Release notes

What changed, newest first. Gameplay changes are described in terms of what they do to a match, because that is the part that matters.

Fixes — 21 September 2026

• The tank was invisible — not a drawing bug: at 105 units per second against a gator's 220 it could never close the distance, and it spawned 1500 units away, so it lived its whole life just off the edge of the screen. It is faster now, arrives from closer, steers around buildings instead of stalling against them, and there is an arrow at the edge of the screen and a marker on the minimap pointing at it.
• You can back up with S or the down arrow, at a third of walking speed. The key was in the input schema and validated by the server from the beginning — no client had ever sent it and nothing read it.
• Getting permanently stuck is fixed, twice over. A gator whose own position became invalid — by spawning near the coast, or simply by growing, since its size is what is tested — had every subsequent move rejected in favour of that position, forever. And a human that ended up inside a building could never be pushed out of one: the clearance only moved things that were already close to a wall.
• Buildings no longer overlap. The spacing test only asked whether a corner of one was inside the other, which two buildings crossed in a plus shape pass without either having a corner inside — so that pair was built anyway. There are also fewer of them now, between where they were and where they had got to.
• Smashed buildings leave real rubble. A gator carves a channel the width of its own body and whatever falls outside it stays standing — still solid to humans and to gators too small to have done it. Clip a corner and most of the building remains; go through the middle and you leave a gap.
• The gator stands on the ground rather than being painted onto it, in the same projection the buildings use.
• The mouth opens upward. It was rising along the buildings' lean, which is parallel to the snout at some headings — so facing those ways it still looked like the head sliding apart sideways.
• A swimming gator looks submerged — the flanks go under and dim toward the water, the back ridge and eyes stay above it.

Tanks, rubble and a slower climb — 21 September 2026

The map fights back

• Get close to winning and a tank turns up. One per player who crosses the line, and it only ever shells players who are themselves close to winning — so it is a tax on leading, not a random hazard. Fall back out of contention and it loses interest in you.
• A tank outlives the player who summoned it. Killing the leader does not clear the map's response; the tank goes after whoever pulls ahead next. You can destroy one by biting it, which hurts, and it is worth 5 points.
• Big gators smash through buildings. Past a certain length a wall stops being an obstacle and starts being something you go through — at the cost of health and most of your speed for a moment. What is left is rubble: no collision, no cover, no line of sight.
• Maps have about two and a half times as many buildings. Cover matters far more than it used to, and now there is enough of it to matter.

Growing is slower and means more

• Growth is a tenth of what it was. A gator used to double its length in the first minute and the match was effectively decided; it is now something that happens across a whole match.
• You cannot double back on yourself. Turn rate falls as you grow, so the arc you carve stays the same relative to your own body and a long gator can never bring its head round onto its own flank. Growing costs manoeuvrability as well as speed.
• Spend two thirds of your boost and you are winded — slower until the meter is completely full again, not just until it creeps back over the line. The bar turns amber so you know why you are slow.

Attacking is directional

• You can only bite another gator from the front. Anything can hit you from any angle — your flank and tail are surface to be bitten, and a bullet does not care which way you are facing. Facing a threat is now a real defensive act, and being flanked is genuinely bad.

Smaller things

• No more rivers. They were the last water that could overlap anything — every body of water is now a single merged lake with one clean shoreline.
• Crystals expire, and fade and shrink as they go, so a long match no longer carpets the ground with them.
• Healing in water is visible — rings and motes rising off the gator, on whoever is doing it rather than only on your own.
• The "Lobby Closed" box no longer covers your win screen. The result stays up until you dismiss it; the lobby closes quietly behind it.

A gator-shaped gator — 21 September 2026

The player

• Growing makes you bigger, not just longer. The head and torso were drawn at a fixed size while the spine grew ten world units a segment, so every bite went into tail — a fed gator was 13% animal and 87% tail, which is a snake with a gator's head on it. The body is now a share of the real spine, so the whole thing — length, width, head — grows together.
• The mouth opens up and down, in the same oblique perspective the buildings use, instead of splitting sideways into two halves. The upper jaw does most of the work, as a real one does.
• Turning moves you forward. A gator no longer pivots on the spot: holding a turn carries you through the arc, which is what the turn radius was designed around in the first place.
• The tail moves the same in water as on land. Swimming had its own wider, slower, flatter stroke, so entering water changed the animal's shape as well as its medium. The legs still tuck — that part is real.
• The bite reaches less far. The mouth already sits well ahead of the head, and the old reach on top of that swallowed things a clear body-width in front of the jaws. Your flanks eat too, so a miss with the snout is often still a hit.

Everything else

• Humans now shout while they are running, not only at the moment they spot you, from a pool of lines written for the chase.
• The public queue rotates in Gold Rush, and the home card now says which mode is coming, what it takes to win and how long it runs — so joining is not agreeing to something you cannot see.

