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[Serapth]

Ok, I've got a bit of a bug in this regard.  With the open beta of the PlayStation Studio SDK, i've become somewhat enamoured, to the point I picked up a Vita to develop on. 

Anyways, I've started a series of tutorials on developing games using the PS SDK.  This could be XBox Live Indie done right, here's hoping Sony pulls it off.  If you are intrigued at developing for PS Vita, PS Android products ( including some HTC devices ), and just possibly the PS3, using a C# (mono) based environment, these posts might interest you.


So far I've put together the following:

A look around the PlayStation Suite tools and SDK -- a top level look at the SDK and the bits and pieces included.

Debugging PlayStation Suite Applications on your Vita device An overview of how to actually deploy to a Vita device


And finally....

The mandatory Hello World tutorial, which is acutally a bit more involved than you might expect, but introduces you to creating your first PS app in detail.


This is just the beginning, I've got a few more in the works and coming soon.

[Player 3]

So you finally got permission from Sony?

[Serapth]

Yeah, I did.  Initially with this thread which gave tentative permission to go ahead, but then I received an email directly from a Sony VP with the exact quote being "unless someone is working to hack PSS as a backdoor to piracy, we're very keen to have people write tutorials, books etc."


Thus far, I am extremely impressed by Sony's efforts in this regard, from developer support ( which has been A1 ), to materials provided... although the documentation can at times be a bit "Engrish" and most of the tooltips are in Japanese...


So far, from my experiences, Sony are doing everything right in supporting Indie developers, lets hope they keep at it!

They've done well enough to turn me into a bit of a cheerleader, which given my history as a gamer and programmer ( very much in Microsoft's camp ), is one heck of a feat!

[Player 3]

Hnng. I want a Vita so badly, even after visiting one of the three malls Sony was showing a beta of it in earlier in the year. Your site is a nice stop for this kind of stuff.

[moi]

working on a minecraft clone  , FIRST

[Serapth]

New tutorial up, Hello World 2: Hello Harder..


This tutorial builds on the previous one, illustrating how to implement a game loop and access the gamepad to rotate and scale the sprite.

[Guillaume]

So the language for the Vita is Java? Ugh.

[Serapth]

So the language for the Vita is Java? Ugh.

Nope C#.

[moi]

so I downloaded and installed the thing and it is indeed very nice.
Sony really went the long way to make it easy for devellopers.
This could become huge if Sony doesn't fuck it up (needs tight but not restrictive quality control)

Only complaint: there are demos and crutches for everything, except for making good sidescrolling 2D games (this will require a bit of work)

[Guillaume]

So the language for the Vita is Java? Ugh.

Nope C#.

OH MY GOD WHY

Why is it that hard to just give us C APIs nowadays?

[moi]

So the language for the Vita is Java? Ugh.

Nope C#.

OH MY GOD WHY

Why is it that hard to just give us C APIs nowadays?

PLZ keep the stupid language discussion in this thread

[Hima]

Thanks for the tutorial, Serapth! Looks simple to follow just like your SFML tutorial.

Vita, here I come 

[Impossible]

So the language for the Vita is Java? Ugh.

Nope C#.

OH MY GOD WHY

Why is it that hard to just give us C APIs nowadays?

There are a couple of different reasons. The biggest is probably security, it's more difficult to sandbox C (ask Google). People could start going the Adobe Alchemy route and offer a version of C that compiles to to byte code and only has access to a limited API and sand boxed memory, but that is more difficult to implement than porting mono.  There are also political reasons why C# is used, obvious with Microsoft picking it for XNA, but I imagine Sony chose it for PS Suite to both poach XBLIG developers and .  Also most developers would rather code in C# than C or C++ if given the option.  The reasons for writing code in C are speed (and if you're working on a PS Vita game that needs C speed you can probably get a full devkit, otherwise you're doing it wrong), portability, and taking advantage of all the C libraries available. I think that all except the last one aren't really concerns for hobbyist indie developers targeting PS Suite. 

At this point C# is relatively portable as far as game development is concerned.  You can use it build games similar to what most indies are building for most platforms indies are making them for (PC, Mac, Linux, Native Client, Android, iOS, 360, PS3), and there are a ton of high profile indie games that have been written with C# (Fez, Atom Zombie Smashers, Dishwasher, Monaco, Terraria, Bastion, etc.)

[Serapth]

Updated with a big new tutorial.  This one covers exporting from Blender to PS Suite, and includes a video of the entire process.

It got so big it actually had to be split into two parts.  The first part is entirely Blender, and covers mapping, texturing and exporting a model from Blender.  If you have prior experience with Blender you can probably skip this.  Also, if you have no prior experience with Blender and are interested in texturing with Blender, even if you don't care about PS dev.

The second part covers converting the model into mdx format, importing into studio, then the code required to display it in 3D.

Exporting from Blender to PS Suite: Blender to Vita in under 5 minutes.

Part 2

[initials]

These are great tutorials.

I'm wondering how hard it would be to create Flixel type wrappers. For instance, consider this code:

Code:

 var width = Director.Instance.GL.Context.GetViewport().Width;

That is so long. Maybe it's just because I'm not a hardcore coder, but this is six layers deep.

Is it possible to turn it into this:

Code:

 var width = FlxG.Width;

Or should I just use what is available?

[Serapth]

These are great tutorials.

I'm wondering how hard it would be to create Flixel type wrappers. For instance, consider this code:

Code:

 var width = Director.Instance.GL.Context.GetViewport().Width;

That is so long. Maybe it's just because I'm not a hardcore coder, but this is six layers deep.

Is it possible to turn it into this:

Code:

 var width = FlxG.Width;

Or should I just use what is available?

Yeah, you could easily create a short hand wrapper layer around their rather... long naming convention.

[Serapth]

I just finished publishing the next tutorial, this one is about creating a sprite sheet ( I recycled my earlier Daz tutorial for this ) using TexturePacker, then utilizing it in PlayStation Suite.

The end result is this:



Tutorial link

[Serapth]

Another tutorial live, this one covers the various ways to update your objects in GameEngine.  Covered topics include using Schedule, deriving from Node and overriding Update ( and the Scheduler singleton ) as well as creating an Action for use with the ActionManager singleton.

[Serapth]

Another update, this one is a two part tutorial

http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2012/05/15/PlayStation-Studio-SDK-TutorialUI-Composer-and-networking-Part-1.aspx

http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2012/05/15/PlayStation-Studio-SDK-TutorialUI-Composer-and-networking-Part-2.aspx


Part one covers creating a UI with UI Composer and the code needed to display it.  Part two covers creating a network client to connect to a high score server.

Coincidentally I re-used the Node code from my SFML/Node leaderboard tutorial for the server.

[eyeliner]

Though I'll probably never going to develop for PSV, I thank you for your tutorials.