A developer's desire to find compelling challenges, a gamer's passion for their handheld, and a neurodivergent's attempt to overcome the entropy of forum threads and Discord channels are what gave birth to this database.
VPS is the place where PlayStation Vita homebrew developers can find ideas for their next project using a handy database of community suggestions.
The first 181 entries you can find here were hand-picked and added from two sources: #projects-suggestions channel on Vita Nuova Discord server and Homebrew Request Thread on gbatemp forum. Shoutout to these two amazing communities.
I hope that you will find the interface pretty intuitive but there are a few things I'd like to clarify before you start looking for your next amazing project.
Searching
Feel free to use the search bar on the top of each page when you already kind-of-know what are you looking for, e.g. "Mario", "PSTV", "SDL2", "devnoname120", "mari[o0]".
As you might have already guessed from these examples, the search is performed on all fields of a suggestion including even dependencies and suggester's name. Yes, Regular Expressions are allowed too, why not? =)
Filtering
Currently, there are five filters available: Category, Language, Status, Feasibility, and Bounty. While the rest is fairly self-explanatory, let me elaborate a bit on Feasibility.
Feasibility for the game and application ports is set according to these simple rules:
- High : all dependencies are available for the Vita and porting, theoretically, comes down to recompiling and minor fixes.
- Med. : some of the dependencies are not available or not fully supported, but fixing up should be doable without fundamental changes or rewriting large parts of the app in question.
- Low : critical dependencies are not available, so the project would require a fairly hard porting of dependencies and/or fundamental changes to the app.
For other categories, feasibility is a rough estimate of how much effort the project might take, so don't take it too seriously.
In future, more filters are planned, such as by dependencies and by game genres. For the time being, please stick to using the search feature for these purposes. Searching and filtering do work in parallel.
Dependencies
For each port suggestion I tried to fill out all the critical dependencies. The "pills" with dependencies names are color-coded in the way similar to Feasibility to give you better quick overview of what awaits you inside.
- Green dependencies are either already available for VitaSDK, or have no dependencies of their own and should compile as-is. For example, SDL2 has great native support.
- Orange dependencies are either already ported but only partially supported, or unavailable for the platform but it should be relatively simple to replace them with an alternative. For example, PSPSDK which is similar enough to the Vita native functions.
- Red dependencies are requiring either labor-intensive porting, or making fundamental changes in the app to replace them.
Commenting
By clicking on the header of a suggestion or on the "X Replies" link in its footer you will get to the "full view" of it. There you can see the description for the project provided by the suggester and a comments block.
If you started working on the project or discovered any inaccuracy in its description, please leave a comment! Alternatively, contact me using the links in footer so I can update the status or other fields.
I think, that's it! Have fun!
Got a good idea for a plugin? Know an open-source game that would be perfect on Vita? This is the place.
Just make sure that your suggestion follows the simple rules below and head straight to the Submit a suggestion page. Within 48 hours your submission will go through moderation and if it's not totally absurd, you will see it on the main list.
By the way, to get notified that your suggestion is published, don't forget to leave a way to contact you in the form. This could also be useful for developers if they would want to ask you something about the project.
In future, I plan to add a rating feature so that community could vote for the most anticipated projects.
Before you submit
1. Only suggest porting open source projects or creating original projects.
Games and applications that have no source code available are impossible to port.
2. Keep in mind the Vita hardware limitations.
PlayStation Vita has 365 (+26) MB of RAM available for applications,
112 MB VRAM, and 500 MHz CPU. xray-16 (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) is an example
of what's impossible to run on the Vita.
3. Do use the search feature.
There are more than 180 entries in this database already. If what you
want to suggest is possible, there is a good chance that it's here already.