Sony is expanding PSP development to a place unexpected: universities. This non-commercial program allows universities to purchase hardware development kits at a "vastly reduced rate." According to Pocket Gamer, the same ProGD and debugging tools used by commercial studios will also be provided to students. Additional details will be revealed later, but here's hoping that this partnership will create some genuinely exciting projects for our handheld.

Videogame creation is a combination of art and technical skill. It's easy to look at next-gen titles on Xbox 360 or PS3 and marvel at the miracle that is their existence, but many gamers ignore the difficulty and special challenges that come from making a portable game. There is a special art of reduction that comes from a developer trying to make a game that can be enjoyed on the go. To act as a sort of reminder of some of these challenges, I thought I'd highlight a few.

• Making a game that has substance, but can be played in quick intervals
• Having the graphics and gameplay at least partially compare to next-gen titles while being created on far inferior hardware
• Dealing with unruly memory restraints and small media to fit the entire title on
• Having controls work despite having less buttons and control elements than home systems
• Balancing amount of attempted loads so that the battery isn't taxed and yet load times aren't too long
• Ensuring color and lighting allow the game to easily be seen on a portable screen

Then of course there's all the regular challenges of making a game. Like I said, the issues listed aren't all of the issues that come into play, just some of the more common ones. Do you consider any of these elements when you play a game on a portable or is a game just a game to you no matter the circumstance?

It appears a French company has created a new development platform exclusively for the PSP, most recently used in Konami's Online Chess Kingdoms, called Virtools. The press release notes that "The Virtools framework brings together GUIs, graphical and text scripting, debug APIs- such as the behavior and render engines- as well as asset integration." Whatever that means. You can see it in action in the video above.

[Via PSP Hacks]

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and Game Developer's Association of Australia are teaming up to give PSP gamers more original games. The two companies will work together to foster development teams specifically for the PSP platform.

Zeno Colaco, SCEE's Vice President commented, "SCEE are excited to work closely with the GDAA to kick start this initiative in the region. PSP has rapidly established itself as a global format for today's digital consumer. Our goal with this programme is to nurture new talent and widen the spectrum of content providers with traditional and new products which use the full breath of PSP's powerful functionality."

This seems like a win-win situation for everyone involved: the Australian games scene is certainly ready to boom, and PSP gamers are always eager for original content, regardless of what EA thinks.

[Via IGN]

IGN's Death Jr. 2 blog has been revealing some real gems of info. The latest entry goes into the technical aspects of creating the game. Read the lengthy, but genuinely informative, blog to find out more on what kind of evil magic programming the team had to do to get HDR lighting running in the game. It gets pretty complicated, showing off scary XML code. I was personally fascinated by the images from the developer's tools (PB Viewer and Maya Viewpoint)-- this is the kind of behinds-the-scenes stuff that we don't get enough of. The blog also explains more complicated-sounding things like vertex lighting and light seams. Finally, they reveal some of the special visual effects the game will employ: softening, eggcrate, fisheye, ripple, and vortex.

All this technical mumbo-jumbo's being thrown around to razzle dazzle us, and I have to say it's sort of working. Although the game is going to pretty, the real test will come the game ships this Halloween, when we'll be able to test all of its gameplay.

It should come as no surprise that the Japanese market is completed dominated by handhelds right now. Thanks to both the DS and the PSP, the handheld sector has grown to control 63.2 percent of the entire video game market there. Sales of both hardware and software rose 13.9% in 2005, as consumers just can't get enough gaming on the go. To make all of you fanboys happy, I should also give you some numbers you'll throw at a DS fanboy's face: According to Gamespot, Nintendo exported 7.34 million DS systems while Sony exported 11.36 million PSPs in 2005.

Also, more numbers you'll want to use in your online fury against DS owners involve how cheap PSP games are to make. The claims that it costs as much as a PS2 game are just wrong. The average cost to develop on PlayStation 2 is 139 million yen ($1.2 million) a game. A PSP game costs on average 63 million yen ($541,000). Sure, that's still more than developing a Nintendo DS game, which costs an average of 39.8 million yen ($342,000). But when you consider how much more technology goes into a PSP game, it's still not too expensive at all.