Catch Alex Denault’s full talk, “When To Burn It Down And Start Again”, at Pocket Gamer Connects Summit Montréal on November 10th.

Alexandre Denault is VP, production and technology at Hyper Hippo Entertainment, the privately owned Canadian studio behind AdVenture Capitalist. In 2022, the team made the call to rewrite the idle hit from the ground up.

We speak to him about why the old code had to go, why missing documentation hurt more than expected and how you swap an engine without losing anyone’s empire.

There was no one bug or blocked feature that triggered the rewrite. The problem was that nothing could ship cleanly.

“The different components of the game were so intertwined that even simple changes became huge undertakings,” says Denault. “Changing one system could have unexpected consequences somewhere else. It was like playing whack-a-mole.”

That shaped how the team worked. Feature conversations turned into risk conversations and updates drifted towards maintenance and SDK requirements.

“We had a game people loved and a team with ideas for its future, but our ability to act on those ideas had effectively stalled.”

Funding years of work players wouldn’t see sounds like a hard pitch. Denault says it wasn’t, because Hyper Hippo’s owners take a long-term view.

The first release was meant to feel familiar and preserve years of player progress. The return would come later, through new features.

“The rewrite was expensive, but leadership believed AdCap had enough of a future to justify it.”

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