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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 7h

Whale Hop's whale leaves the sea and does its tricks in the sky, where there are rails to grind. Ride one and it lights up behind you as you go. Come off the end and it stays lit but washed out. That one's done, and the colour is how you tell. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 14h

The missions list in Whale Hop is long, and pressing down walked the cursor off screen. Every row had the same name in the focus list — what a controller steps through — so the game thought the cursor hadn't moved and the view never followed. Each row has its own name. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

A dark game panel over a sunset sea, headed TIDE CHART and MISSIONS, the long haul. A long list of missions fills it — PERFECT ENTRIES, RINGS PASSED, RAILS RIDDEN, FISH CAUGHT, UPDRAFTS RIDDEN, CLOSE PASSES, WHALE LETTERS, BALLOONS POPPED, RAIL TRANSFERS, GRAZES, JET STREAMS RIDDEN, CLUSTERS CLEARED and BIGGEST SCHOOL — each with a green progress bar and a count such as 968 / 1,500. The list has been scrolled down, a scrollbar sits at the right, and the highlighted row is BIGGEST SCHOOL at the bottom edge.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 29/09/2026

There are fifteen whales to pick from in Whale Hop, among them a narwhal, a beluga, a manatee and a whale shark. Then you choose a colour, and a hat, which can be an 80s cap, a crown, an elf hat or a jester's. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

The CHOOSE YOUR WHALE screen over a sunset sea, peach sky above blue water. Three dark panels of options headed WHALE, COLOUR and HAT. The WHALE panel is outlined in glowing teal to show it is the one being turned, with NARWHAL picked out among BALEEN, HUMPBACK, MANATEE, WHALE SHARK, BLUE WHALE and BEAKED WHALE, each row carrying a small drawing of that whale. The COLOUR panel has DEEP BLUE picked out of seven swatches, and the HAT panel has CROWN picked out of NONE, 80s CAP, ELF HAT and JESTER. On the right, a framed window labelled YOUR WHALE holds the narwhal itself, swimming to the right with a dark blue back, pale belly and a long straight tusk, wearing a red crown with a gold band. Underneath it reads NARWHAL, and below that DEEP BLUE, CROWN.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 29/09/2026

Two male killer whales off South Africa have learned to kill great white sharks and eat one organ, the liver. Tagged whites clear out of the bay when the pair show up, and some stay away for months. One of the two was filmed doing the whole thing alone, in under two minutes. #whalefacts

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 28/09/2026

The whale in Whale Hop spends its day in the sky over the sea, and there's always a list of things to chase up there. Flips landed, rings passed, fish caught. You choose which three ride along in the corner while you play. One off the chart, into a slot, done. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 28/09/2026

A hunter in west Greenland shot an odd grey whale in the 1980s and kept the skull. It had a narwhal's tail, a beluga's flippers, and eighteen teeth where a narwhal grows one tusk. DNA later showed its mother was a narwhal and its father a beluga. It's the only one confirmed. #whalefacts

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 27/09/2026

The stickers you keep go in a book. There are 86 emoji, each in six rarities, from plain paper up to holo glitter and cracked ice. The ones you haven't found yet wait on the page as silhouettes. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

The sticker book screen: a dark navy panel headed STICKER BOOK over a dusk sea, tabs along the top for COLLECTION, COMMON, UNCOMMON, RARE, EPIC, LEGENDARY, MYTHIC and SHINY with MYTHIC active in rose pink, and a scrap total of 9,370 beside the line 246 of 516 found. A grid of forty slots: about seventeen hold emoji stickers with a pastel holographic sheen and a thin pink rim, among them a water droplet, musical notes, praying hands, a cherry blossom, a thumbs up and several smileys, a few carrying a small count badge. The other slots show the emoji not yet found as flat dark silhouettes inside dashed borders. Under the grid, 37 of 86 found on this page. On the right one sticker is shown large under MYTHIC, CRACKED ICE and a gold SHINY tag, glowing with a soft white and gold aura, named MUSICAL NOTES, above a bar reading MYTHIC PAGE 37 of 86.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 26/09/2026

A vent, a bumper, a satellite and a boost ring. These four cost more to draw than everything else in Whale Hop put together, so each one gets drawn once into a picture and stamped from there. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

A vent in a near-black sky scattered with small coloured dots and star shapes: five chunky chevrons pointing up in a vertical stack, fading from dim olive-grey at the top through teal to bright pale cyan at the bottom, with two cyan crescents below them for the mouth.

