Fixed the game feel: pet was levitating, blurry, and out of place

Deep dive into “why does this feel off” today, with actual profiling instead of guessing.

Performance: the Shop tab took 4.9s to open even with everything supposedly cached. Turned out the real cost wasn’t network or sprite loading — it was rebuilding 10 category filter chips by clearing and re-adding them one by one to a bound ObservableCollection, each Add triggering a full CollectionView layout pass. Batching that into a single collection assignment plus caching the catalog for the session dropped it to 11ms. Also found the room diorama’s frame times were fine on average (8ms of a 40ms budget) but spiked to 28ms — turned out to be GC pressure from allocating a new SKPaint + blur filter per shadow, per frame, 25 times a second. Reusing them cut the worst frame to ~12ms.

Visual bug: the pet sprite looked blurry, floated above the floor, and had a system emoji stuck to it that never matched the pixel-art style. Root cause: the pet wasn’t actually part of the room’s canvas — it was a separate XAML overlaid on top, scaled with bilinear filtering (blurry) while the furniture underneath uses nearest-neighbor (crisp pixels), and centered in its box instead of anchored to the floor tile where its shadow already was. Moved the pet into the same Skia canvas as the furniture, anchored to its shadow, and dropped the emoji. Now it reads as actually standing in the room instead of floating over a photo of one.

Also fixed a 10-day false “server is down” alert (uptime monitor was sending HEAD requests, endpoint only accepted GET → automatic 405 → reported as downtime the whole time the server was fine) and wired Sentry into the Android client so crashes on real phones stop being invisible.

Also shipped a live demo page so people can try the core mechanic without installing anything — type what you actually did today, and the real Gemini-powered judge rates its difficulty and shows what your pet would have earned: petproductivity.onrender.com/demo.html