PSP homebrew developer Drakon of JelloPhysics fame is back with another squishy release. Taking a page once again from walaber and his Soft Body Physics library, Drakon has "ported" JellyCar from its Xbox 360, PC, and iPhone incarnation to a PSP-compatible version.

For those who haven't gone outside of the PSP homebrew scene much, JellyCar is known in other brewing communities as "a driving/platforming game [where you drive] a squishy car through squishy worlds, trying to reach the next." Sounds a lot like LocoRoco, only instead of a blob, you've got a blob-car! What more can you ask for, ya?

BTW, we say "ported" with the quotation marks because it isn't a simple port in the strictest sense. As Drakon explains, his PSP version was written from C# to C++. This release is supported by both the Slim and Phat. Aside from that, here are other things you should know about Drakon's PSP version of JellyCar:

• Soft-body physics!
• 20 levels to play
• Smooth gameplay with 60 fps
• Ability to use level editor from PC version to make some new levels
• This is version 1.0 of the game but there still can me some bugs... I have some plans for version 1.1 (music,better background,more maps... etc.) but I need some time
  

More notes are included in the readme file: controls, an FAQ, and some credits. Drakon mentioned that he will later give a how-to guide on adding new maps made in the PC editor, so better keep an eye on that in the forums.

* Article originally posted Nov 05, 2008 at 10:18AM

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*Update* Drakon finally got back to us (thanks for the heads up, man! - sorry again for not getting this up sooner). Here we have his tutorial on how to load your own maps to JellyCar on the PSP.

First things first, you will need the Level Editor program installed on your PC, of course (download link below). Once that's done, you can follow these three steps:

Part 1:

After installation of the level editor is complete, you will gain access to tutorial on using editor, made by walaber. It's very good tutorial :> Also you can open all maps from JellyCar PSP - they are in Assets/Scenes/ folder, .scene files. It's good idea to check them, how they work and how are they constructed. Try to change them, experiment on them and then make your own special map.

Ok - so you have your super map created in editor, what's next? Use option "Save All" in editor to save whole map in some folder - name it ex. "super_map.scene". Now copy all generated files to Assets/Scenes/ - when you are creating objects try to gave them some unique names.

Part 2:

Now open scene_list.xml in some text editor. This is list of all maps. We need to add our own line. ex:

name - name of our map

file - file with our map

thumb - file with image that will be shown in menu

Part 3:

Now the image file. It must be .png image, 96x96 pixels size. With name that you declared in scene_list.xml file so here it will be : supermap.png.

Put that file in Assets/Texture/. If you are not artist like me and want nice image from your level do this. Just run the game without that image file of your level - it will be ok. Navigate your map in menu - there will be name but no image.Run map and take screen in the game - use tool like remoteJoy or other (screens in next version...) Now just make your nice miniature from screenshot and put in in Assets/Texture/. Now if you will start the game and navigate in menu to your map you will see name of the map and image.

Sounds a bit complicated, but once you get a feel of it for yourself, it's actually pretty simple. Drakon also notes that some of you guys may encounter an error with the app:

Warning - I've got a message that there are some errors during installation of the editor. In that case try to install Xna Framework Redistributable from here. If this will not help - please download version for PC, install game and then try to install level editor.

And hey, guess what? Drakon says that if you make some cool levels of your own, you can contact him in the forums and send them in. Your own level just might make it to the next public release for everyone else to enjoy!

Download: JellyCar v1.0 for PSP
Download: JellyCar v1.1 Level Editor install (on PC)
Visit: QJ.NET PSP development forum

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