# BaoLife MVP — TestFlight Release Notes

**Build:** 1.0 (2)
**Date:** 2026-04-13
**Audience:** Internal testers (Craig + up to 10 friends)

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## What this is

BaoLife is a real-time life simulation game. You create a character and live a full lifetime — childhood through old age — with relationships, careers, education, dating, and random life events, driven by a tick-based game loop. Think The Sims meets a text adventure, with a cozy visual style.

This is the first TestFlight build in the MVP push. The goal of this round is simple:

- Does the game not crash?
- Can you get through onboarding and actually play?
- Does the game progress in a way that feels alive?
- **Is any of this fun?**

The last question is the one only you can answer. Everything else is in place.

## Platform

- iOS 16.4+ (iPhone)
- iPad works but layouts are not iPad-optimized — treat it as phone-first
- Dark mode supported
- Android app exists (~85% parity) but is NOT in this round; we're iOS-first

## Known limitations

- **Android is not shipping in this round.** That's next.
- **No localization.** English only.
- **Event pool is catalog-limited.** Over a long life the eligible event pool may feel thin; we need to add content in future builds once we know what's working.
- **AI conversations** go through a third-party LLM provider and can occasionally be slow or unavailable. If a character feels stuck mid-chat, they probably are — it's not your fault.
- **Push notifications** require a physical device build with proper entitlements. If you're on TestFlight, they should work, but don't panic if they don't for the first session.

## How to install

1. You'll receive a TestFlight invite from Craig
2. Install the TestFlight app from the App Store if you don't already have it
3. Open the invite link, accept, install BaoLife

## What to try (in order)

A short 10-15 minute playthrough that exercises the critical paths:

1. **Onboarding.** Fresh install, create a character (name, age, sex). Watch the tutorial steps and tooltips. If any step hangs for more than ~10 seconds on a decent network, that's a bug.
2. **First hour of gameplay.** Hit start. The game clock should tick. You should see at least one life event within the first in-game day or two.
3. **Claim a life event.** When you see a claimable life event card on the home screen, tap it. The card should show a claim animation and disappear.
4. **Relationships tab.** Browse the swipe-style dating view. Swipe right on someone. Check whether a conversation opens or the other person shows up in relationships.
5. **Activities tab.** Try enrolling in a school class, job, or extracurricular. Confirm it shows up in "current activities."
6. **Time skip.** If you want to see the later-life stuff, use a time skip from the time controls. Watch the summary screen after.
7. **Background and reopen.** Put the app in the background for at least 30 seconds. Reopen it. Make sure you resume where you left off and no stats are nuked.
8. **Close and relaunch.** Force-close the app, relaunch it. Same thing — resume, no data loss.

## What to report

Please flag anything in these categories:

- **Crashes.** TestFlight will auto-collect these. You don't have to do anything, but if you remember what you were doing when it happened, that context is gold.
- **Stuck states.** If the game clock stops ticking, a screen goes blank and doesn't recover, or a modal can't be dismissed — that's a stuck state. Tell us what you were doing immediately before.
- **Visual glitches.** Overlapping UI, unreadable text, mis-scaled images. Screenshots help.
- **Weird game state.** Character with impossible stats, relationships that don't make sense, events that fire 50 times in a row. Screenshot + "what I was doing" beats raw bug reports.
- **"I got bored."** This is legitimate feedback. Tell us at what point and what would have kept you playing.

## How to report

Message Craig directly with:

1. One-line summary ("onboarding step 3 froze")
2. Steps to reproduce if you know them
3. Screenshot if visual
4. Approximate time (TestFlight logs are timestamped)

Don't filter — raw observations are more useful than polished bug reports.

## What we won't fix yet

- Pixel-perfect polish on every screen
- Localization
- Android parity
- Content additions (new events, new occupations)
- App Store public release

We're optimizing for: **it runs, it doesn't crash, you can play it.** Once that's true for a handful of humans, we iterate on content and polish.

## Thanks

You're helping a game that has been in development for a long time actually ship. That matters. Thank you.

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*For internal reference: this build came out of the Phase 5 pre-work of the MVP completion plan documented in [plans/2026-04-13-baolife-mvp-completion-design.md](./plans/2026-04-13-baolife-mvp-completion-design.md).*