We had a lot of fun playing Sir Eatsalot for our review, so I got in touch with indie team Behind the Stone to talk about the game’s development and release for the PlayStation Vita.
PS4Blog: Hi! Thank you for joining us at PS4Blog.net. Can you please tell our readers a bit about yourself and you work?
Hi thanks for having us! I’m Slawa Deisling, Co-Founder and Programmer. Together with Monika, who is our art director, we are the small indie studio Behind The Stone.
In April 2018 we released our first commercial game: Sir Eatsalot.
PS4B: Sir Eatsalot is now out on PlayStation Vita. How would you describe the game to someone who’s never heard about it?
Answer: Sir Eatsalot is a slow-paced 2D Adventure-Platformer. You are the righteous knight Sir Eatsalot who has to stop the evil witch Hysterica, who tries to poison Kingdom Gluttington with sour lemonade. On this quest, you’ll meet quirky characters, explore unique areas and interact with the world through the PS Vita and its hardware-features.
PS4Blog: How long did it take you to develop the game? Where there any particular challenges or hurdles you had to overcome when making this game for Vita?
The real work started around three years. Before that, we fooled around with prototypes until we decided to change the design. There weren’t that many hurdles since we designed the game from the ground up for the Vita. It’s not like we tried to port a fully-fledged AAA PS4 game to the Vita. That being said, we still wished for some more power here and there. A bit more RAM would be great. The biggest compromise was the Frames Per Second (FPS). We really wanted that sweet 60FPS, but to get there we would have to compromise with the level design and scenery; we are rendering to many sprites on top of each other. I don’t want to go too much into technical details, but we tried to optimize were we could, but it wasn’t enough. So e settled with 30FPS, but at least we could keep our scenery the way we intended.
PS4B: Any chance a patch might be in the works so that the White Owlcat and the Prehistoric Woolcow creatures spawn again when you leave the area in case players don’t get their stickers right after meeting them?
A very specific question, hahaha. To be honest, that’s the way we intended it to be, but we’ll look into this and might change it.
PS4B: With Sir Eatsalot done, what are you currently working on next? Anything you can tell us about your new projects?
As of now did start the work on a potential next project. It will be again a 2D game with high-quality frame by frame animations, but we can’t tell you the genre, it also won’t be a sequel to Sir Eatsalot. There are really no details here, since we’re basically in Pre-Pre-Production. Also the fate of us working on this next game depends on the sales of Sir Eatsalot. Worst case is there will be never another Behind The Stone game.
PS4B: And that’s all the time we have for today. Once again, thank you for taking the time to do this interview. Is there something else you’d like to add?
Thanks for having us!
