PlayStation Mobile: FuturLab serves up Surge

Hello! My name is Jack Lang, I’m 23 years old, and I’m a junior programmer at FuturLab. I’m responsible for all the programming on our new game Surge (which is out for PlayStation Mobile tomorrow) and I’m here today to talk briefly about how the PSM SDK has made the process of developing our game for the PS Vita really easy!
I started out as a Flash developer because I wanted to make games and this experience along with some prior knowledge of C# meant that I was able to use the PSM cross-platform SDK to focus on the game rather than the specifics of each platform it supports.

As you can see from the trailer above, Surge uses nice visual effects, and thanks to PSM I was able to pick and choose between high and low level programming libraries, making it possible to get visual features like the ‘awesomizer’ line style, particles and the attractive colour blurring glow effects running efficiently and in a short space of time.

Surge came together in just three months and was a fantastic learning experience, and the best bit is the code runs on the PS Vita and lots of Android devices without any code changes!
I’d recommend learning the PlayStation Mobile SDK if any readers want to get started making games, so if you have any questions I’ll be happy to answer them; don’t be shy!
Surge is out tomorrow, 12th December, for all PlayStation Certified devices including PlayStation Vita, priced at £2.59/€3.29. For more info, check out FuturLab’s website: http://www.futurlab.co.uk.