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Window shopping at the fish store
It's been a couple of weeks since the last post: one of those stretches where half the game got touched and the blog had to wait its turn. Let me start with the headline: you can press yo…
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Bred, not bought
It's been almost a month since the last post, and the game grew one of its biggest systems in that time. Let me start with the headline: the store doesn't sell the fancy fish anymore.
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The sand finally looks like sand
Short one this time, and it's all about a single thing I couldn't stop looking at: the floor.
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The fish store is a place now
Eleven days since the last entry, and most of them went to one room: the store. But first: the thing I've been waiting a long time to write.
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The camera grew a soul
One day since the last entry, and it turned into a whole feature arc I didn't plan. A game I've been playing lately, one I'll talk about properly another time, made me realize my camera w…
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Art lands, bugs fall
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 ac…
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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 t…
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Sy's back room
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 s…
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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, wit…
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A collection to complete
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
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 the…
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The sponsors got faces
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
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 t…
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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, blurr…
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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
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…
25 posts
Gamedev blog
Building Aquavale in the open — the systems, the art passes, and the bugs that turned out to be the real problem.