Hi betrion! Thanks so much. :)
Here's a bit of history (just skip to the last three paragraphs if you don't care!):
Vincent and I both started out as artists, in a small company called Coded Illusions, about 10 years ago. Most of us still in school, we were all very green, but had the opportunity to work on a big game for PS3 and X360 (which were about a year away from release at that time.)
We learned a lot, not only on all the work that is needed to go from an idea to a real game - and how easy it is to underestimate how much work goes into that! – but also about our true passions in gaming, which for Vincent is animation and for me is game design. When the plug was pulled on the big project we we're working on and we were facing bankruptcy, we all came together trying to right the wrongs (we were a passionate and motivated bunch at Coded, I still miss it a lot!). We developed a lot of cool small concepts aimed at XBL and PSN for which I was one of the main game designers while Vincent moved to a lead animator position. Vincent and I became good friends because our ideas about why we love games were well aligned. Unfortunately, while we had a lot of hope we we're on the right path and a lot of faith in our concepts, it all came too late. We've been burning money on the big game and when the economy crashed, our private investors couldn't keep the company afloat any longer. (One of the concepts I had been working on a lot and felt like my baby, was actually developed independently later on and became a big succes. I'm still a bit salty about that to be honest...! ;)
When Coded Illusions disbanded, a core group of people including Vincent and me, moved to Playlogic Game Factory who were well on their way with their game Fairytale Fights and about a year away from releasing it on PS3 and X360. A great company with lots of great people, but a deja vu in many respects, as it was a fairly inexperienced team trying to tackle a big project again. Vincent was lead animator, while I moved from level designer to lead level designer. Many loooonggg nights we're had, but we managed to release the game. Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, the game was met with less than stellar reviews. Vincent's life got turned upside down in this time due to some personal issues, which motivated him to go for broke. He didn't feel like being a cog in the wheel anymore and having to do things he didn't see the point in, so he wanted to try out his luck as an independent developer.
I had bills to pay and a girlfriend to take care of, so I didn't dare to take that step yet and stayed at Playlogic where we developed quite a cool DLC for Fairytale Fights, while working with Vincent in the evenings to come up with ideas he could develop during the day. The DLC we were working on at Playlogic was turning out pretty well, with all the lessons learned we could bring out the potential of the concept - which I still really like - but sales disappointed so the DLC was canned (when we we're pretty much done with it). Again, just like at Coded, we started developing small concepts for XBL and PSN for which I was one of the game designers again (together with my friend Dinga Bakaba, who is now one of the lead designers at Arkane who made the awesome Dishonored!). Unfortunately though, it was too late again and Playlogic filed for bankruptcy.
You can imagine that burned me out quite a bit. Everytime I felt like I was where I wanted to be and had hopes we could turn the tide, it ended up being too late. It was very difficult and really got me down. It's awesome to work in games, but it's hard work with many long hours, and when you aren't really reaping the rewards, it's a tough job!
Anyway, I had a small venture at yet another game company where I had the opportunity to design a series of fighting games after we finished the current project but... once we finished that, the fighting games were put on hold. Some cool small concepts were developed... yet again... but as you might expect by now, it was too little too late and the company disbanded.
The opportunities in the Netherlands kind of ran out, so I had to choose whether to leave friends and family behind and find my luck abroad, or join Vincent on this adventure. The latter happened and now we're here! :)
Regarding the way we work, we mostly do everthing together, but Vincent is the main programmer and animator, while I take care of most of the design, setting up the levels and tweak everything till I don't know what I'm doing anymore. However, since we both have experience in most parts of game development, it's really a shared responsibility and we can switch it up if necessary. Prior to Jaywalkers, apart from some mel script, action script and other fairly basic programming languages, we didn't have much experience with code. Vincent took the first year, while I was still at my day job, to get up to speed with everything and by now knows his way around C aswell. I'm still quite inexperienced with writing the actual code, but I like to think I have a firm grasp of the logic behind it which is the essence of creating systems like that, so together there's not much getting in our way anymore! (That was by far the biggest hurdle to overcome though!)
Thankfully, Vincent is a machine who loves everything about making games and has endless amounts of energy, so if that means learning how to code, then that's what he'll do! Without his insane drive, none of this would have been possible. I tend to look at the insecurities and all the enormous amounts of work that is still left on our plates and get a bit discouraged, but while I'm whining about it Vincent is already working on it. ;)
We developed the game in Unity, but when we started with the Vita port, Unity wasn't able to export to Vita. It's there now, but it's not really optimized yet and doesn't work as well as exports to iOS, Android and other platforms, so our friends at Abstraction Games ported the whole thing to Sony's PhyreEngine, which is quite an achievement! (And took us a fair amount of time!)
About a PS4 version: There's some stuff we need to work out and some things we have to change, like the menus which are touch only at this point, but it plays really well with a big controller and the PhyreEngine port we have now should run on PS3 and PS4 with little to no problems, so we're definitely looking into our options!
Thanks for your question mate!
Cheers, Laurens
TL;DR: Homemade programmers, Unity and PhyreEngine.