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.

It opens on a real title screen — and the background is your actual aquarium, loaded in a quiet “relax mode” with the HUD hidden, so the menu floats over living water with your fish drifting behind it. Continue, New Game, Settings, Quit.

There are three save slots now, so you can keep separate aquariums going and continue whichever you like (it warns before overwriting one that’s in use), and you can step back out any time through Settings → Quit to Main Menu, which saves first. It also has music — a calm ambient bed that crossfades between a relaxed title track and a gentle in-tank rotation, with a volume slider if you’d rather have it quieter or off.

The change I’m happiest with is how you start. I threw out the old wall-of-text tutorial and rebuilt it as a hands-on first dive — it doesn’t tell you, it has you do. It walks you into the Aquascape app to pour your first sand (showing off the back/middle/front depth layers you can build up) and place your first plant, then sends you to the Store to pick out a guppy, check out, and drop it in. Every step lights up the exact button you need with a pulsing marker, so you’re never hunting. This matters more than it sounds: my main playtester is nine, and she will not read a tutorial — but she’ll absolutely chase a glowing button.

Buying got reworked to match. Purchases are global now — everything you buy lands in your collection, and you place fish into whichever tank you’re looking at. If a fish can’t go somewhere yet, the button tells you why instead of just refusing. Anything still in hand waits on a new “Waiting to be placed” shelf in My Fish, which now breaks out into individual fish — tap one and the camera flies over to it in its tank. And custom water color is now a gradient, a brighter surface easing into a deeper tone below like real water, set per tank so each aquarium has its own mood.

The tank itself keeps getting livelier. The cleanup crew got a real overhaul — they drift between the back, middle, and front of the tank, move far more naturally (pausing, doubling back, varying their speed), and the climbers swim up to cling to the glass, properly oriented to the wall. Fish forage now too, wandering over to peck at the floor and decor in little “peck, peck… peck” bursts before moving on. And my authored “kit” plants grow as a swaying layered bunch, stalks overlapping, each filling in segment by segment and only crowning out once it’s tall enough.

The big content drop is a whole Japanese garden set: a red torii arch, a multi-tier pagoda, a stone bridge, lanterns, a bamboo water feature, bamboo, shrines, and garden rocks — with fish gliding right through the open pieces.

What’s next

I’m deep in progression now, and the thing I keep coming back to is that I want it to be discovery-led — finding new species, documenting your collection, building beautiful scapes — and not a follower grind. That’s the version of this game I actually want to make.

Thanks for following along. 🐟