Stunt Xpress - Year In Review - 2024

It’s that time of the year again!

The short interval between getting stuffed with Christmas specialties and popping the champagne for the New Year. The in-between-parties limbo, where one sits on a comfy chair with a hot coffee cup and gazes out the window thinking about buying a boat… And the plans we made that didn’t work out. The unexpected awesome things that happened. The friends we made. The places we visited. The XP gained!

With all that has happened, I feel I won’t be exaggerating when I say that 2024 was one bumpy ride of a year. And that goes double for a game like Stunt Xpress.

So grab yourself a warm beverage of your choice and join me, as in the paragraphs below, I recall and reflect upon this year’s highlights in the development of our air-flipping & box-delivering indie game.

NEW TEAM

About this time, exactly one year ago, I was still jumping on my couch like a little kid. Not because Santa had brought me some awesome Lego set (although he also actually did - thx santa!), but because just a few weeks earlier, I had signed my first video game publishing deal with none other than the Godot wizards and hippest gamedev crew down at Pineapple Works.

Although the ink had not yet dried, we were already in the heat of laying the groundwork for the months ahead. And let me tell you, the task was nothing short of colossal.

Almost everything in the game needed to be either revamped or binned and restarted from scratch!

Yes, up until 2023 I had no experience in making video games. Imagine the horror in their faces when they first delved into my code (some of it dating back to 2022). It was more like the indecipherable scribbles of a 6 year old still learning how to write. So hats off to them. They had the courage to go through all of it. Explaining to me what could be salvaged and improved and what auto parts had to be scrapped and fully replaced for the van to hit max speed.

Without getting too much into details, let me just tell you, this was the time we ported the game from Godot 3 to Godot 4 and started using Jolt as the physics engine. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

A BOOTH IN SAN FRANCISCO

Work was progressing at cruise speed when one day, I received the very generous invitation by the Godot Foundation to showcase Stunt Xpress at their booth in the upcoming Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March. We scrambled to push the demo as far as we could. Some critical work was still being finalized as I was taking the plane there. On the eve of the opening day, I was holed up in the hotel until the late hours on a long call with the Pineapple Works team back in Poland, working with them on the very last fixes (I’ll let you run the numbers on the time difference between the West Coast and Poland, plus my jetlag haha!).

The day had dawned! It was finally time to show our baby to the ferocious masses of both experienced and aspiring industry folks attending the show! Would they love it? Would they hate it? Would this finally be the moment my cover would be blown? Would someone point at me and yell: “Guards! Over here! He’s not a real game dev!”

It so happens that my worst fears were unfounded. Everyone