A focus app that keeps a record, not a score

Mythkeep is a creature-raising game wearing a focus app's clothes. Finish a session and a creature eats. Leave halfway and the session leaves a mark on its record. Nothing you raise ever dies, nothing you earn is taken back. The app keeps a record; it does not keep score.

Phases, in order

The project was built in numbered phases, and the commit log reads like a table of contents:

• Phase 0 — skeleton, design system, docs.
• Phase 1 — the creature state machine, the database layer, the species table.
• Phase 2 — a working timer, breaks, and recovering a session after the app dies.
• Phase 3 — focus integrity: breach marks, a setting for how strict to be, and screen-lock detection (locking the phone is not leaving).
• Phase 4 — ritual charge becomes an egg.

The domain layer imports nothing — no React, no React Native, no database — so its 610 tests run in plain Node at 98% coverage. The emulator still found bugs the tests could not, twice, and both rounds are in the log.

Decision 21: the whole shell goes 8-bit

Midway, the visual direction changed: the entire shell became 8-bit. That decision cost a pixel generator and an atlas pipeline — and then paid for itself. All 48 species were drawn, then hatchlings, juveniles and the remaining stages: four life stages for all forty-eight. Most of those frames are derived. Breathing is computed, not drawn. Cerberus has three heads, which the derivation had to learn about.

Making it feel like something

The last days were about texture: a companion you choose, a monument that sits instead of floating, twelve marks in the companion's hand, two sentences and five names for each species. Time started to pass, and every cost got a way back. A year of days became a hexagon map, and both the record and an ascended creature's epitaph can leave the phone as an image.

The cleanup a store asks for

Before monetization went in, one finding stood out: a focus app was asking for the microphone. It stopped. Permissions went from fourteen to seven. Then Decision 22 — ads and a Remove Ads purchase — under a studio name, with three release profiles.