Welcome to the Vita!

I got a test build up and running on the PlayStation Vita a few days ago.  Its early days yet for Unity’s Vita support for both Unity and Sony so I’ll try and not be too harsh.

For anyone else interested in getting their Unity game up and running on the Vita I suggest you read this article before you start… unlike i did..

The basic info:

1.) Register as a PSM developer.

2.) Don’t forget to apply for a publishing license as I did.

3.) Wait to be approved for publishing license.  The FAQ says it can take up to 10 days.  It only took 1 for me.

4.) Install and setup PSM tools.

5.) Install and setup beta version of Unity.

6.) Deploy!

I’m not a huge fan of registering and waiting to be approved.  Compared to getting the game running on android, although minor, it came across as still very much a walled garden.  I originally thought I only needed to register as a developer before I could build to Vita, unaware that I had to apply for a publishing license and that it could, according to the FAQ, take up to 10 business days to process.

But… It’s early days yet, so I’ll try and not judge to harshly.  Hopefully it’ll be a bit smoother once its official released this summer.

Speaking of early days… any info you may need to tweak your game to take advantage of the Vita(controls etc.) can take a bit of searching to find.  This link was very valuable along with the Unity Vita forums.  It doesn’t seem there is any official documentation on Unity’s side yet.  As confusing as the process was at least they didn’t pull a Google and include an “All in one ADT Bundle of everything essential you will ever need to develop for android”.  Yet, the all in one bundle is missing the Java JDK… you know, the most important thing you need to build to android, with no mention of its requirement, what version, or where to get it. Grrr….

Performance right now is a bit concerning.  Vita is getting about 15 fps while the android build on my Nexus 5 is getting around 50-60fps.  There appears to be a few outstanding issues according to the Unity forums so I’m not too concerned for the moment.  Hopefully once everything gets sorted out I won’t have to do too much specific platform tweaking to get the performance on par with the rest.

Next up. I really have to get the camera sorted on android.  Still some defaults hanging about that need to be changed.  Right now its a pain to spend 30 seconds getting the view aligned before I can I pass my phone to someone to try the game out.  Hopefully once this is sorted I can get some feedback on the mobile controls.  Currently, ignoring the camera issues I’m very pleased with the mobile controls.  Will be interesting to see what others think.