Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas is a nice little indie game from developer Cornfox & Bros. It was originally developed for Mobile and then later reworked for PC and consoles. The developers later also worked hard on PS Vita port of the game making sure that it managed to keep most of the look and feel of the console version.

Recently we had a chance to talk with Heikki Repo, Creative Director and Co-founder of Cornfox & Bros, and he was kind enough to answer some of our questions related to the PS Vita version of the game while also talking about the upcoming sequel.

Heikki explained that the PS Vita hardware matches the power of an iPad2 released in 2011 so they had to do quite a bit of work in order for the game to fit on a handheld as old as the PS Vita. The porting work for consoles and the PS Vita version of the game was handled by Engine Software.

“When we were porting Oceanhorn 1 for consoles with a porting house, Engine Software, the opportunity came to tackle PS Vita as well. We were a little afraid that Vita would not be powerful enough, but we wanted to give it a shot anyways. Biggest problems were the polycount from the characters and environment as well as memory limitations. To remedy this we made custom low-polygon 3D assets as well as reduced the texture fidelity of the assets to get make a reference build for the porting house.”

Heiki then talked that the experience was worth it for them as the game was well received by the community. Although the sequel won’t be able to release for the PS Vita because of the lack of Unreal Engine 4 support in addition to lacking the hardware requirements.

“Oceanhorn is a great fit for PS Vita and I am proud of what Engine Software were able to squeeze out of that hardware. The game was well received by the PS Vita community and that is all we ever wanted: portable gaming community to enjoy our game.”

“Oceanhorn 2 is developed with Unreal Engine 4 and currently engine does not support PS Vita. Even if it did, it could not meet the hardware requirements due to CPU and memory limitations.”