Feels Like Coming Home...

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I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to say this: Axiom Verge will be coming to Wii U on September 1 in both the NOA and NOE regions!

When I first announced Axiom Verge about 4 years ago, there was tremendous excitement from Nintendo fans who had been waiting for years for a true 2D Metroid-style action/adventure/exploration game. Because of some technical issues, however, I wasn’t able to launch it on a Nintendo platform straight away. Some people were understandably upset:

The Nintendo games of my childhood are what inspired me to make Axiom Verge. Metroid is probably one of the more obvious influences, but it’s actually a lot more than that. Axiom Verge actually started out as an exercise in game design. I wanted to deconstruct my favorite games from my youth and see what would happen if I took the best elements of each and put them together. The Bionic Commando’s grapple hook and Rygar’s Yo-Yo in the setting of Blaster Master and Shatterhand. I wanted to see what would fit together – and just as importantly what wouldn’t work.

You can still see some of those influences:

Shatterhand

Shatterhand

Axiom Verge

Axiom Verge

Blater Master

Blater Master

Axiom Verge 

Axiom Verge

 

But the influence of the olden times doesn’t end there. Remember glitches that would show up in the game if dust got in the cartridge? Remember Game Genie?

I used to love playing around with that thing. I used to love seeing what would happen if I started up one game and then swapped out the cartridge. It used to fascinate me as a kid that I could walk through a glitched wall into an area that was never intended to be seen. Or I could make enemies behave in strange ways. Sometimes it would freeze the game, and sometimes it would do something useful, but I just loved being able to experiment with all of that stuff. So I included glitching as a primary mechanic in the game.

There’s also another deep connection between Axiom Verge and Nintendo. Dan Adelman, who’s been working with me on the business and marketing side of Axiom Verge for almost 2 years now, was the one who started up the indie games business at NOA about 10 years ago. He’s helped tons of indies get their start from World of Goo to Cave Story to Shovel Knight.

So for so many reasons, Axiom Verge truly belongs on a Nintendo platform. It was only because of Blitworks’ amazing technical skill that we were able to make that happen, and I’m grateful for their work on the pixel-perfect port. Even though the game’s been out for a little while on other systems, the Wii U version is probably the best one. It’s the only console version to support leaderboards for the dedicated Speedrun Mode. And the Wii U GamePad will allow people to have the world map viewable at all times without pausing the game – or to play Off-TV.

It’s been too long in coming, but Axiom Verge is finally home.

Vita and More

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Vita

So, last week we finally submitted the Vita version of Axiom Verge to Sony's certification system. For all console platforms this process takes some time - how long is beyond our power - but it's on its way.  As soon as it's passed we'll know when we can release and announce that to the world.  Given how we really wanted to release it last year, it's definitely going to be as soon as we can - without it being March 22nd (AKA Day of the Tentacle, among other things).  And it's free for anyone who has the PS4 version.

Again, much thanks goes to Tom Spilman of Sickhead Games for making it even possible.

 

And More!

Also coming are Wii U and XBox One ports!  Sickhead games is again doing the XBox One port, while BlitWorks is handling the Wii U sku.  We don't know exactly when they'll release yet but it'll be this year, and definitely after the Vita release.  We plan to have playable demos for both at PAX East (April 22nd - 24th); hopefully by then we will also have more details to share about them.

 

Vita Status Update

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For months now, I’ve been saying that the long-promised Vita version of Axiom Verge is just around the corner and apologizing for the delays. My hope was that I would be able to get it out to everyone and not need to bore everyone with a lot of technical details as to why the port has been taking so long. But as we come within a month of the 1-year anniversary of the PS4 launch, I felt I owed the community a more detailed look at the issues we’re struggling with, where we are in the process, and how much further we have to go. The tl;dr version is this: we have a list of mostly known issues that we are working through and we really, really are getting quite close.

Since you’ve heard me say that we’re getting very close before, though, let me go into more detail about why I think that’s the case. For people who already paid for the PS4 version with the expectation that the Vita version was right around the corner, this isn’t meant to serve as an excuse for the delays. As a consumer, you shouldn’t have to care about what’s going on in behind the scenes. All you should have to know is that you’ve paid for something that included a promise for a Vita version, and you still haven’t gotten it yet. Many of you are upset about that, and that feeling is 100% justified.

So here’s the good news: the game is ported. It runs and is playable! Anyone who has worked on a porting project can tell you that that represents the biggest hurdle. Going from ported game to polished and shippable ported game is much easier than going from non-ported game to ported game. In fact, one of the reasons I couldn’t give a status update on the port before was that there was nothing to show. It was all plumbing and wiring. It’s only when you get everything hooked up and hit the switch that it goes from 0-100 pretty much overnight.

