Hey everyone! My name is Kevin Oxland and I’m creative director at Spiral House. I’m very excited to be here today to finally announce our new game with Sony for the PlayStation Vita. Please welcome PlayStation Vita Pets!

PlayStation Vita Pets is no ordinary pet game! We’ve done our best to really make this feel like a PlayStation game – with ‘game’ being the important word there. We set out to make something that was more than just a pet sim – we wanted to make something that felt like a real game, with characters, fun and adventure, so that’s exactly what we did.

We also wanted to focus on the dogs themselves, which may seem an obvious thing to say, but making them move, act and speak (!) in a very convincing way for the scope of the game we had in mind, was not easy.



Making humans walk and move realistically in videos games is one thing, but creating truly convincing dogs for today’s demanding younger gamers, really is something else. This, we felt, could only be achieved using the power and features of the PlayStation Vita.

In the game you pick from four different puppies, each with their own personality, sense of humour and character traits. Together you and your new friend will be able to do all the things you would do with a real dog or in any other pet sim but in PlayStation Vita Pets we allow you to go further! Once you’ve gotten to know each other and learned the skills needed to venture outside the safety of your home you’ll be able to embark (no pun intended) on the adventure of Castlewood Island!

That’s right; outside of the home where you dress, bath, play with and train your dog is a whole island of adventure to explore and puzzles to solve. Together you’ll be able to explore a massive forest, venture into multiple locations like spooky old mines and graveyards to ultimately make your way to the legendary castle in the centre of the island. We don’t want to spoil anything else right now so we’ll leave further details of the story until one of our next posts on the blog.

Spiral House is a UK-based development team who’ve been around since 1998 but our pedigree goes back years before that with games like the classic RPG, Silver. We’ve had a successful track record in recent years developing and assisting on many key titles, including the successful PS3 titles, MotorStorm and LittleBigPlanet. Fast forward many years and many games later, we also developed EyePet and EyePet Adventures for PSP. So our pedigree is a perfect fit for this game.

Like we said before, there is also a whole pet sim element to the game, all the things you would expect to be there and more will be included, bathing, dressing up, training, learning tricks, stroking, feeding, walking, and much more! We’ve also got some great extended AR features to go into in coming month as well. We’ve really tried to make sure this is a true next-generation pet game!

We can’t announce a release date just yet, but you can expect to see it launching across Europe next year. Until then the game will be seeing its first outing at Gamescom later this month where people will be able to get their hands on it and meet two of the dogs. We’ll be back after the event with a rundown of how it all went and to shed more light on the pet aspect of the game and how the adventure and the nurturing sides of the game are intertwined to provide a deep gameplay experience.

Until then, thanks for reading!