The wait is over! We’re very proud to announce that Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken is ‘wiggling’ its way onto your PS Vita starting with today’s PlayStation Store update.

Building upon our three-time IGF Finalist browser game Rocketbirds: Revolution! and the stereoscopic 3D Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken for the PlayStation 3, it has been fun creating this PS Vita version and utilising a lot of the PS Vita’s awesome features.

When it came time to put together the launch trailer, it made me realise that apart from the sweet screen-tilting (and other great features), the game’s oft-overlooked asset is actually that the PS Vita is so darned portable, allowing people to play the game anywhere – so we really wanted the launch trailer to somehow show it this time (Rocketbirds-style) – and use one of the sweet instrumental remixes from New World Revolution, which is also in the game, to accompany it.

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Hi, my name is Sian Yue Tan and I’m happy to announce that Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken for PlayStation Vita will be available very soon indeed – 13th February.

The game is already available in Asia, where it was bundled with the PS Vita over Christmas. Since then, it became one of the top three downloadable PS Vita games for December in Hong Kong, which is awesome!

In this game, you’ll take control of Hardboiled Chicken, the original Cock of War (a chicken so tough, he survived being boiled as a fetus), to lead the rebellion against the draconian penguin oppressors to overthrow their hold on Albatropolis!
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Hi, my name’s Sian Yue Tan. I’m the ringleader here at Ratloop Asia and it’s my pleasure to tell you that Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken is coming to PlayStation Vita in Q1 2013!

Rocketbirds, our cinematic platform adventure game, has come a long way from its three IGF finalist nominations back in 2010. Since then, we listened to people’s feedback and vastly improved the game for its PlayStation 3 release in October 2011.

That version had more technical improvements than we could shake a stick at; we made it fast and stereoscopic 3D, added a new Jet-Pack mode, a two-player couch co-op campaign and polished the heck out of it.

Again, we received lots of great feedback, so when it came down to the PS Vita version, we jumped at the opportunity to iterate on the game once more. We’ve added things like new chapters, puzzles and humor; a unique new Hardboiled difficulty setting; improvements to the controls to utilise the PS Vita’s unique features; and improved connectivity for the co-operative campaign.

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The wait is over! We’re very proud to announce that our cinematic platform adventure title Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken is fully cooked, boiled and ready to serve up exclusively on PSN starting with today’s PlayStation Store update.

Building upon our critically-acclaimed browser-based game; “Rocketbirds: Revolution!”, it has been a real adventure for us working on “Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken” and when it came down to putting together the launch trailer, it made me realize just how far the Rocketbirds have come! The one thing I really wanted for this launch trailer was for it to use the awesome Rocketbirds Theme song, which New World Revolution put together especially for the game! So, here it is, enjoy!

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Hey everybody, I’m Lucas Pope, lead programmer at Ratloop Asia. Our upcoming PSN game, Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken, got a few upgrades on the way to PS3, and I’d like to dive into some of the technical details of that transition. Hardboiled Chicken is a vastly expanded and improved game based on our earlier Flash release, Rocketbirds: Revolution. In going from Flash to the PS3, we added better controls, more screens, more chapters, more weapons, more enemies, and more gameplay modes. And we seriously upgraded the visuals. In this article, I’ll talk about some of those visual upgrades and how we did ‘em.

Rocketbirds

If you haven’t seen or played Rocketbirds, it’s a non-scrolling 2D game with a strong visual style. Think of classic 2D action-adventure games like Flashback, Oddworld, or Blackthorne. It could be considered a platformer, but there’s no scrolling and each screen is revealed whole-hog when you walk off the edge.

2D Like We Mean It

For the original Rocketbirds: Revolution, we kept things simple. Each screen had a static foreground image and a static background image that were composited together at runtime to make the final image. This is about the limit of what Flash can do quickly at 720p, but it all worked swimmingly and looked good enough for an IGF nomination.

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