Developer and quality assurance company EC-Interactive says it's expanding its game division with the help of Qube Software's Q middleware, while ramping up its testing efforts.
EC-I has released several Nintendo DS and GBA titles, and now says that it's prepping for PC, Wii, PS2 and PSP projects focused mainly on the games market in India.
At the same time, the company says it's handling port projects for Western developers, and on its testing side, claims to have handled more than 350 titles on multiple platforms.
"This is an important step for us," says EC-I founder and managing director Rupert Young. "Not only are we taking our game development onto PCs and consoles, but we’re also expanding our testing services."
The Q middleware includes a renderer that supports arbitrary scene rendering algorithms and programmable shaders, a texture manager, simultaneous n-dimensional animation blending, background queue and 3D editor for both core and custom plug-ins.
Young says the company chose Q because of its multiplatform capabilities and floating point support, and adds that the cross-compatibility meets the needs of both the company's game and testing businesses.
"I really believe that in five years time the idea of having multiple teams working on mutually incompatible systems will seem very dated," says Qube's Servan Keondjian, "and instead we’ll see studios trying to unify their production streams."
Says Young, "My gut feeling is that over the next two or three years we’ll see the industry move that way. I think adopting Q will leave us really well-placed to take on outsourcing work as well as producing our own titles."
