Creature Keeper

Role

Sole developer - design, architecture, and implementation
Game designer - core loop, economy, and balance design

Key Contributions

Designed a three-pillar core loop (Habitats → Expeditions → Evolution) with meaningful tradeoffs, including an expedition injury system that forces strategic roster management
Engineered a tick-less game engine where all resource generation is calculated retroactively from elapsed time, enabling reliable offline progression capped at 8 hours
Implemented client-side time-cheat mitigations including a 100-snapshot save history, negative-delta clock detection, and automatic rollback on repeat offences
Architected across Clean Architecture layers (domain/data/presentation) with Bloc for predictable, testable state management
Designed ethical F2P monetization with rewarded ads and cosmetic/convenience gems - no pay-to-win

Overview

Creature Keeper is a relaxing idle game where players collect, nurture, and evolve adorable creatures across 5 elemental families. Build habitats, send creatures on expeditions, and grow your collection - even while away from the game.

Targeting a soft launch on iOS and Android via Flutter.

Core Loop

The game revolves around a three-pillar flywheel:

Habitats - place creatures in elemental habitats to passively generate Coins and Essence.
Expeditions - send creatures on timed missions (5 min → 8 hr) to discover new species, gather evolution materials, and earn rare loot.
Evolution - spend resources to level up and evolve creatures through three stages (Baby → Juvenile → Adult), unlocking stronger passive generation and expedition capabilities.

Better creatures produce more resources, which unlock harder expeditions, which yield rarer creatures, which fuel further evolution.

Technical Focus

Tick-less game engine: No real-time simulation loop. All resource generation is calculated retroactively when the app opens using elapsed = now - lastSaveTime. This makes the engine simple, testable, and perfectly accurate for offline play.

Offline-first architecture: Habitat income accumulates for up to 8 hours offline. Expeditions complete on schedule regardless of app state. A “Welcome Back” screen summarises offline earnings and completed expeditions on return.

Time-cheat mitigation: Without a server, full prevention is impossible. The approach: maintain a rolling 100-snapshot save history in Hive; detect clock rollback (negative delta > 1 minute); on first offence clamp elapsed to zero; on repeat offences roll back to the last valid save and purge future records.

Architecture: Clean Architecture across domain, data, and presentation layers. Bloc for state management throughout. Hive for fast local persistence with save format versioning from day one to support future migrations.

Content Scope (Soft Launch)