Introduction

The PlayStation Mobile (PSM) SDK represents an exciting opportunity for game developers of all stripes, from hobbyists to indie and professional developers. It contains everything you need to quickly develop a game using the C# programming language. Perhaps more importantly, it provides a market for those games. If you are currently using XNA, you will feel right at home with the PSM SDK.

You may be wondering at this point, Why develop for PlayStation Mobile at all? Obviously, the easiest answer is, so you can develop for PlayStation Vita, which of itself will be enough for many people. Perhaps, though the most important reason is that it represents a group of dedicated gamers hungry for games. While there are a wealth of games available for Android, finding them on the App Store is a mess, while supporting the literally thousands of devices is a nightmare. With PlayStation Mobile, you have a common development environment, targeting powerful devices with a dedicated store catering to gamers.

We are now going to jump right in and get those tools up and running. Of course, we will also write some code and show how easy it is to get it running on your device. PlayStation Mobile allows you to target a number of different devices and we will cover the three major targets (the Simulator, PlayStation Vita, and Android). You do not need to have a device to follow along, although certain functionality will not be available on the Simulator.

One thing to keep in mind with the PlayStation Mobile SDK is that it is essentially two SDKs in one. There is a much lower level set of libraries for accessing graphics, audio, and input, as well as a higher-level layer build over the top of this layer, mostly with the complete source available. Of course, underneath this all there is the .NET framework. In this chapter, we are going to deal with the lower level graphics interface. If the code seems initially quite long or daunting for what seems like a simple task, don't worry! There is a much easier way that we will cover later in the book.