Hoplet, live.
The studio has a home on the internet. Why it took two days, what's on it, and what comes next.
Note, August 2026. This letter is left as it was written in April. Two things in it have since changed: the product is now called Renpai Studio, not Aleena, and the beta date named at the bottom was dropped rather than met. There is no date now, and there will not be one until there is a finished game made with the tool. The rest of the letter stands.
The studio has a home on the internet now. You’re reading it.
hoplet.app went live yesterday, going from “blank Cloudflare zone” to a fully ported
editorial landing inside a single 48-hour push.
A few notes on what shipped, since the cost of not writing them down is forgetting them.
The boring stuff that mattered
The site is Astro 5, with React 19 for the few interactive bits — the newsletter
form, an age gate (on the imprint side). It builds to static HTML; everything that can
be served from the edge is. That’s the whole hosting bill: zero, on Cloudflare’s free
tier, with auto-deploys whenever I push to main.
The original plan was Railway. Railway is great for apps with a real backend; for a
content-heavy marketing site, it’s overpowered. So Cloudflare Workers Builds with a
small wrangler.jsonc declaring assets.directory = "./dist" does the job.
I’d been holding off on porting the static HTML mockup into proper Astro components, reasoning that the static page already worked. It does. But once the second page lands — this devlog, the Aleena product page — you want components, not 1,200-line single files. So we ported tonight.
The look
Warm parchment canvas, never pure white. Fraunces does the display work — a
variable serif with a SOFT axis you can tune from cold to friendly, set somewhere
in the middle for the brand. Manrope carries the body and UI. JetBrains Mono
labels the technical bits. There is exactly one hot voltage — Deep Orange — and it’s
reserved for primary CTAs.
The Hoplet mascot is a wizard frog with a constellation hat. It’s bobbing somewhere above this paragraph, depending on which page you came in from. The hat band is the one place the brand allows itself to be loud.
What this devlog will be
Short. When something ships, when something breaks and gets fixed, when a decision gets made that I want to remember in three months. A letter, not an essay. One every week or two. Mostly about the production tool we’re building, which is the whole reason the studio exists in the first place.
If you want them as they appear, the RSS feed is the whole mechanism. No upsells, no funnel, and no list holding your address.
What’s next
Pre-beta polish, a real product page, and probably two or three more of these letters about the parts of the build that surprised us.
— the studio