The fish store is a place now (and Aquavale is on Steam)
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.
🎉 Aquavale is on Steam. As of Monday, the store page is live as Coming Soon, and you can wishlist it right now. After months of living in a folder on my hard drive, it has a real URL, a capsule, a genuine “Sword & Llama” under Developer and Publisher, and a little row of tags — Creature Collector, Idler, Wholesome, Cozy, Underwater. Release date’s still “to be announced,” but it’s out there, and that hasn’t quite sunk in yet.
Wishlists are the single most useful thing you can do for a game before launch — they’re how Steam decides whether to show it to anyone — so if you’ve been following along, that little button is the biggest help you can give me. Okay. Deep breath. Back to the fish.
Window Shopping
The old store was a grid you scrolled past. The new one is a shop you stand in: a wall of display tanks stretching left to right, with a catalog menu docked on the side. Tap a fish in the catalog and the room glides over to its tank — carousel-style, with a soft snap. Tap the tank itself and you’re buying that exact fish, the one you just watched do a lap.
And the display tanks are real now. They wear the same hand-drawn frame as your home tank. Every one is set-dressed — sculpted sand beds poured with the actual substrate tools, plants in front of and behind the swimmers, a waterline with drifting bubbles. I built myself a little “Store Lab” so I can redecorate each species’ display like a shopkeeper fussing over a window. The fish in them behave like fish, too: they turn with the new eased animation, the resting types rest, and the cleanup crew walk the floor. Snails creep. It is very important to me that the snails creep.
Equipment moved out of a menu and onto wooden shelves you browse like a real aisle, and clicking a background swaps the whole shop’s backdrop live so you can preview it. The cart got a pass — items grouped by type, rarity colour-coded, a running total, your coins and stats always visible while you shop. And fish you haven’t unlocked simply aren’t stocked: no grey teaser tanks, the shop just grows as your reputation does, with a NEW! sticker on fresh arrivals. I’ll be honest: the storefront still has a fair bit of work left in it. I’m sitting with it for a while before I tackle the next pass — I’d rather ruminate than rush a room this central.
Heaters finally tell the truth
A player — me, the player was me — hit a warning that said “Too cold for your tropical fish, fit a stronger heater” while already owning the strongest heater in the game. Discus want 82°F; the best heater held 76. The game was recommending a product that didn’t exist, forever.
Two fixes. First, there’s a proper Tropical Heater at the top of the ladder now that actually reaches tropical warmth. Second, and this is the part I like: heaters became thermostats. They read the fish actually in the tank and hold the temperature that suits them, up to whatever the heater can reach — so the fancy heater warms a Discus tank to 82 but will never cook your danios. And the warning only suggests an upgrade when one actually exists to buy. If you’ve mixed fish that genuinely can’t agree on a temperature, it tells you that instead, because the fix is moving fish, not shopping.
New rule going on the wall, next to the others: never sell the player a fix that doesn’t exist.
Gentler first steps
Onboarding got two new lessons — one for cleaning that waits until your glass actually gets filmy before handing you the squeegee, and one for going live that appears right when your first sponsor asks for a broadcast. And while any lesson is active, every button that isn’t the one you need quietly greys out. Nothing’s locked — poke whatever you like — but the single lit button makes the next step obvious without a word of extra tutorial text.
Right-click grew up too: it backs you out of whatever’s on top — the food pouch, a tool, a popup, the phone — one layer at a time, and Esc does the same. And if you right-click on the glass with nothing open… try it during a livestream. Chat has opinions. That’s all I’ll say.
The Phone
The in-game phone got a proper redesign — dark bezel, a notch, an app dock that follows you into every app, and a little nav pill for back/home/hide. It’s a true overlay now, so if you scale the UI up on a small screen it floats over everything instead of squashing itself flat. Sounds cosmetic, but every menu in the game lives inside this thing; it deserved to feel like one consistent object instead of twelve slightly different rectangles.
Small delights
Three new angelfish joined the art roster (the Rio Nanay is the new default), along with a veiltail betta and a Red Delta guppy — plus a hue system, so I can breed colour variations of a species I like without repainting it from scratch.
Fancy party foods now genuinely impress stream viewers — zoomie candy, loop drops — while routine pellet feeding earns a polite golf clap; basic care is the baseline, not the show. There’s a batch of new achievements, including ones for collecting every variety, temperament, and trait of a species, and a couple for coordinated fish chaos (twenty fish doing zoomies at once is a sight). One achievement is hidden. It involves the glass. And every hover tooltip in the game is gone — they were everywhere and they were ugly; anything that actually mattered got promoted to visible text.
Where things stand
Now that the page is live, the work splits into two piles.
The near pile is marketing. I’m making shorts for YouTube and Instagram — the feeding-frenzy clip cut to a tight 30 seconds is the best the game has ever looked in motion, and I want a steady drip of those going out. I also want to come back to achievements with fresh eyes, and take a real pass at the UI so it feels custom instead of functional.
The far pile is the one that actually matters, and I know it. The game needs a proper balance pass — the quest objectives should feel genuinely rewarding to work through, and opening a loot box should feel like a little event, not a menu click. That’s the difference between “a tank you decorate” and “a game you play,” and it’s where I’m headed next. Alongside it: a lot more content. Honestly, a lot more — more fish, more decor, more things to chase. The systems are there. Now they need filling.
None of that is a small ask, and I’m not pretending it is. But the game’s on Steam now, and that changes how real the whole thing feels.
Tell me your dream fish-store display tank. Mine’s the one where the betta judges you from behind the glass while the snails creep. The snails creep.
— K.