Capcom's Hiroyuki Kobayashi, producer of many titles from the Japanese video game company who's currently working on Devil May Cry 4, shared a few things about going cross-platform and the technology that allows the developer to do so. In an interview, he talked about Capcom's ticket to next-gen development, which is the MT (multi-target) Framework.

According to Kobayashi, the team behind Devil May Cry 4 began working on the game before Sony finalized specs of the PlayStation 3. Thanks to the Capcom's internal next-generation engine, the MT Framework, developers were able to solidify the core elements of their project before details on the console surface. Soon enough, the company's higher-ups announced a multiplatform strategy, and the next Devil May Cry title was bound to appear on the Xbox 360 and PC.

Obviously you're coming up on completion of the title. If you can talk about how the overall development process has been going for this, because it's the first next-generation Devil May Cry game.

Hiroyuki Kobayashi: First of all, we started the development in 2005. At that stage, they were still developing the PS3 technology, and we didn't have a lot of the PS3 resources. However, we had the MT Framework -- that's a Capcom internal next-generation engine -- so it probably was an easier start than the other companies might have had for similar games. We showed it for the first time at last year's Tokyo Game Show in playable form, and the big point there was how much we could show of the game, and what we could show off with the technology of the PS3. At that stage, most of the core elements of the game were in place.

It's been one year since last year's TGS. Since that time, we've really just been developing the story, going through the stages, creating the enemies, and fine-tuning all of that and putting together all the content that makes up the game. At the same time, we were developing all the technical elements that were so important in the game, and now we're at the stage where we're pretty much complete.

When the game was first announced, it was a PS3 exclusive, but then the 360 version was announced. Was that planned all along, or was that an opportunity that arose or a decision that was made? How did that affect development?

HK: We initially planned only to release it on the PS3 in the first arc of development, but during the development of the game, Capcom announced that we decided that we were going to have a multiplatform strategy for the next generation machines, and we started to develop it for the 360 at that time.

In terms of any problems or any effect it had in the development of the game, we initially didn't have a schedule for releasing it on two platforms simultaneously, so that did have an affect on the amount of work that we had to do. Because we developed it on the same engine -- on the MT Framework -- it wasn't double the work that we had to do, but it probably required about 1.5 times the work and 1.5 times the ability in order to be able to get everything done. There were some changes we had to make, and some extra work that we had to put into it.

I remember when development on this game first started. It was before the PS3 was finalized, and I believe you started to develop it on the PC, and then move it over to the PS3. Can you talk about that process a little bit?

HK: Yeah. As I've mentioned before, we started developing this on the PC on the MT Framework -- the internal Capcom engine. The PS3 specs were not finalized at that stage when we started developing it, so we did start to develop it on the PC. By developing it on the PC, it's very easy for us to work with the graphics and the gameplay, and see how the game is going to play. Actually, we're still continuing to develop it on the PC, as well as being able to check how it runs on the 360 and the PS3.

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