Restarting! The PSP Game Jam of 2022 is a PSP Homebrew contest starting tomorrow, brought to you by Iridescence and the PSP Homebrew Community. Thanks to backers, the contest has now brought in $550 in prizes (which are awarded to the makers of the league’s best homebrews), up from $175 when we first talked about it. What this means in particular is that now the homebrews that finish between 4th and 10th position will get $25 each (was $5 each initially).

This is now going to be the biggest PSP homebrew competition in years! The competition now has a donation campaign if you want to help increase the prize pool even more.

What is the PSP Game Jam 2022?

Restarting! The PSP Game Jam of 2022 is a homebrew competition open to everyone. You have to create a game for the portable Sony PlayStation and submit it for the competition between October 7 noon EST and October 21 noon EST. The top three submissions, judged by the community, will be rewarded as follows:

  • 1st: $175
  • 2nd: $125
  • 3rd: $75
  • 4th to 10th: $25 each (was $5 previously)

This year’s theme: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

From my perspective, the theme should be inspiring to get you started, but then it’s up to your own interpretation. You could build a platform game, an RPG, a sandbox game, etc… There are already 13 participants, so this year already promises to be a good competition 🙂

The contest rules have been slightly updated since our last article, in particular, the organizers have added the precision that you can use any game engine to make your homebrew, not just those for which they provide links or guides.

From the official page of the contest:

All games must be compiled and ready to be played on the Sony PlayStation Portable. If your game is running in an emulator but not in the hardware, your entry will be disqualified. You may submit a game that is cross-platform. Make sure to use the #testing channel on our discord server! You can use any tool to create a game on PSP, including visual editors and pre-built engines like RenPy, Quake and more.

You cannot start creating your game assets or developing code* before the specified start date.

*You may create an engine or utility library, as long as the engine or utility library does not implement the actual mechanics of your game. This engine or utility library may contain things that can set components such as sprite drawing, tile mapping, generic physics, etc. that can be used. An example of a disallowed engine or utility library would be in a final entry which was a flight simulator, the engine defines an object called Plane that has all or most of the features in the final version.

Entries will be democratically judged based on the following criteria::

adherence to the theme: Does the entry correspond to the mentioned theme?
creativity: How unique is a particular entry?
Visual/Aesthetic Quality: Does the game have a cohesive and pleasing visual theme?
Soundtrack: Does the game have a high quality soundtrack (sound effects, music, etc.)?
Brightness: Does the game make it somewhat clear what you are going to do? (Make sure it is not confusing to an end user)
Pleasure: How much do you personally enjoy this game?

Additional information for participants:

It would be appreciated if your code is open source and hosted on a service like GitHub or GitLab so that others can contribute to your game if they want to take your idea further. The PSP Homebrew Community encourages open source development! Join the discord! We will be setting up a channel for the game jam soon!

It would also be nice if your projects on GitHub or GitLab were set up as Hacktoberfest repositories! Read more here:

Below are helpful links, tutorials, and tools to use: https://hacktoberfest.com/

Tool chain:

PSP Toolchain: https://github.com/pspdev/psptoolchain
Rust-PSP Toolchain: https://github.com/overdrivenpotato/rust-psp
Zig-PSP Toolchain (zig v0.8.1): https://github.com/zPSP-Dev/Zig-PSP
Install toolchains: https://psp-dev.org/doku.php?id=tutorial:toolchain_setup

interpreters:

OneLUA (lua): http://onelua.x10.mx
LuaPlayerPlus (lua): https://github.com/Rinnegatamante/lua-player-plus
StacklessPSP (python): https://code.google.com/archive/p/pspstacklesspython/
Scratch PSP block editor: https://snap.berkeley.edu/project?username=pspscratch&projectname=ScratchToPSP
Scratch on PSP interpreter: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/933676293843714068/1018618737550700554/Sc…

engines:

Gen7 engine: https://gbatemp.net/threads/gen7-engine-visual-programming-engine-for-switch.522…
Stardust-Celeste: https://github.com/Iridescence-Technologies/Stardust-Celeste

Libraries:

GLib2D: https://github.com/libcg/gLib2D.git
QuickGame API: https://github.com/IridescentRose/QuickGame
OSLibv2: https://github.com/dogo/oslibmodv2.git

tutorials:

PSP-DEV Text Tutorials: https://psp-dev.org/doku.php
PSP-DEV Video Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwIRcsl57ziPsDYCi6bgO-W9qqAwuW3Mk
More Video Tutorials (Including Images, Scratch, QuickGame): Iridescence

If you would like to contribute to the funds, please donate here: https://www.givesendgo.com/restartpspgamejam22

Iridescence has published an announcement video on its YouTube channel to recap the details on the contest page:

How do I enter the competition?

  1. Go to the contest page on itch.io then click on “Join JAM”
  2. Check the community’s discord server for help and details