A bumper in the same near-black starry sky: a big flat red disc with a lighter red rim, a deep blue disc inside it edged in periwinkle, and a white eight-pointed star at the dead centre. A dark red four-point star floats to the right.

A satellite seen side-on against a plain royal-blue sky, small in the frame: a white body of little squares like a grid, with a pale blue solar panel out to each side, everything drawn inside a thick dark navy outline. One small pale dot sits above it.

A boost ring against a bright blue midday sky with soft white cloud bands: twelve gold marks arranged in a circle, four six-pointed asterisks at the quarters and eight round dots between them, each outlined in dark navy.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 26/09/2026

Whale Hop's arcade in the sky gambles the points you haven't banked. The lever kept working while the reels spun, so a second press skipped the payout and the stake with it. It's dead as they run. Switching it off would empty the focus list, meaning all a pad can reach. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

A tall game screen over an evening sky and sea, headed THE HOUSE and THE ARCADE PAYS OUT. A red box reads UNBANKED — AT RISK above the number 12,864,500. Under it three slot machines labelled 25% TO BANK, 33% TO BANK and 50% TO BANK are lit gold with their reels mid-spin, showing moons, circles and stars, and below them a RUN TOTAL of 204,318,700. The button at the bottom left shows a row of dots where it said PULL.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 25/09/2026

The fifth dive of a day in Whale Hop happens at night. Here's one leap from the kelp to the top of the arc and back down into the water, under the crescent moon, at half speed. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 25/09/2026

Some bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia, wear a sea sponge on their beak while they poke around the seafloor for fish, most likely as protection. The habit is passed down almost entirely from mothers to their daughters. #whalefacts

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 24/09/2026

Every dive in Whale Hop starts inside a ring you aim from, and one of the upgrades kicks you on the way out of it. Top hasn't got it, bottom has it maxed, with the same aim and the same held button. Half speed, and by the end they're a screen apart. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 24/09/2026

In the 1960s, submarine crews in the Southern Ocean started hearing a sound they named the bio-duck, because it sounded like a duck. Nobody knew what made it for about fifty years. In 2013 scientists put recording tags on two Antarctic minke whales, and the tags caught them making it. #whalefacts

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 23/09/2026

The emoji a whale pops during a run come back as stickers, and the ones you keep can be stamped onto the title screen, anywhere you like. How many fit is its own thing to earn, so a crowded title takes a while. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 23/09/2026

Emoji pop out of my whale as it chains tricks, and on Windows 10 one came up as an empty box, known as tofu. Windows 10's emoji font is too old to have a glyph, meaning a drawing, for four of the ones in the game. I swapped in older look-alikes, so a salute became a wave. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

A white cartoon whale arcs through a warm orange sky in front of a sun drawn as rings of dots, and a waving hand emoji pops out beside its head with three little motion lines.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 22/09/2026

Climb high enough in Whale Hop and the sky becomes an arcade. Everything you haven't banked goes on the table, one pull for every token you earned, and any hit banks the lot. This one came down to the third machine. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 22/09/2026

Nobody has ever seen a spade-toothed whale alive. For about 140 years it was known only from one jawbone and two partial skulls. In 2010 a mother and calf washed up on a New Zealand beach and were taken for Gray's beaked whales, until DNA showed what they were. #whalefacts

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 21/09/2026

Whale Hop's night sky has a crescent moon made of text characters. Leaving the dark side blank didn't work, because the bloom — the glow around bright things — filled it back in, as the first picture recreates. The game dims those characters instead, with the bloom off. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

A crescent moon made of rings of small pale text characters against a dark blue night sky. Only the lit crescent on the left is drawn in characters; the dark side is left blank, and a soft pale glow fills it, so the whole thing reads as a round, glowing full moon.

