u/antionio

[Mods gave me the go-ahead to post this — thanks.]

I’m Antti, founder of a small game studio in Finland. Since 2019 I’ve been making Choppa: Rescue Rivals in whatever hours I could find around a day job and small kids. It’s finished, and it’s out on August 13.

It exists because of Choplifter. I know Dan Gorlin wrote the original for the Apple II in ’82 before it got everywhere else (I played it on C64 since that was a more popular home computer in Finland). Nevertheless, I got really invested in the chopper phycis, instead of anything else in the game. The chopper movement felt like such a revelation back in the day.

So when I sat down to make my own, I asked what would happen if I focused a bit more on the physics and made a physical ladder as well, that the "hostages" could grab onto. There are no guns in Choppa. You can’t shoot anything, not even the enemies, and you can’t hurt the people you’re there to save. That’s deliberate design choice, not a limitation we ran out of time to fix. Everything that makes it hard comes from the flying, the environment, other hazards like wild animals.

The rest: a campaign with a cast of pilots, each with a different rescue tool and a different part of the world to fly over, so the missions ask different things of you. Pixel art pulling from 80s/90s arcade cabinets, retro games, cartoons and anime. And a four-player local versus mode where you race each other for the survivors, which is closer to air hockey with helicopters than anything in the original: that one is entirely my own fault 😅

Happy to talk about the game, it's Apple II origins, or what seven years of part-time development does to a person.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1173100/Choppa_Rescue_Rivals/
Nintendo Switch: https://nintendo.com/us/store/products/choppa-rescue-rivals-switch

Context: retro arcade helicopter rescue game, single-player campaign + 4-player couch PvP, priced around $14.99. Marketing so far: trailer shared by IGN Gametrailers & Indie Game Hub, Facebook/Reddit posts, our own social media + promoted posts, the lot. The date is tied to a Nintendo Switch release. The dilemma as we see it: momentum is finally building in Steam and a delay could grow wishlists, but we're a part-time team and every month of delay has real costs. For those who've launched: did you delay when traction came late, and how did it play out?