A year after Axiom Verge came to PlayStation 4, Thomas Happ has announced that it will release for PlayStation Vita on April 19 in North America and April 20 in Europe, complete with cross-buy. As an added bonus, both versions will be 10% off during the Vita version’s launch week.
Discussing the long road to release on Vita, Happ explained the he was using a development framework called XNA when Axiom Verge first started. Following XNA being abandoned, the community created an open source version of XNA called MonoGame, and Sony told him that they were working to get MonoGame support on both PS4 and PS Vita, so he “jumped at the opportunity.”
Happ continued:
Tom Spilman from Sickhead Games was in charge of the porting process. Porting an engine to a new platform is an incredibly complicated task, yet he was able to pull it off easily for PlayStation 4. After the PlayStation 4 version was done, however, porting it to Vita turned out to be a lot more challenging. Optimizing an engine is slow and painstaking work. As the months ticked by, Tom was feeling a great deal of pressure to get MonoGame working.
One analogy that I like to use when describing getting Axiom Verge working on PS Vita is that of a lightbulb. For months, Tom Spilman was putting in all of the wiring, but until it was fully connected, the light bulb just couldn’t turn on. And finally, about a month ago, Tom Spilman was able to make the final connection. The build went from not running at all on Vita to running almost perfectly. There were a few bugs here and there that needed to be tweaked, but most of that was fairly minor and easily handled.
When Axiom Verge first launched last year, Happ had recently lost his dog, Max, and sold his car to pay for treatment. Then, his son, Alastair, was born with a severe cause of jaundice that may leave him permanently disabled. “The silver lining here is that, thanks to the success of Axiom Verge and the support of its fans, I’ll be able to be there for my family,” he added.
[Source: PS Blog]