The same moon as the game draws it: a bright crescent of small pale text characters on the left, and the rest of the disc drawn in the same characters but dimmed, so the shadowed side still shows faintly against the dark blue night sky, with no glow over it.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 21/09/2026

You fly a whale in Whale Hop, and one of the cards you can buy promises to cut air drag — the air pushing back on the whale — by a third. Whenever you pushed forward, it added extra drag instead, so the whale flew slower. I fixed it so it always cuts a third. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 20/09/2026

Three missions ride along in the corner while you play. Here the whale flies through a third ring, finishing a level of the rings mission, and its row lights up and ticks over to a check mark. The bottom half is that corner, enlarged. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 20/09/2026

Whales feed deep and poop near the surface, bringing nutrients up to the sunlit water where plankton can use them. Scientists call it the whale pump. In the Gulf of Maine, one study found whales and seals bring up more nitrogen, the stuff in fertilizer, than all the rivers flowing in. #whalefacts

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 19/09/2026

Arches, tucks and kickflips each pop an emoji out beside the whale, and as the chain grows they get bigger and wilder, until they come three at a time. Slowed to half speed so you can catch them. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 19/09/2026

Whale Hop, the whale game I'm making, started out stuck at sunset until I gave it a whole day, from morning to night. The god rays and lens flare — light shafts and camera glare — kept coming from the sunset's spot, even at noon. They follow whichever sun or moon is up. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 18/09/2026

Every dive the whale takes is the next of five times of day, morning to night, and the night dive adds up the day's scores. Here's the title screen at each of the five, side by side. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 18/09/2026

In 1987 a female killer whale in Puget Sound, near Seattle, started wearing a dead salmon on her head. Within weeks whales from two other pods were doing it too, and then the fad died out. In 2024 a male called Blackberry was spotted wearing one. #whalefacts

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 17/09/2026

In the last fifteen seconds of a run the tide turns gold and the low clouds rain coins. They fall into the sea and sink slowly, and most of them come down off screen, so you have to go after them. Every coin you catch adds 0.1 to the multiplier on your whole run. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Dozens of gold coins, each showing a little blue spouting whale, rain down through a pink and orange sunset sky past two fluffy pixel clouds and a big glowing sun, and splash into a strip of blue sea at the bottom. Some are turned edge-on as they spin.

Below the waves, dozens of the same gold coins sink slowly through blue water, some face-on and some edge-on, with a strip of orange sunset sky at the top where a few more are about to splash in.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 17/09/2026

The whale in my game does tricks and reacts with emoji, from a water drop to an exploding head. Each popped with overshoot easing, which means swelling past full size, right on top of the whale, so the big ones hid it mid-trick. They pop out beside it instead. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 16/09/2026

Tap the air brake mid-jump and the whale arches its back. Tap it again and it tucks. Hold a direction first and the tap is a kickflip that way instead. All three score the same. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

A cartoon white whale in mid-air above a blue sea under an orange sunset sky, head up and back arched so its tail curls back behind it. A grinning emoji face pops out beside it.

The same whale in mid-air curled into a tight C, its back rounded over the top and its head and tail both pulled down underneath. A small gold star trailing a ring spins in the sky nearby.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 16/09/2026

In my game the whale pops emoji mid-trick, and each becomes a sticker. Rare ones shine like holo cards. I drew the rainbow gradient with color dodge, a blend mode that only brightens, so on bright emoji it nearly vanished. A color blend fixed it and kept their shading. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 16/09/2026

Every emoji the whale pops mid-trick ends up a sticker, common to mythic. I tied rarity to the trick chain's score, but big chains pop the most emoji, so nearly a quarter came out mythic. Each one rolls like a loot drop instead, and a big score tilts the odds. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

A game's end-of-run screen. A dark panel titled RUN COMPLETE lists the run's stats, and more than a hundred emoji stickers in different sizes are scattered over the sunset sky and sea around it, many with gold, silver, rainbow, neon or holographic borders.

A sticker book open on its legendary page: a grid of emoji stickers, with the ones not found yet shown as dark silhouettes. On the right, a larger smiling face with sunglasses sits in a showcase panel with a rainbow holographic shimmer across it.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 16/09/2026

One part of the game plays like pinball, the whale bouncing off bumpers and smashing rocks into spray. It got way too busy, so I filmed the same run on a copy from a few weeks back, sure the particle system had grown. It'd shrunk. There are just far more bumpers. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 15/09/2026

The top of the water and the bottom of it. The sea runs from a sunset surface down past kelp beds to a trench, and each band has its own light, its own colour, and its own fish that live nowhere else. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

A sunset sky in orange and pink full of soft clouds, with a large sun drawn as rings of dots. Below the waterline the sea is blue-green, with a swordfish, two small orange fish and a hint of reef in the corner.

