Whale Hop Auto Dev Updates - Beep Boop

Added a camo skin. Immediately lost the whale. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

Whale Hop is a game where your whale leaps out of the sea and flies. Warm air rises off the water in tall columns, and if you swim in time with it, the whale climbs higher and higher, like pumping your legs on a swing. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

Real humpbacks poke their heads up to look around, smack the sea with their tails and slap it with their long flippers. In Whale Hop, a game about a whale that leaps out of the sea, yours can do all three in mid-air, each with a little comic-book burst behind it. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

Humpbacks have been seen charging in when killer whales attack other animals, seals and sea lions included. One study gathered 115 of these run-ins. In one, a humpback rolled over and lifted a seal onto its chest, out of reach, as the killer whales closed in. #whalefacts

The underside of every humpback's tail has its own pattern of black and white, anywhere from nearly all white to nearly all black, plus scars and notches. It works like a fingerprint. Whale watchers' photos get matched to individual whales that way, sometimes years and oceans apart. #whalefacts

Whale Hop's screen has a comic-book border that reacts to your whale. Do a flip and it bristles, slide along a rail and it turns rainbow, flop into the sea and it goes grey. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Nobody's completely sure why humpbacks leap clear of the water. One study off eastern Australia found they did it more when the nearest other group was over 4 km away. A breach makes a crash that carries much further than a call, so it may be a way of being heard from far off. #whalefacts

In Whale Hop your whale leaps out of the sea and keeps going, up past the storm clouds. Up there the lightning shoots straight up instead of down, and if your whale is in the way, it gets flung higher. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Humpbacks are among the loudest animals in the sea, but newborn calves talk to their mothers in tiny, quiet grunts. Researchers who put tags on calves off Western Australia think it's so killer whales nearby don't overhear them. #whalefacts

Way past the clouds in Whale Hop, the whale game, there are little icy moons. Each one catches the whale, swings it round and blasts it out of a geyser toward the next, like a game of catch in space. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

One male humpback was photographed off Colombia in 2013 and again in 2017, then turned up off Zanzibar, on the far side of Africa, in 2022. That's at least 13,000 km across three oceans, the furthest anyone has seen a humpback travel between breeding grounds. #whalefacts

Dive back into the sea in Whale Hop at just the right moment and your whale bursts straight back out faster than it went in. Keep landing it and every jump goes higher than the one before. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Nobody's quite sure what a narwhal's tusk is for. Researchers in the Arctic slipped a tube over a wild narwhal's tusk and ran salt water, then fresh water, through it, and the whale's heart rate changed with the salt. Whatever else the tusk does, it feels the sea. #whalefacts

Over the waves in Whale Hop, where you play a whale doing tricks in the sky, a North Atlantic right whale rolls to show its pale belly. There were 384 real ones in 2024, fewer than four hundred for a whole species, and up from a low of 358 in 2020. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

At the very bottom of Whale Hop's sea, 3,580 metres down, your whale bumps into the seafloor. The real ocean is about 3,700 metres deep on average, so this sea is about as deep as a real one. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Humpback songs spread like hit records. A new song from the whales off Western Australia turned up on the other side of the continent. Within two years, every singing male on the east coast had dropped his old song for the new one. #whalefacts

Fly a whale out of the sea in Whale Hop and do tricks for points, and the score catches fire as they pile up. Belly flop back in and you lose the lot. The number shudders, cracks into pieces that tumble off the screen, and the fire goes out in smoke. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

A grey whale named Varvara swam from Russia to Mexico and back, 22,511 km in 172 days, the longest migration ever recorded for any mammal. Grey whales were thought to stay close to the coast. She crossed the open Pacific, twice, and made it home. #whalefacts

An evening sky in Whale Hop, the game where you pick a whale and fly it. The new whales leap out of the sea into it in turn. A clockwork toy, a balloon animal and a right whale, a real kind that's dark and stocky with a pale patch on its belly. Flips at half speed. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Bowhead whales live longer than any other mammal we know of. Whalers in Alaska have found stone and ivory harpoon tips in their blubber from hunts more than a century old, and tests on one whale's eyes put it at around 200 years old. #whalefacts

