Hey all,

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of my little side project. I did not expect the amount of attention it got at all – it’s actually rather insane, and I absolutely appreciate the fun times I’ve had with all you guys. However, everything has its end, and Sanicball has been a thing for longer than what’s healthy for something based on a viral internet meme thing.

When I first released the game, one year ago today, it had one stage, three characters and three music tracks. There was no multiplayer, there was no character selection. The balls rolled waay slower. It was just some stupid thing I had made for shits and giggles with a friend of mine. The game wasn’t really fun for more than a few minutes; however, when I woke up on my birthday a few days later, one thousand players had played the game overnight! It was very odd to see. My games usually don’t get much attention at all. The comments I got weren’t all that helpful but I didn’t care. The players had fun!

So I kinda just kept working on it for a while. Things were very slow at the start. Around christmas, multiplayer was implemented, and the game had been played about as many times as The Connection, my second most played game. It’s really nothing compared to now, but back then, it was kind of a big deal. So I kept on working. In Janurary, Awesome Games Done Quick featured Sanicball in their bonus section – and earned me about 5 thousand more plays in less than a day. A tiny, but rather dedicated fanbase slowly started to emerge, but I didn’t know until a guy contacted me and told me he’d been playing it with his friends once in a while. I was pretty stoked about the thought of more people playing it together, and a few patches later, the game had a server browser! However, at the time, servers were rare and almost always didn’t work. That didn’t stay for long.

Things were slow for a while. On April 1st, I made Super Sanic as a stupid april fools joke. Then suddenly, shit started to hit the fan when the montage parody crew picked up the game. Pioneered by Vagabonds, a fair amount of youtubers had made videos featuring the game (fully or partially). All this happened in the span of something like a week, and in that week, a literal shitton of people played the game; this was great, but at the same time sort of bad – most of these people were much more toxic and vulgar than the already established community. Racial slurs were everywhere and I couldn’t really do anything about it, so I rolled with it.

Around that time, I started to get progressively more tired of working on the game. I migrated the development blog from Tumblr to WordPress on a new domain I bought, which I later found out was a bad idea as it somehow caused me to post much less often. When 0.6 was released, I decided it was time for a break. However, the break lasted a bit longer than it needed to, and I started to lose my touch with the game. I also had time to think about just how bad the community had gotten. Apart from the game’s very dedicated subreddit, most players are very immature and don’t really know how to do anything but spew out copypasta memes in the game chat and on the Game Jolt comments page.

All this thinking without any working eventually really started to bring me down. I also recently moved from the college-ish dorm I lived at to an apartment, and the time it takes to take care of myself and cook my own food gives me only a few hours to myself, mostly spent on Reddit. After no more than a few weeks, I got tired of idling and started a reddit thread on the subject of stalling development. It had some negative reactions, but I felt most of the responses were actually agreeing with me – so now here I am, ready to stop development for good. It’s been a long ride, but as said, everything has its end.

So that was a.. uh.. ‘brief’ review of the game’s story. Lots of ups and downs. Mostly ups, though. I loved working on it most of the time. I just feel it’s time to let go and move on.

With that said, I’m putting the full source code up for grabs for anyone interested. You can download it with this link. A readme is inside with instructions on how to set up the Game Jolt login system.

Thank you all for playing Sanicball.