Everybody has a Fool’s Day, and we have an anniversary 🙂

In fact, it was on April 1, 2024, after the final agreement with the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation on the key objectives of the project, that work on the creation of the game officially began. By this point, the game designer and future producer of the project already had the basic outline of GDD and gathered the first core team of six people.

Even these people were not easy to find: many of them refused to work on an obviously “sanctioned” project. Some for fear of ruining their careers in the “big” gamedev, some for personal reasons. But in the end the project gathered people who understood why to make a game about the war and were motivated to do it right, not trying to cover themselves with general phrases like many others.

During April 2024 the team managed to create a basic package of technical documentation, scripts for the first five Mariupol missions, worked out ideas for graphical setup, the composer wrote the first 10 melodies, and the first block-out with the most basic outlines of mechanics appeared in the game engine.

The team at that time worked without funding, on enthusiasm. The task of getting the first demo version done by the Army-2024 exhibition in August in order to get resources to complete the project seemed crazy, but it was an interesting challenge to take on. By the way, the demo was eventually completed.

Well, after April there were eight more months of constant crunches, dispersing deadlines, team growth, constant search for creative and technical solutions to fit into the modest resources available…. Did it all work out as planned or desired? Of course not. Did we succeed in creating a game – we believe we did. In any case, it is symbolic that in April we are ready to go to Steam and release the mobile version of the game on Android.

By the way, from today the game’s publishing on VK resources (VK Play for PC and RuStore for Android) will be handled by PoliteNut Games – a company specially created to operate our game project. The name is a little hooligan, but not because of the April 1 🙂

In any case, we, the Squad 22 team, do not regret this adventure and are ready to develop the game further, to work on new ideas on the topic of SMO, to help teams of related public projects on this important topic. We have quite ambitious plans, we will tell you about them as they are confirmed.

Thank you to our players, consultants, fighters and veterans of the SMO for your constant support and warm words!

Victory will be ours! And our team will continue to do everything we can to help immortalize the history of this victory.