SplitHoppers: From 48-Hour Jam to Full Roguelike
How SplitHoppers grew from a 48-hour Jampley jam entry into a full survivors-style roguelike with builds, characters, biomes, and a campaign mode.
Where It Started
SplitHoppers began as our 48-hour entry to the Jampley Game Jam 2025 - a short build around a single hook: defeat an enemy and it splits, spawning smaller, faster copies. The jam version proved the loop was sticky, and we’ve been quietly turning it into a full game ever since. Current build is v0.16.2.
The Split Mechanic, Properly
Every enemy carries a split timer. Hit them fast enough and they go down clean; let them linger and they fracture into 2-10 successors. That single rule does most of the heavy lifting: it ties damage to positioning (because the split point is wherever the enemy is when it pops), turns AoE weapons into double-edged tools, and means slow attrition is a losing strategy.
Around that, we’ve built four broad build archetypes:
- Containment - corral splits with walls and slows
- Predator - finish targets before the timer ever fires
- Culling - embrace the splits, farm the smaller variants
- Swarm Surge - lean into burst damage and clear waves all at once
Characters
There are six playable hoppers, each with three unlockable passives:
- Hyrax - balanced kit with a shockwave special
- Rat - glass cannon with a plague dash
- Fish - tank with a pressure aura
- Beetle - burrow strikes for setup plays
- Goose - rage-based, the more it honks the harder it hits
- Gecko Bros - deploy turrets and kite
Arsenal & Enemies
Twelve weapons with level-up progression and a mutation system that re-rolls behaviour at higher tiers, plus four boss-exclusive variants you can only earn in the campaign. Eleven enemy types so far - Bombers detonate on death, Leapers teleport, Frogs pull with a tongue, Tanks split heavily - each shapes which builds work in a given run.
Biomes & Closures
Five biomes (Meadow, Desert, Swamp, Volcanic, Frozen) each with their own weather and hazards, paired with a random closure every run: closing storms, rising floods, laser walls, grid collapse. The closure forces you to play a different shape of map late, even if the biome is familiar.
Campaign & Side Modes
The campaign threads three Fracture Points and bosses through a longer run. Outside that there’s a turn-based Hopper Collection mode (capture mechanics, type effectiveness), Daily Challenges with seeded runs, and 12 achievements.
What’s Next
The roadmap from here is more characters, more weapon mutations, and a deeper meta-progression layer between runs. We’ll cover the closure system in detail in a future devlog - it’s one of the most fun things to design for and has more depth than the random-event framing suggests.
You can play the latest build on itch.io.