KyûHEN – PlayStation Vita Homebrew Contest!

It’s been a while since the last competition of its kind, GekiHEN. Years, in fact. But here we go, a brand new homebrew development competition that will hopefully bring users more homebrew content for the console that never got any love from Sony.

KyûHEN is that contest, and it can be found here. The people responsible for the contest are Cimmerian, 20ld4Gaming, frangarcj, Wirus, with the help of Windvern of Custom Protocol for the logo and background, in addition to the sponsors PSX-Place, Wololo and PlayStationHax, very well-known PlayStation homebrew communities that have existed for years and years.

The contest is to last 2 months, ending on May 27th, and the rules are the following:

1. Developers can submit as many submissions as they want but can only win one prize per category.

2. For games, if they were previously released on another platform like PS4 or Switch, even if it is yours, it must be submitted in the port category. Utility from other homebrew scenes shall remain in the utility category though

3. If the game you want to submit was already released before on the PSVita, it must have been at the state of prototype and being improved to make it a complete game. For utility, the changes should be consequent to the homebrew/plugins which required lot of work.

4. No piracy will be allowed. No use of copyrighted assets is accepted, games must be the author original creation. We do allow the use of generic free assets you can find in unity assets store for example but do note that we will value more games which use hand made assets. As for ports, do not include game files if they are not free to share. Engine made from RE are allowed, but engine made from leaked source of a game engine are not allowed.

5. You must have a paypal account to receive the money.

6. You must include the contest splash screen in the booting process of your homebrew (you can include it as a live area asset Plugins obviously can’t show the splashcreen, instead we will ask you to put a mention of the kyûHEN contest inside your readme in your repo.

7. You can share a public build outside of our website only when we have approved it and already showcased your project on our website

8. If your project is based on an open source project, you must follow the license of the open source project

9. If we catch you cheating, you are automatically banned from the contest.

10. Categories prizes might be subject to slight changes depending on submissions and on the amount collected.

https://kyuhen.customprotocol.com/en/details

The website helpfully points potential participants to a number of useful tools and SDKs that can be used to develop a PlayStation Vita app, in addition to Discord servers where anyone can get support whilst working on their project.

It’s a good thing to see that the PS Vita homebrew community still lives, even if Sony themselves have stopped caring years ago. Through homebrew developers, the Vita still lives, and that’s amazing to see.