Back in my teenage years I enjoyed like crazy with my PSP, so I was all excited to get myself the all new shiny Vita as soon as I could afford it, specially at that time Unity and Sony announced they’d be allowing indie developers to create their own games for the new sony console for free. Unfortunately this program was (not too much) later cancelled, leaving all doors closed to indie devs willing to bring their creations to the Vita.

However there’s always a way, so with the release of the unoficial PSVita SDK some doors are again open.

In my personal case I was on how challenging it would be to bring an existing game to another platform and what it would take in terms of implementation. So after seeing some other projecs I decided to give it a go with something not too complex: an open-source Tetris clone called Openblok.

It turned out to be an extremely rewarding experience, so although it is still work in progress it mostly involved:

• Understanding how to use the PSVita compiler.
• Understanding how to use CMake for this particular case and adapting the original project files for the Vita compiler.
• Reimplementing all the platform-specific code to be funcional in the Vita. Luckily the original project code was quite modular and this task was not too cumbersome.
• Basic understanding of how the Vita graphics hardware works.
• How the Vita apps are bundled and installed on the system.

All the development process was done inside Visual Studio Code with the help of the CMake plugin to ease the iteration and deployment time.

You can see the code in my github repo