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.

Sponsors used to be three one-off contracts. Now they’re characters with multi-step quest lines, and they’re the main way you earn money, which means the game leans much less on raw viewer counts. Vivian, who runs a filter company, has the flagship line: get four guppies into one tank, push that tank to a Beauty of 55, then show off three pieces of the Japanese garden set. Each step pays out, opens the next, and unlocks more of that decor set tier by tier. That’s the part I’m happiest with — sponsors gate content now, so you unlock the game by playing the way the game is about: collecting fish, beautifying tanks, scaping with sets, rather than just watching a number tick up. Your active quest rides in a little tracker pinned under your stats — who’s asking, what they want, a progress bar, the reward. Marina and Thalia fill out the roster with their own asks.

The cleanup crew grew up, too. Shrimp, snails, and plecos are now full individuals just like the fish — each with a name, a temperament, a trait, and a size, rolled the moment you buy them. They wait on the “to be placed” shelf, list under whichever tank you drop them into, and chat will even name-drop them now and then (less often than the fish — they’re the supporting cast, not the stars).

The store got smarter about what you can’t buy yet: locked items show themselves, dimmed behind a padlock with the exact unlock condition printed right on them, so you can always see what’s coming and how to earn it. And equipment got a real overhaul — filters, heater, light, air pump, CO₂, a UV sterilizer, a wavemaker, an auto-feeder — all bought into a shared inventory and installed per tank, with filters on a proper upgrade ladder so a basic one can’t overwrite the better one you already fitted.

The big new content drop is a sunken city. The Atlantis set is nine pieces of drowned antiquity — a broken column, coral, a pearl clam, an amphora, a Spartan bust, an archway, a domed rotunda, and two grand centerpieces: an open temple and a seated Poseidon.

And one unglamorous thing I’m quietly proud of: I set up a headless smoke test. I can now boot the game with no window and have it walk through every screen on its own, catching compile and runtime errors before they ever reach a build I’d actually play. Almost all of this update shipped “green” through it. For a one-person project where I’m not really a programmer, that’s the kind of safety net that keeps the whole thing from buckling under its own weight.

What’s next

The spine is in. Now it’s about filling it — more sponsors, more sets to chase, more reasons to keep diving back in.

Thanks for following along. 🐟