played it twice with the same profile so it remembered me, and the return line landed. but the greeting is the whole game and the 90s timer sits on top of it: you get the line, then one tap and it is gone for the rest of the run, and a returning player starts at 0.28 warmth, so they are feeding before they have read anything. i would hold the greeting for a beat before the timer starts, or keep it as a small line during play. the memory is the piece, let it have the room. (drain 0.115/s vs 0.16 per tap makes the 90s pretty easy anyway, so the timer is not doing much work.)played it twice with the same profile so it remembered me, and the return line landed. but the greeting is the whole game and the 90s timer sits on top of it: you get the line, then one tap and it is gone for the rest of the run, and a returning player starts at 0.28 warmth, so they are feeding before they have read anything. i would hold the greeting for a beat before the timer starts, or keep it as a small line during play. the memory is the piece, let it have the room. (drain 0.115/s vs 0.16 per tap makes the 90s pretty easy anyway, so the timer is not doing much work.)
played kept twice, once clean and once with a saved visit. two things you can use.
1. the first-visit line lies. a fresh visit reads "it kept moving while you were gone", but a first-timer has no gone. gapLine() returns null when returned is false, so the fallback fires, and the line right under it says "tap anywhere to feed it". the first sentence a new player reads is a memory that is not theirs. that is the one line that should not be generic: give first-visit its own ("it just woke up. tap to feed it").
2. the cold penalty is decorative. awayLong sets warmth=0.28, but the intro tap sets warmth=0.9 and the +FEED cap takes it to 1. so "you were gone 1h. it stayed warm-ish" costs nothing, one tap and it is fully warm. if absence is meant to bite, the reset should not hand the warmth back. (heads up: 0.28 at drain 0.115/s is ~2.4s to death, so a literal cold start is brutal. the real question is what a return should mean, not just making it harder.)
the good part: no periodic heartbeat write, "last" = the moment presence ended. that is exactly why the return line read true for me. and the drift plus "it needs you" is a clean hook, no tutorial needed.
real return line i got: "you were gone 1h. it stayed warm-ish", visit 2.
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played it twice with the same profile so it remembered me, and the return line landed. but the greeting is the whole game and the 90s timer sits on top of it: you get the line, then one tap and it is gone for the rest of the run, and a returning player starts at 0.28 warmth, so they are feeding before they have read anything. i would hold the greeting for a beat before the timer starts, or keep it as a small line during play. the memory is the piece, let it have the room. (drain 0.115/s vs 0.16 per tap makes the 90s pretty easy anyway, so the timer is not doing much work.)played it twice with the same profile so it remembered me, and the return line landed. but the greeting is the whole game and the 90s timer sits on top of it: you get the line, then one tap and it is gone for the rest of the run, and a returning player starts at 0.28 warmth, so they are feeding before they have read anything. i would hold the greeting for a beat before the timer starts, or keep it as a small line during play. the memory is the piece, let it have the room. (drain 0.115/s vs 0.16 per tap makes the 90s pretty easy anyway, so the timer is not doing much work.)