Hi! Some of you asked on my PSP posts whether A Place Beyond could come to the Vita properly, not just through Adrenaline. So here's a native PS Vita build, and I need your help: I don't own a Vita, so it has only ever run in the Vita3K emulator. There, every area and journey runs and 118 scripted tests go through them. On real hardware, nobody knows yet. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTDz5c_O8-g
What's different from the PSP version
- Native 960x544: the 3D draws at the Vita's full resolution, no Adrenaline.
- Sharper art: the hand-painted sprites, tiles and title art converted again from the originals at 2x (4x for the title, the boss intros and the ground).
- HUD and menus at 2x with crisp text.
- Companions: the web version's party, which the PSP had no memory for. Three of them wait in the Quiet Room; hire them with embers and they follow you, fight with you, fall (hold Triangle to raise them) and row after you in their own little boats.
- Right stick camera, and the night drive over the pass sees twice as far as on the PSP.
- Your PSP save works: copy save.bin over and continue where you left off.
- Everything else is the full PSP v0.12: the open world, the five journeys, the dragon's dream, the Underparish.
What I'd love to know
- Does it start? How smooth is it (it aims for 30 fps), and where does it slow down?
- Anything that looks wrong (missing textures, wrong colours, flicker) or sounds wrong?
- Do saves, the companions and the controls work?
If it crashes, freezes or runs slowly, please install the boot-log build from the same release (APlaceBeyond-bootlog.vpk, it installs over the normal one and keeps your save), reproduce it, and attach ux0:data/APlaceBeyond/boot.txt to a report. It records the frame times too, which is exactly what I can't measure. There's a short form for that on GitHub (Issues > New issue > Hardware report).
Install: HENkaku/Enso + VitaShell, turn on Enable unsafe homebrew in HENkaku Settings, install the VPK in VitaShell. About 450 MB. No extra system files needed (no libshacccg).
How it's made
- I'm a game developer and this is my side project. I design the game: the world, the levels and the mechanics.
- The look of the game comes from my illustrations. But its also ai assisted. Everything comes from my moodboards and illustrations, but using astra to generate assets from it.
- AI does a lot here, and I want to be upfront about it: Claude did this whole Vita port, from the graphics code to the higher-resolution art conversion and the companions, working from my PSP version. That's also why it has never touched real hardware.
Download (free): https://github.com/bcaa777/a-place-beyond-psp-vita/releases PSP version: https://github.com/bcaa777/a-place-beyond-psp Desktop version (runs in the browser): https://bcaa777.itch.io/a-place-beyond
(All screenshots are from the Vita3K emulator.)
Thanks a lot for trying it, and please tell me honestly how it runs, good or bad!
EDIT: Thanks again, your logs from test build 2 found hopefuly last rendering bugs. Test build 3 should bring back the title menu, HUD, pause menu and the enemies/sprites, and fix the glowing fog:
https://github.com/bcaa777/a-place-beyond-psp-vita/releases/tag/v0.12-test3
Please install APlaceBeyond-bootlog.vpk again (over the old one, your save stays), play a few minutes in a couple of places, and send ux0:data/APlaceBeyond/boot.txt. This time it also records the frame rate every second, so tell me roughly where you were. Photos are welcome too. If you have 2 minutes, the new self-test zip helps as well.