BETA | HOME
Home Sweet Having only just launched, Sony’s Home is a known quantity for gamers – but what does it really mean for developers? Ed Fear sat down with the team behind the project to find out why we should be excited about the possibilties offered by the new social space for PS3 gamers… Home has been in development for quite a long time now – has the focus changed much over that time? Mitch Goodwin (lead programmer): Well, I’ve been on it since day one, four and a half years ago. It’s changed a lot. Originally it was a lobby interface for The Getaway: Black Monday on PS2 – that was the original goal of it. The decision at the time was that there wasn’t enough of a PS2 online userbase to justify it, so we were kind of left to explore and take this idea of a lobby system forward. We talked about doing an SDK so that other developers could use the system for their own games; give it out to them as a set of libraries. 38 | DECEMBER 2008/JANUARY 2009
“You’d normally want a pretty clear design at the start, but for Home we’re going to be evolving as we get responses…”
It soon evolved into a committed PS3 standalone project, and we started going towards the idea that we would be a part of the PS3 platform. It evolved very slowly over a long period of time to get where we are now. We recently found a bit of code which had weapon pickups in it – it was legacy from back in the day when the target was very different. That can be a bit of a bad thing in terms of managing the development of a product: you’d normally want a pretty clear design at the start, but for Home it’s essential that we work in that way, because we’re going to be evolving as we get beta responses and third parties put in requests.