14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Bossa Studios has announced that its quirky game Surgeon Simulator is coming to the PlayStation 4 computer entertainment system.
The game is played from the first-person perspective, with a complex control scheme that's also the game's main source of humor and its premier gameplay mechanic. Players can move and rotate the surgeon's hand by using the mouse, and have to use the keyboard to mimic individual finger movements in order to grasp various items.
Surgeon Simulator challenges players to perform various surgical procedures such as heart transplants without dropping vital organs on the floor or losing their scalpel inside their patients. Multiple game modes are available, such as performing surgery while inside a moving ambulance, with surgical instruments bouncing around at random, as well as zero-g environment surgeries where everything just floats around.
The announcement that Surgeon Simulator is coming to Sony's next-gen console, the PlayStation 4, comes from a post on the PlayStation Blog where developer Bossa Studios' Community Manager, Poppy Byron, has taken the time to explain how the game's infamous control scheme was translated to work on a DualShock 4 controller.
Porting the game to the PlayStation 4 raised many questions at Bossa Studios, various issues coming into question, such as whether the game would look as good on a next-gen console, on a big screen in the living room.
He has revealed that creating the control scheme for the surgeon's arm on the PlayStation 4 was the most challenging and at the same time the most enjoyable part of the entire process. The first and most obvious step was to map the hand movement and rotation to the thumb sticks, according to player expectations in console games.
After a bit of experimenting, the team decided that the one button for each finger control scheme used on PC did not translate well on the console and as such the control scheme was condensed to just two of the shoulder buttons.
In addition to this, the devs also experimented with the six-axis motion sensors for control over the orientation of the hand, and the results were beyond expectations.
After more work refining the control scheme, the guys at Bossa Studios felt that they had reached a perfectly balanced point and that the PlayStation 4 version of the game was even funnier than earlier versions of Surgeon Simulator, as having your whole body involved in the experience adds to the physical comedy aspect of their game.
In addition to this, the PlayStation 4's SHAREfactory makes it easier than ever for players to share their botched surgical procedures with the world.
