Alrighty, time for the yearly recap. This is what happened with September Games in 2022.
January-March: Crossing Guard Joe
I started work on Joe in summer of 2021, aiming for a late 2021 release, then January 2022, but finally had to push it back to March to get the last pieces in place.
Crossing Guard Joe released on March 4th to very little fanfare.
Late March: Enough screwing around… time to start working on POGOPPL!
All the way back in 2010 I tried making a game in Flash where you play a clown on a pogo stick. It was gonna be called “Coco On The Pogo”, but it never turned into much because I sucked at programming. In 2014 I finally learned programming, starting making games in Unity, and in 2016 I made the first prototype of a physics-based pogo stick platformer. It was gonna be called “Bounce”. I worked a bit more on it in 2017, but in 2018 I decided to get serious about it, working on this game for at least 1 hour every night, Monday-Thursday, throughout the year, while I still had a day job. At some point I realized there’s already 4 games on Steam called “Bounce” so I rebranded it to “POGOPPL”.
Anyway, after years of gamedev as a hobby, this was gonna be my first big commercial Steam release. In 2019 I quit my day job, founded September Games and… kinda got cold feet. I figured I should release a smaller game first, just to get used to releasing games on Steam, so I decided to dust off my old 2015 itch.io game “Stilt Fella” and put that out first. The plan was to release Stilt Fella AND POGOPPL in 2019. Then Fella turned into a much bigger project than I’d anticipated, dragging into 2020, and by the time it was done I’d lost my taste for physics-based wacky sports games, and got sidetracked with other things for a couple of years.
Well, enough of that. Time to wrap this bad boy up!
April-December: Developing POGOPPL
I polished up what I had so far and released it to my testers in April. Response was good. I then spent 2 months implementing the level editor, which meant unraveling much of my previous work. Changing how levels were made and stored meant remaking all the content I’d made up till that point, but it was well worth it. In July I released the Level Editor update.
After that I spent a lot of time refining the editor and the gameplay. Late in the year I began implementing local multiplayer. Though this game might look simple on the surface it is by far the most technically complex thing I’ve ever made, because of the editor and the multiplayer.
All year: Side projects
Been tinkering with 5-6 small sideprojects this year. A sidescrolling post-apocalyptice driving game, a cartoon immersive sim, a lawnmowing game, a mobile thingy, and these 2…
September: Hover Cabby RTX
Remember my free Hover Cabby game from last year? No? Ok, well I added RTX to it, though I couldn’t be bothered doing the other updates I wanted, so it’s kinda gotten stuck. Perhaps I’ll finish it up in 2023.
November: The Flying Doctor
Started making a flight sim inspired by the old Australian “Flying Doctors” TV-show. This is currently my main sideproject.
Meanwhile, out in the world…
The Finnish winter of 2021-2022 was tough with the covid-restrictions, everyone was masked up more than ever, but as spring arrived the masks came off and covid hasn’t felt as scary or as present in our lives since then. In its place, another horror emerged: Russia’s war with Ukraine. As another small country on the border of Russia, the early weeks of the war felt very uneasy. But Ukraine soon proved far more resistant to being invaded than anyone had expected. Finland and Sweden decided it was finally time to join Nato, a process which is still ongoing. As a result of the war, energy prices have been going up, and 2023 might be hard on a lot of people financially.
Coming in 2023…
• POGOPPL
• Stilt Fella console annoucement? Yeah yeah, it didn’t happen in 2021 OR 2022, but I got something in the works… maaaaaaybe this year?
• The Flying Doctor? I feel like I might release a small free version of this to see what folks think of it.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned to @SeptemberGames for further updates! And wishlist POGOPPL! 🙂