A Collection That Needs Looking After

Entry 004 ended with a game that could breed, hatch and run out of room. Since then most of the work has gone into the part of keeping geckos that happens between the exciting days.

There is a shop now, paid for in Coins. It sells room first: an enclosure rack for five more living spaces, and an incubator tray for two more incubation slots. It also sells genetic testing, which finds what a gecko carries out of sight, and a Growth Formula that brings a young gecko on sooner.

Then came daily care. Once a day you feed the collection, clean the enclosures with fresh substrate, and give fresh water and a misting. The supplies come from the shop, and the diet says how long it will last for the size of your collection. Now and then a gecko sheds and needs a little help. Care earns reputation, and reputation is what raises your level.

Time needed the most thought. Every age, pairing, season, egg and rest now runs on one biological clock. You can lock a single gecko and it stops exactly where it is. If you do not open the game for three days, the whole collection pauses at the moment the third day ended, and stays paused on every device until you press Resume Collection. Nothing should suffer because you had a busy week.

“Nothing should suffer because you had a busy week.”

Females have careers of their own now. Each has an outlook for the seasons ahead and a natural retirement at the end of them. She rests after a season, and Calcium and D3 brings her rest to an end sooner.

The numbers behind all of this, from prices to rewards to how long things take, are first guesses. They now live in settings we can change without a release, which is an honest admission that we expect to be wrong about several of them. The small group playing now will show us which.

Written at the time. The geckos here are drawn by today’s renderer.