Hopfall #1 - My first ever devblog

Hello everyone or my future me who sees this and gets some nostalgia feeling on how far the game has come.

I decided to make my first ever devblog to document my experiences developing my baby called Hopfall which is for those who dont know a game about taming and battling frogs. I've got this question why frogs in particular and the reason for that is that my first serious hobby project was a frog platformer game inspired by Jump King which I did no marketing at all. It turned out that a lot of people also like frogs.

I'll keep this blog as it is and refuse to use AI to improve my texting as I usually do. I want it to be as authentic as it can be so expect lots of grammatical errors and even typos because as writing this I see no spell checking used in my IDE.

In this blog I will mainly tell you why I choose the particular genre for my game and tell you some of my future plans. Let's start.

Why roguelite, taming and autobattler?

Taming

As a kid I really enjoyed playing Pokemon on Gameboy and later on DS. I realized that I really enjoy catching pokemons and seeing them grow as my own kids (I don't have kids but you get the point).

Roguelite

I see roguelites a great opportunity for solo devs to reach a lot of content with little work. I'm a solo developer and I just can't put that much time into tons of different levels and have a huge story. Roguelites are fun and mostly simple.

Autobattler

Especially todays newest generations don't have the attention span as the older generations has. I love watching 80s 90s movies and there are so many long scenes that add no plot and action whatsoever but I still love the peace behind that. They were way different to todays movies. You can't just make a 3 hour movie with a 5 min environment shot. What I love about autobattlers is that you can do multiple thinks at the same time. Watch a stream and play because it doesn't require your full attention as multiplayer pvp games do for instance.

I'm confident that there is a huge need for autobattling games but too little supply for that.

New Steam capsule

I felt like the steam capsule felt too realistic and gamers would misinterpret the game. I wanted the new one to have more of a indie pixel like feeling so it needed to be more cartoonish.

The new one is more dynamic and even has a wizard casting an ability which makes the scene more engaging. I made the font more "pixelated" to indicate that Hopfall is a game with pixel graphics.

Do you think the new capsule artwork is a better fit for the game?

Future plans

I'm currently working on a more polished/balanced version for a first playtest. And then plan to develop a demo for steam in the near future. Stay tuned for that!

I'm happy to announce that I will hold a talk in the Vienna Gamedev Metup #97 on 14. April 2026.

You can currently play the game as it is right now on https://classical-frog.itch.io/hopfall