Devlog #9 - 5760 gamedev hours

The number in the title is our rough estimate of how many hours our duo has poured into this game.

In this post, I’ll recap the key milestones from the entire development journey.

Let’s dive in!

The Idea:

Sportal is an evolution of our previous game, Golf VS Zombies. We wanted more weapons, more enemies, more arenas-and we wanted to remove the barrier that kept players from jumping straight into monster‑slaying action (yes, that infamous wall of text).

The old game was fun, but it lacked that extra spark and didn’t achieve commercial success. This time, the plan was simple: do everything similarly… but better.

Golf VS Zombies on Steam

Prototype:

The first prototype took just one month to build, and the biggest difference was that the game originally used a TPP perspective instead of FPS.

Early Development:

For several months, we continued building the game in TPP. We created four enemy types, a player model with dozens of animations, around ten arenas, and two weapon types.

Around that time, we also received funding to prototype a different game, so Sportal’s development was paused for a few months.

Switch to FPS:

When we returned with “fresh eyes,” we realized TPP wasn’t doing the project any favors. Movement felt slow, the action lacked punch, and players’ synapses simply weren’t getting enough dopamine. So we rebuilt everything as an FPS. It was absolutely worth it—the combat instantly felt better!

Game Reveal:

Two months after switching perspectives, we had enough content to record a trailer.

Andrzej (the coding half of our duo) kept pumping out new lines of code while I spent an entire month recording the reveal teaser trailer.

We made many versions, and it ended up being the longest trailer production of my life—but it paid off. The announcement brought in a huge wave of wishlists.

We revealed the game during BoomStock 2024.

The Grind:

Then came the longest stretch: over a year of steady development.

During this slow and steady marathon, we created about 80% of the content you see in the game today.

I also posted hundreds of tweets and Reddit posts—some of which even went mildly viral.

We were using google sheets for task management as you can see there is about 1400 tasks done on the list:

Demo Release:

In October 2025, during Steam Next Fest, we released the demo.

The reception was overwhelmingly positive. Out of dozens of comments and reviews, only two were negative.

That’s a great sign—especially since the full game will include hundreds of improvements.

Here are a few comments and reviews (click to enlarge):

Demo Steam Page>>

Finalization & Polishing:

The last few months were all about refinement. No big new features, no massive content drops—just hundreds of polish tweaks and bug fixes.

Thanks to that, the gameplay experience is now smoother and more satisfying.

We relied heavily on feedback from demo players, plus tons of notes from internal testing.

That’s all for today!

Thanks for reading.

We’ll share a few more updates before launch.

In the meantime, go play the Sportal demo.

The full release is coming very soon.

Watch this space!