When FuturLab released Velocity earlier this year and the game was met with tons of praise, it almost seemed like the developer had come out of nowhere and struck gold. Like most game development companies though, that wasn’t quite the case.
After an eventually failed game pitch that started with PRISM in 2007, FuturLab and Sony’s relationship wasn’t very good, prompting the developer to just go for it with Velocity on PlayStation Minis.
Speaking to Gamasutra, James Marsden of FuturLab explained the situation:
We just had to get something out there, and PS Minis was our only option with next to zero budget. We put everything we had into Velocity, keeping our fingers crossed that if we over-delivered for the platform, we’d get noticed. Fortunately that has paid off!
That pay off led to them finally signing a deal with Sony to produce PlayStation Vita content in 2013, and James laid out how the money and partnership will help FuturLab:
Our plan is to scale up massively, tripling our team from 3 to around 10.
The main difference is that we’ll have an elevated level of production value to match up to our ideas. I wouldn’t go expecting AAA from us just yet, but we’ve been hiring recently and have found some absolute gems that are going to help us deliver a higher visual fidelity in our products, and there’s more good news on that front to announce later this year, which should get our fans very excited indeed.
Be sure to check back on December 14th when the countdown clock ends and reveals the next game FuturLab is working on.
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