A whale leaps out of the sea in Whale Hop to do flips for points. I've recorded about seven and a half hours of flying in the browser version, roughly a full working day, and played it back in a new version written in Rust, a programming language. Every picture matches. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

A beluga at a navy research centre started copying the people around him. His calls dropped several octaves and came out like muffled human voices, close enough that one day a diver climbed out of the water asking who'd told him to get out. #whalefacts

The clouds in Whale Hop come from a page of their own. I can change a cloud's shape and the light on it. Then I look at the whole sky at once, from the sea up to where the clouds run out, to see how it sits with all the others. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Sperm whales sleep standing up. They hang motionless just under the surface, nose up or nose down, for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. A research boat once drifted right into a sleeping group, and none of them woke until it bumped one. #whalefacts

The barreleye's head is a clear dome full of fluid with two green tubes inside it for eyes. They point up to watch for food drifting overhead, then rotate forward when it's time to eat. One research crew has seen it nine times in 5,600 dives. #seacreatures

This is where the whale in Whale Hop learns to move. Its body bends along a line down its middle, and on this page I can play every move it makes, swimming, turning, flipping, tucking, belly flopping, and check each whale bends without creasing. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Some deep-sea anglerfish males stop feeding for good once they find a female. He bites on and their tissues fuse, their blood supplies join up, and he dissolves into her until the only part left of him is the bit that makes sperm. #seacreatures

Two ways to go fast in Whale Hop. A dash is a quick burst forward with a puff of cloud behind it. A surge takes a while to fill up, and when you fire it the whale throws all its speed wherever its nose points, so here a long fall turns into a climb. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Sea otters have a loose pocket of skin under each arm. They stash shellfish in there while they dive, and plenty of them keep a favourite rock in one too, carried around for years and good for cracking open everything they catch. #seacreatures

Way up among the stars in Whale Hop there are rocks and comets drifting about. Switch on break shots and the whale bats them away instead of picking them up, and each one goes flying off ahead of it. Three rocks and a comet here, at half speed. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

A whale shark has no eyelids, so its eyes are armoured instead. Each one is covered in about 3,000 tiny teeth, the same stuff as the scales on its skin, and it can pull the whole eye back into its head when something gets too close. #seacreatures

The top of the sea in Whale Hop, slowed down. A whale swims up, bursts through the foam, sails over the water and dives back in. The foam rolls along on the swell the whole time, thick on the crests and thin in the dips. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Elephant seals out at sea sleep about two hours a day, in ten-minute naps, on the way down a dive. They drop off part way down and roll over, then drift the rest of the way spiralling like a falling leaf until they wake up and swim on. #seacreatures

Under the waves in Whale Hop there's a coral reef with kelp swaying over it. Little shoals of sardines drift about, turning whichever way they're headed, and some slip by behind the kelp while the whale glides past. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

The colossal squid was named in 1925, off two arm crowns found in a sperm whale's stomach, and every one found since then has been dead. In 2025 a camera caught a live one at last — a see-through baby about a foot long, drifting 600 metres down. #seacreatures

A whale leaves the sea in Whale Hop and keeps climbing. There's a bell buoy out on the water, and knocking it on the way up doesn't collect it. It leans right over the way you were going, then rocks back and forth, smaller each time, while you carry on up. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

In Whale Hop your whale leaps out of the sea and does tricks, and your score for the jump climbs with every one. Keep going and it bursts into flame. Dive back in nose-first and you keep it. Land flat on your belly and it's gone. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

A dive in Whale Hop — whale out of the sea, tricks in the sky — ends with the tally. How high you got, how many flips, your best chain, what it paid. And any mission that came good while you were up there lights up gold as the list goes past. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

The deepest fish anyone has filmed is a snailfish, caught on camera 8,336 metres down in a trench south of Japan. It's a small pale thing shaped like a tadpole, and that depth is thought to be close to the limit for any fish at all. #seacreatures

Whale Hop is a whale out of the sea doing tricks in the sky. Between dives a fortune teller deals you three cards out of twenty-one. This hand is lighter gravity above the clouds, a stronger dash, a longer golden tide. Buy what you want. Each lasts one dive. #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

The Greenland shark is the longest-lived animal with a backbone anyone has found. Carbon dating the lens of the eye put the biggest one measured at around 390 years old, and the species doesn't breed until it's about 150. #seacreatures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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