IG: Considering that a portable can often involve shorter gameplay bursts rather than game sessions lasting hours, how do you have to change your design for PSP?
Richard Ogden: In the case of MotorStorm: Arctic Edge we just made sure that a Festival race could be completed in around 3 minutes - this meant having at most 2 or 3 laps in a race. Wreckreaction mode allows the player to select 1-lap races if they wish and Time Attack provides for any length of play time. To be honest, MotorStorm on the PS3 has quite short races anyway so we didn't have to change the format much.
Dana Jan: Looking at Chains of Olympus from a design standpoint, we chose not to make large changes to the pacing based on the fact that it was portable. I think this is one of the reasons that players don’t get the sensation that they are playing a handheld game. The franchise has been carefully designed to include adequate checkpoints, save locations, and break points for the player. It’s also designed keep the player moving forward to see what is just around the corner that might be more amazing than the last brutal battle. That’s the beauty of God of War. You want to keep going. We kept this philosophy in mind while designing levels, encounters, puzzles, etc. One advantage that the PSP does have as a handheld is that it can be put to ‘sleep’ at any time, suspending the game and allowing the player to simply turn it back on and continue playing. This feature inherent in the hardware allows players to meter their game sessions and take a break from the game whenever needed.
Mark Green: In many ways it's trickier on PSP. Some people might want to play in short bursts, while others might want to have marathon sessions and we need to cater for both. With LittleBigPlanet we found that PSP was suited slightly for more puzzle-orientated levels than entirely straightforward platforming and if you've played both games you might have noticed this slight change in emphasis. We've also tried to make sure we include a decent number of what we called 'mini-games' where the player is trying to gain as high a score as possible while (for example) jumping a motorbike the longest distance or surfing for as long as possible without becoming shark bait.
IG: In a racing game like MotorStorm or an action title like God of War, rumble is often important to the gamer. With no rumble on PSP, how does that change your approach?
Richard Ogden: Rumble can be used in two senses - for immersive purposes and for gameplay feedback purposes. We have to accept that we can't exploit the first one but the second must be considered. Where the rumble may indicate, for example, a warning we would look to include more audio and visual cues instead. An example in MotorStorm is the boost warning just before the vehicle explodes. Not having rumble in this situation meant that we decided to enhance the orange glow around the screen edges and increase the boost alarm volume.
Dana Jan: It means that you have to look for other ways to provide the missing tactile feedback to the player. In some cases it can be achieved by adding camera shakes, additional particle effects to really show the progression of an interaction, audio cues that supplement the action, and even the clever use of dynamic lights flashing and full screen effects. There are plenty of tools at the developers’ disposal to supply the player with feedback where you would traditionally use rumble. Do they always work as well as rumble? Not necessarily. Can a great game be made without it? We think so.
Mark Green: This is similar to the controls issue. Rumble is just another way to communicate to the player. If you can't tell the player something because you don't have rumble then you need to find another way to reach them. Fortunately for us, this wasn't as big a problem on LittleBigPlanet as it might be on some other games.
