The critter game started simple. Walk in grass, something jumps out, you punch it and throw a net. It worked, but it had the depth of a puddle, and honestly the fights made no sense. You were the one throwing hands while a team of caught critters watched from your pocket.
So the battle engine got rebuilt. Your critters fight for you now. Your lead steps up on every encounter, faster sides strike first, fainted teammates get replaced on the spot, and swapping costs you a turn like it should. Bare knuckles are still in there, but only as the desperate fallback they were always meant to be.
Then came growth. Every critter levels from fights, and the curve is banded on purpose: quick gains early, a slow crawl later, no cap anywhere. A level 150 critter barely edges out a level 99 one. I have strong feelings about games where a big number deletes the other team in one hit, so the math here refuses to let that happen.
Evolution is the part I like most. Each individual rolls its own two evolution levels the moment you catch it, somewhere at the end of infancy and somewhere in middle age. Your rambit and mine will not grow up on the same day. When one evolves it gets a new name, a deeper palette, and the sprite itself changes: horns first, then a crown and claws. All three hundred species do this procedurally. Nobody hand-drew anything.
There are gym leaders now too. Eight of them, from the linter up to the architect, each with three critters and a badge. No nets allowed, no waiting them out, and running away forfeits. Badges unlock hotter regions where the wild critters run above your best, which closes the loop: explore to train, train to challenge, challenge to unlock more to explore. The world remembers where you have been, and there is a map to prove it.
Under all of that sits a boring fix that mattered more than any feature: every game canvas now renders at the display's real pixel density. Everything used to be drawn once and stretched, which on a retina screen means soft edges everywhere. Sharp pixels, colored tetromino tiles with beveled edges, a dino with an actual eye, cacti with arms, grass that sways. Small things. They add up.
All of it lives behind the tilde key, same as before. The engine is pure functions with a hundred and thirty tests on it, which is a silly number for a terminal minigame and exactly the number it deserved.