A small alien, a broken ship, and a reason to care
DESIGN DIARY · Work completed October 22–23, 2026 A virtual pet gives you someone to care about. A survival game gives you difficult choices. Tiny Critter: Stranded brings the two together around a small alien whose damaged spacecraft is both home and the route back to safety. The emotional center is deliberately simple: feed, play, clean and rest. Around that familiar routine, expeditions bring food and salvage, the weather forecast helps with preparation, and wildlife creates bounded trouble. Surplus alloy can become permanent ship repairs. Spending on survival today competes with making progress toward departure tomorrow. The design choice that matters most is permanence. Installed repairs stay installed; a setback is not meant to erase days of escape progress. Repair work is staged, so players can contribute affordable amounts rather than hoard the full requirement at once. The return-home ending gives these small decisions a destination. The playable campaign arrived in v3.0, followed by a feedback pass in v3.1 and a narrowly scoped visual patch in v3.2. It runs as a standalone, offline-first Scriptable app. EVIDENCE, NOT A PROMISE Forty seeded, twice-daily simulated campaigns completed in 4–9 days, with a median of 6.5 days. That is encouraging evidence for a roughly one-week design target, not a guarantee about every play style or a substitute for a human playthrough. The owner has reported successful device checks of the everyday trip and save flows; a complete human survival-to-homecoming campaign remains a separate milestone. Next we want evidence from that longer arc: do gathering, recovery and repair choices stay interesting all the way home?
Next: Confirm the sprite correction on iPhone and continue a full survival-to-homecoming playthrough.