Earlier this afternoon, Nathan Vella of Capy Games spoke at length about their XBLA title Super Time Force. He talked about the challenge of taking a “game jam” game (a game that was brought from start to finish in 3 hours) into full production and releasing on a platform like XBLA. During his talk he briefly spoke about Capy Games next-gen title, Below. He didn’t have much time to talk about the Xbox One title due to the fact that he’d apparently gone well over his time limit for the segment (Oops!)

After the session adjourned I had the opportunity to talk to Nathan outside of the room for a few minutes and before long I got to asking him a few questions about his team’s work on the Xbox One console. First off, I really wanted to know how long Capy had an Xbox One dev kit in their possession. Vella reckoned it was sometime back in February that the studio got their hands on the hardware. My next inquiry drifted to that all too familiar territory that many Xbox One discussions have been finding themselves in as of late. I asked him if Capy had noticed any performance bottlenecks while working on the Xbox One. Specifically Microsoft’s use of ESRAM. Vella promptly and frankly replied,

“Look, we’re not pushing polygon counts like a lot of the big devs. We’re likely not taking the hardware to it’s breaking point with Below. It took us quite a while to make our way through all of the documentation, but we’ve really enjoyed working on the Xbox One platform. We’ve had no ESRAM bottlenecks.”

This bit of assurance from an indie developer is a breath of fresh air. Like Vella stated, Capy isn’t going to be looking to create absurdly crisp, photorealistic visuals, but they’re likely making something that’s demanding from a collision event, physics aspect. It’s great to hear something that’s really positive come out of the Xbox camp. After Vella’s candid approach to his discussion, I’d have to say that he’s a more than a reliable source from a developer standpoint.

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Dylan Zellmer

EIC at iGame Responsibly

Dylan splits time between games journalism, designing video games, and playing them. Outside of his deep involvement in the games industry, he enjoys It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Shameless, A Song of Ice and Fire, fitness, and family.

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