V0.2.24

Four releases' worth of changes since V0.2.20 — mostly making the heap behave the way it looks, plus a placement bug that could quietly eat geometry.

The server and the client now agree on the heap's shape

The biggest change under V0.2.21. The heap used to be stored one way and drawn another: the client re-buckets everything into 20px horizontal bands, but the server tested placements against the raw polygon. On a realistic heap those two disagreed about 15.6% of the time — so a placement could be judged against a shape that wasn't the one on your screen.

The band envelope is now the authoritative representation on both sides. Same shape, same rules, no disagreement. It also made the server roughly twice as fast: 99th-percentile request time dropped from ~17ms to ~9.5ms.

Placements can no longer be lost when a section freezes

Once a heap grows past a threshold, the lower part freezes and becomes a static base. Two players placing at the exact moment that happened could both win — and one of their items would vanish into an orphaned base, permanently.

The freeze is now a single atomic operation with a compare-and-set guard, so the loser of that race is a complete no-op, and stragglers get folded into the next freeze instead of disappearing.

Daily Drop paid the wrong day after an ad repair

If your streak lapsed and you repaired it with an ad, the reward strip kept highlighting day 1 while the server granted the repaired day. A repaired day-2 claim paid 75 coins but showed as day 1. The strip now re-renders from the day actually granted.

Balance and UI

• Pickup jump bonuses toned down. The big jump items were swinging runs too hard: +90 and +70 both come down to +45. The speed item's jump penalty is softened from -45 to -35, so it's a trade rather than a punishment.
• Score screen buttons no longer collide on narrow screens.

Ads, and a single invisible character

Ads were not showing. At all. The cause was a trailing newline that had crept into the ad unit ID stored as a CI secret, which made every unit ID malformed — plus a cadence target that went stale and never redrew. Both fixed, and AdMob failures now get reported instead of failing silently.

The web build stays ad-free.

Under the hood

• A remote-config minimum version floor, so a build made unsafe by a breaking change can be stopped centrally rather than waiting for everyone to update on their own.
• A load-testing harness against a staging environment — which is what surfaced both the shape mismatch and the freeze race in the first place.
• An admin editor for authoring heap silhouettes band by band.

Heap has a website now

heapgame.com — play instantly in the browser, no install, no ads. Same shared heap as everywhere else.