Porting to the PS Vita

Porting Dread The Dead to the PS Vita was quite the challenge to setup initially but eventually became fairly easy to build for. Initially Dread The Dead was made entirely in Unity 6, but I wanted to port it to the PS Vita as it is one of my favorite handheld consoles. With the PS Vita being a ‘dead’ and unsupported system, Sony no longer provides an SDK for the system, nor does the latest version of Unity have any support for it. This added some additional struggles in my quest to port the game to my favorite console as I needed to track down the SDK, as well as the Unity support package needed for Vita development.

My search for the Unity Support package and SDK sent me through many forum threads on the topic of Vita homebrew development. After a lot of searching I finally found a Reddit thread with a link to a Google Drive with the SDK, and Unity support package. After installing around 15 – 20 Vita development programs and copying the SDK to the correct folder and adding it to my computers ‘Path’, I could finally install a copy of Unity 2018.2.19f1 and the Vita support package. One small issue that I came across was that Unity was asking for a license key (every Vita developer was given the same Unity license key), which although is very easily findable, had expired back in 2023. The solution I found to solve this is a program that modifies the Unity install to no longer need a license key.

After setting up a new project in Unity 2018 and creating a new scene with just a cube, I tried to build it and install it on my PS Vita, which I had to homebrew in order to develop for (which was a somewhat confusing but not too complicated process). Installing this build of the game didn’t work. After researching why its not working I found out that I needed to change some of the build setting for the Vita as well as install a unity asset file that allows for building .vpk files. Rebuilding the game with this allowed me to install and run it on my modded Vita successfully.

After getting an empty project running it was time for me to begin remaking the entire game from scratch in this 7 year old version of unity. To start I imported the ‘Sony Example Scene’ and Sony’s custom version of the Unity Input system that has extra things for the PS Vita’s controls. I then looked at the example scenes script to see what the name of each of the buttons where for inputs. After looking through that I began remaking the entirety of Dread The Dead from scratch. After remaking it and getting it to run without errors I began optimizing it for the Vita by creating a new quality level in unity and lowering them to their lowest values without making the game look too bad. I then made the game detect if you were playing on the Vita and if you are it changes the quality level to this custom one and locks the frame rate to 30fps.

After ensuring everything worked great on the Vita it was time to make it work on PCs again. To do this I added code that detects what platform you’re on and changes the title screens subtext, control screen, and how the buttons on all the menus work accordingly. I then made it so if you’re not on the Vita it uses a different control scheme to match the platforms differences. I then built it for Windows, Mac, and WebGL. After trouble shooting with audio not working on WebGL, I was all done and my final Beta build of Dread The Dead was complete.