August 30.