“It was like playing whack-a-mole”: Hyper Hippo’s Alexandre Denault on burning down AdVenture Capitalist

• A tangled codebase, not a single bug, forced the 2022 rewrite.
• Missing documentation and seven-year-old bugs were the biggest surprises.
• Every player’s progress survived and new features finally shipped.

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.

No single breaking point

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.”

An easier sell than expected

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.”

The code tells you what, not why

The biggest misjudgement was documentation. The team assumed that with source code and a working build, reverse engineering would be straightforward.

“Source code tells you what a system does without necessarily explaining why,” says Denault. Years of fixes and exceptions had piled up and some of the people who understood them had left. Rebuilding the design documents took design, development and QA working together.

Then there were the bugs players had come to depend on.

“When a bug exists for seven years, it becomes the expected behaviour. Correcting something that was technically wrong could feel to them like we had broken the game.”

Nobody loses their empire

Preserving player progress across several generations of save formats was the hardest part of the project.

For long-lapsed players, the team often had no save files to test with, so QA dug through archives to recreate them. The stakes were high: a failed migration leaves the game permanently hung.

Denault says the effort pays off. “We often see Reddit posts from players returning after five or six years and finding their progress still there. That matters a lot to us.”

Would he do it again?

“Absolutely.” The team estimated an incremental rewrite would take twice as long, and with a declining player base, it needed decisive action.

Hyper Hippo has kept shipping 9.x updates since, with version 9.26.1 arriving in August 2026. In the last year, the team has revamped progression while adding minigames and themed events.

“None of this would have been possible before,” he says.

His one regret is resourcing. He would have put more people on the project to give the team breathing room and more time to test.

The credit, he says, belongs to them. “They navigated enormous uncertainty and worked through a difficult rollout while continuing to listen to players. AdCap has a future we’re excited about because of their work.”

Hear the full story at PG Connects Summit Montréal

Denault presents “When To Burn It Down And Start Again: The Story Of AdVenture Capitalist 9.0” at PG Connects Summit Montréal, part of MIGS, on November 10th, hosted at the Grand Quay of the Port of Montreal.

One ticket gets you into both PG Connects Summit and MIGS. Register now.