Beatshapers on the challenge of bringing Carnivores to PSP Minis, and the possibility of a 3DS version

Dino hunter game Carnivores has already made its mark on the App Store, but now the developer Beatshapers is bringing the title to Minis for PSP and PlayStation 3 owners to enjoy.

We caught up with Beatshapers's founder and CEO Alexey Menshikov to find out more about the porting process.

Alexey Menshikov: Let's face it, this is the first real first-person shooter game available on the Minis platform and we are very proud of it.

For example, we like how the button controls work on PSP compared to iPhone. While playing on a touchscreen, you hide half of the screen because your hand covers the controls. This doesn't happen on the PSP.

There are some awesome things about Carnivores: it's about dinosaurs, it features huge exploration areas, and it also provides a new and unusual experience compared to other hunting games.

For me personally, one impressive thing is that the original Carnivores was my first industry-shipped title. I was an audio designer and sound programmer for the game. Twelve years on, I felt very nostalgic during its development for PlayStation Minis.

During this process, me and the original Carnivores lead designer recalled some interesting facts from the original PC development. The largest T-Rex in the game is 19 metres long, and you can see up to 50 flying dinosaurs - these technical facts are valid for the PSP version too.

Finally, back in 2000, we planned to create a PlayStation 2 version, but it was very difficult to get approval from Sony, so this version was left on the shelf. It's nice to see Carnivores finally released for a Sony platform.

There were some issues but for the most part it was pretty easy. The iPhone consists of newer hardware, so some graphic related materials are easier to implement on it. We've have to use some tricks on the PSP hardware to transfer them to the platform properly.

The hardest issue was how to fit all of the data, including huge terrains, foliage, and dinosaurs with animations into the PSP's memory size. Overcoming this delayed the development for 1.5 months of the 4.5 month total development time.

Another challenge was Carnivores controls. We don't use Y-axis (view up/down) all the time for precise aim as most shooters do. We only use it for fine-tuning during fire mode, so the PSP's analogue stick really emulates mouse controls, creating a game that feels natural and smooth.

Unfortunately, yes. The differences caused by memory limitation means we can't allow the user to select multiple dinosaurs to hunt in the same hunting area.

You're limited to one dinosaur to hunt and five others to provide that Jurassic atmosphere. To compensate, we've increased view distance, which improves the hunting experience as low level PSP hardware allows us to render bigger areas.

Also, we increased the swimming speed a bit as we found it too boring when a player slowly swims during his exploration.

Potentially, yes. We're thinking about Nintendo 3DS and Google Android but it's too early talk about it. Also, we've talked internally about Nintendo WiiWare as we became aware that the game will fit within the WiiWare downloadable size requirements. But don't expect this to be completed anytime soon.

In addition, Tatem Games, original iPhone game developer of Carnivores, is currently working on a full scale build for iPad with high-res graphics.

You can buy Carnivores for iPhone now, priced $2.99, €2.39 or £1.79. It will be released for PSP Minis during August.