Axiom Verge Blasts Its Way Onto PlayStation Vita Later This Month

Light has emerged at the end of the pixelated tunnel for Axiom Verge‘s long-in-development PlayStation Vita port.

Taking to PlayStation Blog, developer Tom Happ confirmed that the Super Metroid-inspired platformer would make a beeline for Sony’s handheld on April 19 – more than a full year after the base game debuted across PlayStation 4.

News of Happ reaching the finish line on Axiom Verge‘s portable version first surfaced last month amid reports that the game had been canned. Here, the title’s chief programmer, artist, designer and composer offers some insight into the prolonged delay between PS4 and PS Vita.

When I started development of Axiom Verge, I was using a development framework called XNA. Support for XNA was abandoned, so the community created an open source version of XNA called MonoGame. Sony told me they were working to get MonoGame supported on both PlayStation 4 and PS Vita. I knew that Axiom Verge would be great on a handheld, so I jumped at the opportunity.

“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.”

At long last, Axiom Verge will blast its way onto PlayStation Vita on April 19.