One whole life,before history.

You’re born into a band of Ice Age foragers, 22,000 years ago, and live one life a year at a time: childhood, a name at 18, a hearth, children, old age. When you die, the run is over, and your soul starts again as someone else.

Nobody in the band is scenery. They pair up, have children, grieve, fall out and move away on their own schedules, and each of them has a mood and a feeling about you.

Each year opens on what the season brought: threats like wolves or a mudslide, bounties like the first greens. You decide who meets which. Send the wrong person at a wolf pack and you lose them. Send nobody and everyone goes hungry. Try a round.

Play data showed newcomers quitting inside the very first board. The birth year ran about eight rounds because the whole band had to play, Auto-play stayed grayed out all year, and the board could dead-end on “Fill 1 more column” with nobody left in your hand.

The dead end: an empty hand, and a button asking for one more column.

Birth year	Before	After
Who places the band	you, everyone, by hand	you for two rounds, then the band
Rounds in the birth year	about 8	2
Auto-play	grayed out all year	on the main button from round 1
A lane nobody can work	a dead end	settles itself

Two weeks, four changes

1. Oct 18

   Two thirds of first lives were ending before age 5. A learning life now shelters you: until you've lived to 5 once, the board never seats your own baby, and a death on a lane becomes a wound you pull through.

2. Oct 23

   Auto-play from round 2, a button that moves someone into the empty column, and an analytics event for every round, so the next look would have numbers.

3. Oct 31

   The numbers came back: 4 of 22 got through. Nobody tapped Auto-play before round 8, though it had been there since round 2.

4. Oct 31

   The redesign, out the same evening. A first life's birth year is two rounds, the first by hand and the second with Auto-play on the main button. Then the band finishes the season on its own.

A life sim needs a band that’s still there when you’re old. Measured against real forager life tables, mine wasn’t: run 20 bands for 60 years in the loop the game actually plays, and every one fell below ten people. Step through two days of fixes.

The store page says it’s all words, and it is. But every tile, front, person and choice also carries a drawing, so a crowded screen has a shape before you read it. Filter the set.

1. Drawnby hand or generated, to a written style guide
2. Tracedinto one path on a 256 square
3. Taken innamed and filed by an intake script
4. Builtinto components
5. Registeredin the icon map, by hand
6. Reviewedand redrawn if it reads as an abstract shape

Ice Age Life is mostly words, so the words get rules too. Flavor keeps its voice. A sentence that teaches you something drops the mood and says it plainly.

• “The thaw’s here at last. The hungry season is broken.”
• “The ice age still grips the world, and the wolf is a rival at the kill.”
• “Dahak is simply herself today: present, capable, unhurried.”
• “Then winter takes you too. It takes everyone.”

Each of the 366 days has its own pair of palettes, one for light mode and one for dark. Seasons, holidays and animals each get a day: Halloween is a pumpkin patch by day and All Hallows’ Eve by night.

It’s one Expo and React Native app in a TypeScript monorepo with shared types. The web version is the same game, exported and served at iceagelife.cc, and one capabilities file decides what each platform gets: on the web there are no in-game ads, purchases or accounts, just a banner under the game.

Fixes without a release, if you get the order right

Over-the-air updates are stamped with the app’s version at the moment they’re published, and only builds of that exact version take them. Try both orders.

About 13,000 tests run on the game. The rules I trust most came from green suites that shipped bugs: ten homeland cards passed every test and never fired once, because the tests built their runs by hand instead of the way the game does.

jest
  .spyOn(Math, "random")
  .mockReturnValue(0.99);

// never: Math.random = () => 0.99;

const rng = createRng(
  deriveSeed(runId + "dogs", turn, 0),
);

1. Systems, then measurement.Most of a life isn’t scripted; it comes from the band, the land and the season meeting. That only works if I can measure the systems, which is why the sims exist.
2. The first minute decides.The deepest simulation didn’t matter while new players quit in their first spring. Twenty-two devices were enough to find the wall.
3. Make the wrong thing loud.Tests that can fail, a deploy that checks the live site, a store page that has to be true.