In the year 2018, Sony’s PS Vita is easily forgotten, but still much loved. The recently released Sir Eatsalot is among a handful of original Vita titles recently released to the handheld, and when I was writing my review for Sir Eatsalot I began wondering about the small German game studio behind the colourful title starring a hungry Knight with a seemingly insatiable sweet-tooth. I got the opportunity to ask co-founder and programmer, Slawa Deisling, about how Sir Eatsalot came to be, and his opinion on the future of Sony handhelds in today’s current gaming climate.
Article by Dylan Blight
Dylan: Behind the Stone was formed in 2015, officially, from what I could gather, and Sir Eatsalot started as an iOS game? What was the cause and effect of changing to developing on the PS Vita?
Slawa: Yes, it started as an iOS game. At some point, Monika, our art-director, and I sat down together and reviewed the game. Back then it was just a Super Mario Bros. clone. A bad one. It was not fun. It looked terrible. We just weren’t satisfied with the state of the game back then. So we talked. What shall we do? Make another game or adjust it? We decided to revamp basically everything: the art-style, the game design and of course the platform.
Dylan: One of my critiques of Sir Eatsalot was that it used too many of the Vita’s features and I found it cumbersome at times. When you decided to make a Vita game, was it decided at the start of development to implement as many of its features as you could, or were more added later after the core gameplay and platforming?
Slawa: Yes, the moment we decided it should be the PS Vita the features of the consoles were interlinked with the game design of Sir Eatsalot. As developers, we didn’t want to create just another 2D game which can be played on the PS Vita. If we wanted to do that, we could develop it simultaneously for other platforms as well. But we wanted to create a game FOR the PS Vita.
