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 that — a collection to fill in — bundled with a long-overdue pass on the small frictions that were quietly making the game harder to walk into than it should be.

A collection worth completing

The Field Guide used to be a plain list — a name and a line of text for each thing you’d documented. Now it’s a wall of picture cards: every fish, plant, piece of decor, and cleanup critter you’ve discovered shows up as its own little portrait, five across, and the ones you haven’t found yet are teased as dark silhouettes. It quietly flips the whole screen from “here’s what you own” into “here’s what’s still out there,” which is a much better feeling to sit with. My daughter took one look at the empty slots and immediately wanted to go fill them in — which is exactly the reaction I was building it for.

Placing plants and decor now brings up the same tidy Tools + Layers panel the substrate sculptor uses, instead of the cramped little strip it had before. There are proper on-screen Flip and resize buttons — which matters more than it sounds, because this game is headed for tablets and there’s no scroll wheel on a touchscreen — and the depth picker (Back / Middle / Front) sits right there with a little cross-section preview. I gave that preview a band of water above the sand line so it actually reads as a waterline, and I hide the Feed/Relax/Light bar while you’re placing so nothing’s fighting for the same corner of the screen.

An x-ray so you can see where things land

Here’s a problem that had been nagging me. When you placed a plant on the back layer, the preview showed up crisp and full-colour and front-and-centre — so it looked like it was going in the middle, and you’d let go and get a surprise. The ghost wasn’t picking up the depth haze a real, placed plant gets, so it was lying to you about where the thing would actually end up. Now the preview fades exactly the way the finished piece will: back-layer pieces go soft and see-through like an x-ray, the middle less so, the front nearly solid. The plane you’re on is unmistakable at a glance. (Honest engineering footnote: this took longer than it should have, because the plant art is drawn by a shader that ignores the usual transparency knob — I had to teach the shaders a brand-new one. Exact same trap I’d fallen into with the fish a while back.)

Meet your fish

When you place your very first fish, the phone now tucks itself away, the camera drifts over to your new resident, and it opens up about what it’d love to see at home — “some driftwood would really make me feel comfortable,” that sort of thing — with a gentle nudge toward the shop. It’s a tiny cinematic beat meant to teach the whole loop (a fish has preferences → you can lift its mood → here’s where to do that) without a wall of tutorial text. Alongside it, fish pop a little heart over their heads when their favourite things are around, and I changed “favourite things” to count anything anywhere in the tank rather than only what’s right next to them — so the affection reads as being about the home you’ve built, not wherever the fish happens to be drifting at that second.

The sponsors got a bit more personal

Thalia — the plant supplier who hands you your first real job — now calls you back the moment you finish it, just to say thanks, slip you a personal bonus, and introduce you to Reed for more work. It’s a small thing, but it makes the sponsors feel like people who remember you instead of a quest board that dispenses money. I also widened the call popups so their longer messages stop running off the bottom of the screen.

A brighter front door, and a gentler start

The title menu is light and airy now instead of a dark slab — and, the fix I’d wanted every single launch, it stopped dimming the tank behind it, so your aquarium is the star of its own menu again. The opening tutorial got a pass too: the coaching tips no longer plant themselves right on top of the buttons they’re telling you to tap, the beauty-score lesson politely closes the phone before it asks you to tap the diamond, and — a genuinely embarrassing one — a fresh new game once again starts with actual sand in the tank instead of an empty blue box. One more for the character-sheet nerds: a fish can no longer roll up “Shy” and “Social” at the same time, because that never made a lick of sense.

Behind the scenes: a workshop of my own

The change that’ll keep paying off is a sandbox I built for myself — a sterile, flat test tank I can drop into with a single key, spawn a couple of fish in, and tune how an asset looks and behaves without ever disturbing my real aquarium. It’s where I now dial in each species’ bioluminescent character: how tightly it fluoresces, which colour it isolates, whether it breathes with a slow pulse. So the blacklight night from last update keeps getting richer, one creature at a time. Unglamorous work, but every hour I sink into tools like this buys back several later.

What’s next

With a collection to chase and friendlier tools to build with, the tank’s starting to feel less like a tech demo and more like a game you’d actually want to keep reopening. I’m turning next to the room the tank lives in — pulling the water colour, the light rays, and that bioluminescent switch together into one proper “Color & Lighting” space — and giving the day-to-day of running your little aquarium channel a bit more shape.

Thanks for following along. 🐟