This is more like a 9 hour game - I did the bulk of the work on an airplane flight across the country. So I apologize for the hasty crap art and the lack of game balance.

The JAR is all uploaded now, and the applet is working. If you get poor performance in the applet I suggest downloading the JAR, but gameplay should be analogous on both. The source is included in the JAR if you unzip it.
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You are a renegade angel who has decided that man should have the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge in order to evolve from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens. The path to the fruit is fraught with dangers, however, and the lowly Homo Erectus are not strong enough to make it there alone. You must selectively breed the Homo Erectus until they are strong enough to fight off the feral creatures blocking the way to the apple.

TO MOVE, LEFT CLICK ANYWHERE on screen. You will automatically path find. In addition, HOLD SPACE to lure Homo Erectus after you, RIGHT CLICK OR SHIFT-CLICK a Homo Erectus to tell it to go breed, and HOLD SHIFT OR S to bring up a stats display for each Homo Erectus.

The forbidden fruit is at the bottom right of the map. The monsters get stronger as you go, and you may also find different types of Homo Erectus along different side paths.

TIPS:
A good strategy really is to just select for fertility first, and then when you have very high fertility start selecting for attack and defense. The game is not terribly well balanced so you can pretty quickly get a small army that can win you the day. Also, I erred on the side of easy so it's very unlikely for a child to be worse than its parent in any way - if you keep breeding you're golden. I also implemented but later removed an inbreeding function (inbred creatures are much much worse) but I didn't have time to communicate this aspect at all so it's removed.

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WHAT THE STATS MEAN
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power - how much damage you do
defense - reduces the damage taken from enemies by this much
dodge - the percent chance to completely avoid an attack (max is 75%)
hitPoints - how much life you have
fertility - how many offspring you can have (maximum). When 2 creatures mate, the amount of offspring is (parentA.fertility + parentB.fertility) / 2.

So in combat damage done to a defender is:
attacker.power - defender.defense
but only if rand() > defender.dodge

------------>Known issues:
-Splash screen says go the bottom left. GO TO THE BOTTOM RIGHT ACTUALLY. Whoops.
-Game hangs momentarily at the start presumably due to some assets needing to load which I didn't bother to do beforehand.