Devlog

v20.2 — The polish batch

The big v20 release earned itself a full audit, and v20.2 is us paying the bill: an eleven-item defect list worked through one by one, from misbehaving buttons to fractions that didn't render through the game's one true fraction path. A follow-up patch the same day fixed the Daily and Weekly quest tabs, which had stopped rendering after a dead call slipped through.

Not a glamorous entry, but this is most of what game development actually is — and shipping the fix the same day the audit found it is the standard we're trying to hold.

v20.1 — A calmer Grounds, a roofed Nursery

The world view shed its clutter of floating black status pills — the Grounds now read as a place, not a dashboard. The Nursery finally got its roof, plus proper world labels, so the heart of the game looks like the building it always was. A small release, but the base has never looked cleaner.

v20.0 — The one big release

Weeks of staged work landed as a single update. Stone Paths arrived — the first placeable decor, painted anywhere on your grounds. The old NPC villagers left the Hollow, and in their place came visitors: real players strolling your base. Your guide became a true Guide Mythling — a one-of-a-kind creature with its own archetype — and the Guard Post gained a posted Ranger who actually shoots the beasts camping your fence.

The same batch reworked the Forage Post into a pure egg-crew and rebuilt Keeper Power around the new world. It was the largest single update the Hollow has shipped.

v19.43–.46 — Life stages and the Brawl Pit

Nest-hatched Mythlings now grow up: newborn, baby, adolescent, adult, raised in a little straw-floored pen beside the Nursery — and only adults fight or work. Alongside it, arena fights moved into the Brawl Pit: a full-screen arena with a packed crowd of common Mythlings in the stands, corner flags, and keeper territories in the corners. Several patches of crowd-work and clarity fixes followed over the next day.

v19.33–.42 — The art pass and living genetics

Ten versions in a straight line, all in service of one idea: the creatures should look like the stars of the game. The Hollow got its warm new coat of paint, and then the Mythlings got living genetics — horns, long tails, coat palettes, arm and flight genes, feet that visibly stand and stride. Pure pairs breed true, so all of it is heritable: the breeding law arrived in the same run. The stretch closed with habitat lands and a soft glow on the Nursery.

v19.31–.32 — Performance and instant loot

A profiling pass found the fog being rebuilt every frame at triple retina resolution; fixing it made phone frames roughly three times faster, with a matching cleanup on the duel screen. Then the satchel died: everything you touch in the world is now instantly yours. The same batch added the Power Road, so Keeper Power finally pays, and spelled out the no-gold-from-fighting rule in-game instead of leaving it to be guessed.

v19.25–.28 — The tutorial rework

The opening hour was rebuilt around a simple rule: never tell, make them do. Every tutorial step advances on the real action and pays a real reward. The same run brought auto-merge at the fence — step past your fence with a healthy companion and you Soulwalk as one, automatically — plus a hotfix wave that made the world render unkillable and a resume system so a reload can never strand the tutorial.