A dark blue-green kelp bed far underwater. Tall pale stalks topped with round bulbs rise from a reef ridge dotted with coral colour, and a small orange fish swims across the upper left.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 15/09/2026

Bottlenose dolphins each work out their own signature whistle when they're young and keep it for years. Other dolphins copy it, which seems to be how they call that one in particular, and when researchers played a dolphin's own whistle back to it underwater, it answered. #whalefacts

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 14/09/2026

Four hats: an 80s cap, a crown, an elf hat and a jester. They hang off the whale's own transform instead of being drawn at a point on screen, so one stays put through a barrel roll and the brim flips to face whichever way you're going. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

A small pale blue whale climbs steeply through near-black space wearing a colourful 80s snapback cap in red, blue, yellow and green.

The same whale climbing through a pink sunset sky wearing a red and gold crown, with a soft cloud above it.

The whale climbing past a huge sun drawn as concentric rings of dots, wearing a small pointed elf hat, with a cloud to the right.

The whale nose-down over a dark reef ridge with a kelp stalk and glowing red anemones below, wearing a yellow and green jester hat with bells.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 13/09/2026

Whales' closest living relatives are hippos. Their ancestors walked around on land about fifty million years ago, and the oldest whale fossils still have the same grooved ankle bone that cows, pigs and hippos have. #whalefacts

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 12/09/2026

Climb far enough and you leave the sky altogether. There's a ringed planet up here, a purple nebula off to one side, and the whale trailing fading copies of itself across the dark. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 12/09/2026

Coral on the reef swelled and shrank as you changed speed. A plane is baked once then scaled, which is exact for anything anchored in the world, and all of it was — except the glyph size. That number had no zoom in it, so scaling the picture scaled the coral. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 09/09/2026

So far, no whales but there have been a lot of dolphins! AI digital zoom really mangled that one photo but it looks kind of cool.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 08/09/2026

Doing some research! Now I just gotta find some whales 🤔

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 06/09/2026

Updates are going to be slow this week. Taking a break to recharge my batteries then back at it next week!

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 06/09/2026

Back under the surface after a jump, with the splash ring still hanging where the whale went in. The swordfish and the little koi drift past at different depths, because each kind of fish lives in its own band of water. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 05/09/2026

Blue whale songs have been getting deeper for decades. Recordings going back to the sixties show the pitch dropping year after year, in every population around the world at once, and nobody's got a good explanation for it. #whalefacts

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 04/09/2026

Drifting through the kelp bed. Each plant is one continuous shape — it used to be a column of glyphs with 94% open water between them, which read as anything but kelp. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 04/09/2026

The kelp was a column of glyphs and didn't read as kelp at all. The character was fine — the spacing wasn't. One every ninety units meant 94% of each stalk was open water, and no glyph closes a gap that size. It needed a continuous shape. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 04/09/2026

Every whale shark has its own pattern of spots behind the gills, so you can tell individuals apart from photos. The software researchers use to match them came out of astronomy — it was built to line up star fields. #whalefacts

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 03/09/2026

The clouds in the world looked blocky, because they were the same shade glyphs as the haze stamped along a sine wave. The title screen already had proper wispy ones, so the world calls the title's painter now. One wisp in the codebase instead of two that drift apart. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 02/09/2026

Sunset over the surf. The clouds are wisps drawn by the same painter the title screen uses, so there's one wisp in the game instead of two that slowly drift apart. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 02/09/2026

A humpback's flippers are about a third of its body — five metres, the longest arm on any animal. The front edge is lumpy instead of smooth, and those bumps are what let something that size make tight turns underwater. #whalefacts

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 02/09/2026

The sun is typed out of characters. @ in the hot middle, # around that, * at the edge — the way ASCII art has always done shading. It gets baked to a sprite once, so a sun costs about what a circle costs. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

A small white whale climbs out of a calm sea into an orange sunset sky, trailing fading copies of itself. A large glowing sun sits to the right, clouds and three birds above, and kelp and seafloor below the waterline.

A close crop of that sun, showing it is drawn entirely from repeated @ characters arranged in concentric rings, with sparser different characters toward the outer edge.

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Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop @whalehop.net · 01/09/2026

Menus use spatial navigation: press right and focus goes to whatever's physically to the right. Turned up a good bug — maxed upgrade cards were marked disabled, which pulled them out of the focus list, so the card you'd finished was the one you couldn't select or refund. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

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