Watch me try to show off Axiom Verge Vita while fighting a cold. Notice that it is actually real and I am playing it! Though it's definitely at an Alpha stage, there is still is much to be done (performance, memory, bug fixing, Sony certification, etc.). Comments welcome.

So from here on out, our focus is on cleanup, polish, and bug fixing. Here is the current list of known issues with the game. Some of these sound like major issues, but in most cases, it’s just a question of going down the list and implementing each feature or isolating a few bugs. For the most part, this list is not necessarily in the order of which these issues will be tackled; rather, it’s primarily in the order of ease of understanding. Any feature listed as critical is something we feel we cannot ship without.

The proper way to read this is not to add up all of the different timeframes to come up with the total time. Many of these things will happen in parallel. For example, fixing the graphics glitches is part of general QA. Fixing the memory issues will also help with load times. And so on. In fact, when I first started drafting this update, the list was quite a bit longer. In the time it took me to record the video, the to do list had shrunk by about a third.

I am extremely tempted to share our internal target dates for completion, but I am going to restrain myself from doing so, since I don’t want to fail to meet expectations and continue to disappoint those of you who have been so patient and supportive. However, I am very comfortable in announcing that we’re in the home stretch. It’s everyone’s top priority, and we’re getting closer every day. Thank you all for your continued patience and support.

 

Axiom Verge Going on Sale!

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Sale season!

When Dan (the business side of Axiom Verge) and I discussed our pricing strategy, we decided that come hell or high water, we were going to keep the price as is for at least 6 months. Although this flies in the face of conventional wisdom (and we may have lost out on some sales as a result) we felt it was important to do for 2 main reasons:

  1. Respect for early adopters – I don’t want our customers to feel like suckers. We’ve all felt that sting of buyer’s remorse when we buy something at full price and then find it on sale (or free!) just a couple days later. I really appreciate everyone who believed enough in Axiom Verge to buy it in the beginning and didn’t want anyone to feel like a sucker for not waiting a couple weeks for a major discount. I want to be as transparent about pricing as possible so that anyone interested in Axiom Verge can make an informed decision about when to buy and for how much.
     
  2. Combating the race to the bottom – As you may know, times are tough for indie developers. There’s incredible pressure to slash prices right out of the gate, and the race to the bottom has been making indie game development unsustainable. There have been several extremely talented game developers who have had no choice but to leave game development as a career and instead do it as a hobby. Many developers slave away for years to make great games only to have people demand that they be sold at a 70% discount. As a professional indie developer I think it’s important to apply the brakes to this race to the bottom. In the long run, this will mean a healthier sustainable marketplace where great games will continue to be made.

Given all of that preamble, I’d like to announce that the 6-month window has passed, and I will be putting Axiom Verge on sale off and on throughout the holidays. In fact, the first sale – 30% off in the EU PSN Store – is going on right now! The other places where Axiom Verge is sold, Steam and the NA PSN Store, will be getting similar discounts later this month. If you have friends who have been holding off on getting Axiom Verge, you can let them know that now is a good time to get it!

T-shirts!

Thanks to everyone who voted in the Axiom Verge t-shirt design contest we did with We Love Fine! We got a bunch of amazing entries, and it was really tough to narrow it down to our favorite 3 designs. But we did, and now they’re all available for purchase. Here are the designs:

  

All of the shirts are available in both men’s and women’s cuts and have a variety of color choices. Also, I’m a big fan of creative people being compensated for their work, so you should know that those fans who designed these shirts will all be receiving a portion of the proceeds.

In addition to these 3 designs, I still have some of the original t-shirt design available on my website. Here’s me, Dan, and Iga (yes, THAT Iga) showing it off:

 

I am talking with another t-shirt manufacturer about producing and distributing this design, so in the next month or so I expect to take this down from my site and direct people to buy it elsewhere. The specifics of that will be announced soon.

Vita update

I often feel like if I don’t mention Vita, people will assume that it’s not always on my mind. It is, and I can report that significant progress has been and is being made! I will be giving some more detailed updates on this in the next month or so, but for now let’s just say that there’s some light at the end of the tunnel. Keep in mind that it is retroactively cross-buy, so if you bought Axiom Verge on PS4 already, you will get the Vita version for free when it launches. Also, if any of your friends have a Vita, they can take advantage of the aforementioned upcoming sale and get both for the price of one!

Thanks again for everyone’s support and patience. It was a lot more complicated than any of us expected it to be, but we’re getting there.