Devlog

v20.123 — Room to breathe

Your Hollow was being laid out badly. The spots buildings are seeded on were chosen by angle alone and never checked against the ground each building actually occupies — so new bases opened with the Well standing inside the Training Yard, or the Nursery through the Keep. Measured across three hundred different worlds, every single one had at least one pair of buildings sitting inside each other.

Buildings now claim their ground properly and the village arranges itself around the Keep with daylight between every wall. The Nursery also stopped reserving a phantom half-plot it never used — it now takes exactly the space its art fills, which frees a tile beside it for stone or a neighbour. Your trees, bushes and rocks have not moved an inch: whatever timber you fenced in is still fenced in.

Building names also stopped landing on the buildings. The name plates already knew how to step around each other; now they take the walls into account too. Where there is room a name shifts aside to stay clear; where a village is packed too tightly for that, the name is left off rather than printed across a neighbour’s roof — so a building is sometimes left unnamed, instead of wearing a name that belongs to the building next door.

v20.122 — A fairer climb

The Trials and the Endless Mist got a quiet but deep fix: a foe's type is now flavour, not difficulty. Shades and stalkers used to fight soft for their stat line, so a harder-numbered trial could play easier than the one before it — the ladder now climbs the way it reads. Measured, not guessed: every step is at least as hard as the last.

Duels also sharpen and shed pixels mid-fight now — if your phone starts dropping frames inside a battle, the arena lowers its resolution on the spot and raises it back when the pressure lifts. And two economy dials got guardrails: the Watchtower's idle coin trickle caps per day, and collect-tapping a near-empty store no longer showers gems and pass tiers.

v20.121 — Your Hollow, your rules

Three protections every keeper deserves. A language screen now stands at every door a name can walk through — foul handles can't be saved, and foul names from other keepers never render in your guestbook, your visitors, or your battles. Tap any visitor or guestbook signature to block that keeper — blocked keepers can't visit, sign, or send you gifts, and you can unblock any time in Settings.

And your base's front door got a rule of its own: flip 🚪 Friends only in Settings and only the keepers on your buddy list may tour your Hollow. Everyone else finds the gate closed.

v20.120 — One thumb in the mist, and smoother everywhere

The mist is now a one-thumb place. You walk; your Mythling does the fighting — it picks the nearest wildling in reach and fires on its own rhythm, no aim stick, no second thumb. And when a beast catches you, the old Fight-or-Flee card is gone: the duel just begins, your Mythling already fighting for you. Tap ✋ Manual any time to take the reins yourself; Overwhelm and Flee live right there in the fight.

And for every phone that stuttered: the game now trades pixels for smoothness on its own. When frames run long, the world quietly renders lighter and climbs back to full sharpness the moment your phone can carry it. On our slowest test device that tripled the frame rate.

v20.119 — Every ending reads the same, and taps land true

The result screens finished growing up: chest finds are named on the result wherever they drop — the Endless Mist included — rarity colours follow one rule everywhere, and the rival-inspection button stands in its own row instead of hiding inside a sentence. Defeat got quieter too: your options are the big green ones, and walking away is a small red whisper, not a third shout.

Under the hood, a five-round hunt fixed the top corner buttons: their invisible tap-zones had drifted and overlapped, so a thumb aiming at 👤 could open ☰ — or ✕ could swallow a Menu tap on any sub-screen. Every button now owns every pixel of its own face, proven by a probe that taps each edge for real.

v20.118 — A tidier front door, and a handbook that answers back

The Keeper Profile got the hub treatment: your identity card up top and five clean rows — Power, Appearance, Handle, Recovery Code, Settings — everything on one phone screen, with the full stat spread tucked behind the ⓘ. The Power page now points at the real fix when Mythlings stand idle: a count and a green Put Them to Work button straight into Jobs. And Settings finally has a 📳 buzz toggle — every vibration in the game now respects it.

Tobin's Handbook learned to search: type a word and it digs through every question and answer, landing you on the exact entry, already open. Topic rows now say what they cover instead of counting their answers. Lost players find their answer in seconds.

v20.117 — A grudge with a name, and quests for the dynasty

Lose a wild fight now and the beast that beat you escapes — and remembers. It returns to the mists as your named nemesis, a level or two above its kin, wearing a 💀 name tag you can see from across the field. Beat it and a bounty in gems lands in your mailbox; lose again and it grows stronger. Every defeat becomes the opening of a story instead of a dead end.

The Breeding Hall gets a weekly challenge board: three goals drawn fresh each Monday — hatch a Rare, breed a speedster, raise a particular calling. Each bred hatch is judged against the board, each cleared goal pays out, and sweeping all three earns a Rare-or-better egg. Breeding with a purpose, not just a hunch.

v20.116 — The morning rounds, and a book of guests

The base keeps a little list now. A 🔔 chip counts everything standing ready to collect — gem mine, habitat tips, forage hauls, wood piles — and tapping it points your feet at the nearest one. Sweep the whole list and the day pays a ROUNDS DONE bonus, once. No shortcuts, no auto-collect: the game just notices you did your rounds.

