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Art lands, bugs fall (and the game has a name)
Three days since the last one, and this stretch had a different flavour: less "build a new system," more "the art showed up, so hook it all in" — plus two bugs that turned out to be the a…
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Your real fish, your real quests, your real terrain
A shorter cycle this time, but a satisfying one — a batch of "oh, that's what was bugging me" fixes, plus the first pieces of a whole new decor theme. Standing back afterwards, I noticed…
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Sy's back room (and water you can read)
Last post ended with a promise: make the gear visibly pay off. This one delivers on that from a few directions at once — and the theme that emerged, once I stood back, was making systems…
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Cleaning up, in every sense
Last few updates were about how the tank looks. This one's about how it runs. I spent the whole session on the un-glamorous middle of the game — the upkeep, the gear, the sponsor jobs — w…
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A collection to complete (and friendlier hands)
Last post I said the atmosphere layer was finally where I wanted it, and that the next job was giving you more reasons to sit and look at the tank. This stretch is the first real swing at…
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The water got depth (and the dark got a glow)
Last time the sponsors grew faces and the tank learned mood lighting. This stretch went deeper — literally. Almost everything here is about water, light, and atmosphere: you can sculpt th…
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The sponsors got faces (and your phone number)
A big stretch this time, on three fronts at once: the sponsorship system grew a personality, the whole aquascaping menu got torn down and rebuilt, and the tank learned to do mood lighting…
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A reason to keep going (and a sunken city)
Last time I said I wanted progression to be discovery-led instead of a follower grind. This update is me actually building the spine — and it runs on sponsors.
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A front door, a soundtrack, and a first dive
For a long time this project booted straight into a tank. Useful while building it, but it never felt like starting a game. Now it has a front door.
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The tank learns to behave
Most of this devlog has been about making the tank look alive. This stretch was about making it act alive — and almost none of it screenshots, because it's all motion. You'll have to take…
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Making the stream talk back
For a long time my livestream chat was a yes-man. Every comment was some flavor of "nice tank!" It looked alive but it wasn't paying attention.
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A store you can walk through
Buying fish used to be a list on your phone. Tap a name, get a fish. Functional, forgettable, and — for a game that's supposed to be about looking at fish — a weird place to make you read…
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Making every fish an individual
The most recent stretch had one obsession: making every fish feel like a someone, not a copy. A few systems stack to get there.
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The big glow-up
Then came the session where everything leveled up at once. The flat gray surrounding the tank — which I'd stopped noticing — was quietly flattening the whole scene, so I added a soft, blu…
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From programmer art to real fish
This is the stretch where the game started to feel like itself. I began replacing the flat-shape fish with actual illustrated sprites.
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Redesigning the aquascape menu
The menu where you actually place plants and rocks started life as a plain list. Functional, but it covered the tank (see rule from devlog #2) and showed no art — just text.
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A camera and a gallery
If you can livestream, you should be able to take photos too. I added a capture mode where you pan and zoom to frame a shot, then snap it.
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Making the water look like water
For a while the water was a flat slab of navy blue. It did the job, but it was lifeless — and as I started polishing other things, that flat fill dragged everything down with it.
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Going live (and learning to get out of the way)
The first feature I fleshed out was a livestream. The idea: point a "camera" at your tank, go live, and watch viewers, likes, and followers tick up based on how good things look.
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Starting with a tank and a debug panel
Every game starts ugly, and mine started very ugly. The first playable version was a box of water, some flat-shape fish, and a debug panel covered in buttons I could mash to fake money, f…
20 posts
Gamedev blog
Building Aquavale in the open — the systems, the art passes, and the bugs that turned out to be the real problem.