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

I decided to write my first ever devblog to document my experiences developing my baby called Hopfall which is a game about taming and battling frogs for those who dont know. You might be wondering why i chose frogs in particular. The reason is that my first serious hobby project was a frog platformer game inspired by Jump King which I didn't do any marketing at all. It turned out that a lots of people like frogs too.

In this blog I will mainly explain to you why I choose this particular genre for my game and share 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, the DS. I realised that I really enjoyed catching pokemons and watching them grow like my own kids (I don't have any kids but you get the point).

Roguelite

I see roguelites as a great opportunity for solo devs to create lots of content with minimal effort. As a solo developer myself, I just can't dedicate that much time to creating lots of different levels and writing an exstensive storyline. Roguelites make it much more simpler.

Autobattler

Todays younger generations especially don't have the same attention span as older generations. I love watching 80s and 90s movies, even though there are so many long scenes that add nothing to the plot or action. But I still love atmosphere. They were very different to todays movies. You can't just make a 3 hour movie with a 5 min shot of the environment. What I love about autobattlers is that you can do multiple things at the same time. Watch a stream and play at the same time because it doesn't require your full attention, unlike 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 feeling so I decided to make it more cartoonish.

The new version is more dynamic, even featuring a wizard casting an ability, which makes the scene more engaging. I made the font appear 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 the first playtest. Then I 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