And the tour finally leaves a trace: when a visiting keeper heads back into the mists, they sign your guestbook with what they admired — the Statue, a favorite habitat, your streets. The Keep displays the latest pages, and the first signature each day gets a little toast. Vanity, formalized.

v20.115 — The kind streak, the newcomer's crown

Two mercies for the daily fire. The first missed day each week now costs nothing — the Guide keeps your fire lit and the streak carries on as if you came. A second miss still eases one day off (never to zero, as ever), and a week away is honestly a week away.

And a Keeper's first-ever week walks the streak calendar wearing a crown: the day-7 chest guarantees an Epic-or-better egg, and says so up front, so the first week has a finish line worth walking toward.

v20.114 — A lawn that lives, a HUD that counts

The grass grew up: the meadow tile now carries real little flowers — petals round a warm centre in three soft colours — plus clover patches and a few more pebbles, so a brand-new Hollow reads like a place from its first minute. By day, butterflies drift over the claimed ground, handing the air to the fireflies at dusk.

And the HUD learned to count: coins, wood, and gems now ease to their new value with a little pulse instead of snapping, so every earn and spend is felt at the top of the screen. All of it respects reduced-motion settings, and none of it costs a frame — the flowers are baked into the ground tile once.

v20.113 — The hatch earns its crown, the duel earns its weight

Two pure feel upgrades. The hatch reveal now scales with the occasion — a Common arrives at its familiar size, a Mythic fills the ring — and on the crown tiers the reveal ring finally wears the rarity's own color: gold for Legendary, a slowly turning rainbow for Mythic, with the archetype keeping a thin rim inside.

In the duel, the struck body reacts: a grounded squash and a white-hot pop the instant a blow lands, on both sides of the lanes. And a beaten fighter now tips over and fades through the knockout hold instead of standing at attention through its own defeat. The deterministic combat core is untouched — every bit of this lives in the render layer, and the byte-lock proves it.

v20.103–.110 — A solid world and one navigation

A week of phone-in-hand feedback, shipped fix by fix. Buildings became solid: your Keeper bumps into a Market now instead of wading through it, and anyone standing behind a tall building fades it translucent so nobody ever vanishes. Pressing into the seam between two buildings used to bounce the whole screen — the collision resolver now just stops you at the wall like a wall should.

Navigation was unified into one system: a Pokémon-GO-style centre button fans out the other screens, the corner menu holds the feature doors, a red ✕ always walks you home, and the game now boots straight onto your Base under a little hatching-egg intro instead of flashing the wrong screen. The top of the screen learned to speak with one voice — one pill at a time, no more toast-on-claim-on-label pileups — and taps out in the mist can no longer accidentally open buildings back home: the fence is the rule.

v20.99–.102 — The commissioned art arrives

The biggest visual change since the v19 art pass: hand-painted building art landed for the Keep, Market, Nursery, Watchtower, Cauldron, and more than a dozen others, followed by wild-lands props — trees, bushes, rocks, and dig-spots. The Nursery and habitats keep their living windows: real eggs, real timers, and real housed Mythlings drawn on top of the painted shells, so nothing on your screen is ever a fake picture of your progress.

Under the hood, the combat balance battery ran a full Monte-Carlo pass across bad, decent, and good players; one archetype pairing and one rarity rung sat outside their fairness bands, and a tuning patch brought all twenty-two checks green.

v20.45–.98 — The hardening month

Fifty versions of unglamorous, necessary work. The combat core went byte-locked — a checksum now guards the deterministic duel engine so no refactor can quietly change how fights play. The analytics pipeline, crash beacon, and tutorial funnel went live end to end, the stale-client self-heal learned to catch players stuck on old builds, and the Play Store groundwork shipped: manifest, signing, store listing art, and the policy pages.

v20.13–.44 — Racing, the Market, and a placeable world

Mythling Racing arrived — your creature against real keepers’ recorded ghost runs, with boost gates and a ladder board — followed by a full Global Market rework where keepers set their own prices. Building placement moved to a DragonVale-style grid: whole-cell footprints, lattice snap, stone tiles butting flush against walls. PvP inspection let you peek at any keeper’s champion, and the sheet system gained a proper back-stack — one ‹ steps back, one ✕ exits all.

v20.3–.11 — The notification quiet-down

The Hollow used to shout. This run taught it to speak once: gain pops that merge instead of stack, claim banners that queue politely, and quest rewards claimed right in their tab. The Brawl Pit got a defense retune after a proper investigation (the bug was in the storm ramp, not the math), racing pacing was normalized, and three breeding pens replaced the old single pen.

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.