Cops and dealers — 21 September 2026

The humans have names and jobs

• Red humans are Addicts, green are Dealers, blue are Police, grey are Bystanders and the gold one is the Kingpin.
• Police hunt dealers. An officer that spots a dealer chases it down and arrests it, and the crystals it was carrying go with it — so a dealer with a cop closing on it is a timer, not a target you can come back to.
• You outrank the law. Both of them abandon the chase the moment they see a gator, so charging into a pursuit scatters it.
• The Kingpin now carries a shotgun and is faster than a boosting gator. You cannot run one down — but it cannot fire on the move either, and the moment it braces to shoot is the moment you close. Chase one that is shooting at you; give up on one that is quietly running.

Fixes that change how the game feels

• Your body is a real object now. The segment chain was built with an inverted sign, so every segment was dragged onto the head — a twelve-segment gator occupied about four world units instead of a hundred and ten. Tails could not be hit, could not hit anything, and the body you saw was mostly drawn rather than simulated. Bodies now trail properly, eat along their whole length, block bullets, and collide with other gators.
• Hitboxes grow with you. They are measured from the same number that draws the sprite, so a big gator no longer passes visibly through a human without touching it.
• Growing heals you. Getting longer raises your maximum health, and the new headroom is filled rather than left empty — eating used to quietly drop the fraction your health bar showed.
• Humans talk noticeably more often.

Longer matches

• Score targets were set at four to seven points, which a competent player reached before the map had finished being interesting. They are now five times that, and the time limit is 25 minutes rather than 15.
• Singleplayer is configurable — game mode, target and time limit, the same as a lobby.

Cookies

• The banner is now a real preference panel: analytics and advertising are separate choices, everything optional starts off, and Reject all sits beside Accept all with the same weight. Changing your mind later from the footer takes effect immediately.

Gold Rush — 21 September 2026

A new game mode

• Gold Rush. One gold human at a time, and the match is won by whoever eats three of them. Pick it in the Game Mode box when you create a private or public lobby; the target is adjustable from 1 to 15.
• The Kingpin notices you from a long way off and runs immediately. It is worth 12 points and a large slug of boost even outside Gold Rush. (Superseded above: it now carries a shotgun and outruns boost.)
• Eating Police is how you grow the boost meter you will need to catch one.
• An arrow at the edge of the screen and a marker on the minimap point at the gold human wherever it is — the map is too big to find it by chance.
• Like a blue, a gold cannot see or shoot through a building — cover works in both directions.

Boost

• Eating a blue human now makes your boost meter permanently longer, not just fuller. Previously a blue was worth nothing at all if your meter happened to be full, which made the one human that shoots back a bad trade. The gain is capped, so a gator that has farmed blues is still slow.
• The meter no longer slides off-centre when its length changes. It sat in a container that resized around it, so every change in capacity moved the whole thing sideways.

Maps

• Overlapping lakes now merge into one body of water with a single curved shoreline, instead of being drawn as two lakes on top of each other — each painting its own bank across the other's open water. Lakes were previously forbidden from touching for exactly that reason, which is why every map was a field of separate ponds; they are free to overlap now, and the interesting shapes come from where they do.
• Rivers that cross each other merge at the confluence rather than one drawing its bank over the other's channel.

Site

• A settings page. Turn sound off or set its volume, choose a default name and gator colour, hide the human speech bubbles, and control animation. Everything is stored in your own browser and applies immediately, including to a game already open in another tab.
• This page.

Health, PvP and hunting — earlier in 2026

• Gators bounce off each other unless one is a third bigger. Eating another player takes a real size advantage; anything less is a collision that costs both of you health. The badge above each gator tells you which of the three it would be before you commit.
• Health bars, visible on every gator, not just your own. Bigger gators have more health. Standing still in water regenerates it.
• Eating a player grows you by an eighth of their size.
• Blue humans — the ones that shoot back, need line of sight, and are worth the most boost.
• Humans no longer notice you through buildings, which makes cover worth using.
• Comedic dialogue. Humans shout things when they spot you. The lines live in one file and are meant to be edited; nothing about them touches the server. Turn them off in Settings if you would rather not.
• Rivers, more water on every map, and humans willing to wade into it.
• Win and defeat screens that wait for you to click rather than dumping you back at the menu, and a game that actually ends when everyone is dead.

The procedural gator — late 2025

• The player alligator is drawn and animated from scratch rather than from a sprite sheet, the way the humans already were. Walk, swim and eat are all generated, so a gator of any length moves correctly instead of being a fixed image stretched.
• Buildings occlude gators and humans that walk behind them.
• Snapshot playback interpolation: the world no longer shimmers when you move fast. Positions are blended between two real server states rather than eased towards the newest one.

Lobbies, maps and win conditions — November 2025

• Private lobbies with a share code, public lobbies with a browser, a matchmaking queue, and singleplayer.
• All 50 states, with Florida as both Everglades Brawl and a Florida default — 51 maps, each with its own outline, water and buildings.
• Score Race and Last Man Standing, with configurable targets and time limits.

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