Critter Keeper is a genre bender prototype roguelite bullet hell with ecosystem management elements.  Build your own ecosystem of crustaceans and arthropods while avoiding collisions, sawblades, and fireballs from vicious attack robots.  Dash your way about to collect as much treasure and biowaste as you can to level up and create new critters for your ecosystem.  Find some powerful relic combinations and experiment with your predator, prey, and food combinations to save the universe.

https://iepathos.itch.io/critterkeeper

We have lots of updates this time. We've been working on things across the board: new artwork,  more player abilities, better critter behavior, balance tweaks, and bugfixes.

Visual improvements

Relic and level-up cards have been given fancy new graphics, effects, and animations. We also hammered out several visual glitches.

Abilities

We added two new abilities this week, along with relic cards to unlock them: Decoy and Midwife.

Decoy

The decoy ability occasionally produces a holographic decoy when you dash. Decoys will stick around for a few seconds before fading away. If you're being chased by a critter or nemesis bot, a decoy will distract it and allow you to escape!

Midwife

In the past, if you ran over eggs you'd crush them and kill whatever was inside. Now, there is a small chance that the critter will instantly hatch. The Midwife ability increases your chance of hatching critters when you crush their eggs.

Be careful: newly hatched critters can still hurt you!

Smarter critters

Critters are now aware of when something is hunting them. Woodlice and worms run away from their attackers, while spiders and centipedes fight back. Be careful mixing spiders and centipedes; your boss fights could become much tougher.

More Rewards

You now gain some Guided Evolution Points based on time survived instead of only when you win. Guided Evolution Points allow you to engineer your critters' stats for future runs. This way, even if you lose, you still get something out of it.