Bred, not bought (and tails that finally move like tails)

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.

Bred, not bought

The store now stocks only the regular strains — a plain Guppy, a Tiger Barb, a Rio Nanay Angelfish. Every fancy variety in the game — the Cobra Guppies, the Marble Angels, the Blue Tiger Barbs — has to be bred. You pick two fish from the same family, pair them up, and about thirty minutes later fry appear in the tank, right there beside their parents.

Most pairings give you more of what you put in. But every cross has a chance at something else: authored recipes (two Cobras have leopard-patterned offspring in them somewhere), and rarer “sports” — a surprise a full tier above the parents that keeps you guessing even when you don’t know a recipe exists.

When a strain shows up that you’ve never had before, the birth is the discovery. A card pops up with the baby’s portrait, its proud parents (their actual art, their actual names), and a gold banner announcing the new strain. That moment used to be “buy the rare fish in the store.” Now it’s a delivery in your own tank, from fish you raised.

A birth announcement card: two new strains discovered in one litter, with the babies' portraits and their proud parents beneath — Twins, and both of them firsts — the gold border means somebody in this litter has never existed in this save before.

The Field Guide grew a Lines tab to go with it: a family-tree chart per species line, silhouettes and dashed connectors for everything you haven’t found yet, solid lines and portraits filling in as you discover crosses. The guppy line runs six generations deep now — I dropped five new strains into it this month, and the tree ends in a tier-4 grail (the Emerald Green Dragon) that requires meeting the two branches of the family in the middle. You can zoom and pan around the chart like a map.

The Lines chart early in a save: two discovered guppies on the left, a wall of silhouettes and dashed connectors ahead — Day one of a guppy dynasty: 2 of 26 lines found, and every silhouette is a question the tank can answer.

Tails that fold, turns that sweep

The other big arc was motion. Guppy and betta tails have been bugging me the whole project — a flat drawing waving up and down never reads as fabric. I went through three attempts (UV waves, noise-driven “flag” displacement) before landing on the real answer: the fan is now a piece of actual geometry — a subdivided mesh that curls like a sheet of paper. When the wave rolls the tip past 90°, the tail genuinely folds over itself, back-face shading and all.

And once that worked for tails, it was too good not to use everywhere: turns are now the same trick applied to the whole fish. The old turn was a card-flip with some squashing. Now the nose commits to the new direction first, the bend travels down the body like a real fish’s C-turn, and the tail whips through last — with the front of the fish genuinely overlapping the back half mid-sweep. No more instant mirror-flip at the midpoint; it’s one continuous motion. This might be my favorite change in the whole game so far, and it’s basically invisible — which is the point. The fish just look alive now.

Six freeze-frames of the new turn: the nose commits first, the body sweeps through overlapping itself, the fan unfurls on the far side — One turn, frozen at six moments — nose first, body folding through itself, tail last. (I owe you a video of this; stills undersell it.)

Four wave phases of the mesh fan tail — spread, rippling, folded closed, and mid-fold — The same tail at four points in its wave. Frame three is the one that took three rewrites: the fan is genuinely folded over itself.

A sticker chart, because I’m a child

The Field Guide also got a Stickers tab: every fish is a row, every possible unlockable is a slot — documented, owned, the four camera moments, the completion star, the morph set, the bred-strain badge. Earned stickers are fat colorful dots; unearned ones are hollow slots begging to be filled. It’s a kindergarten sticker chart and I have zero shame about it. Undiscovered fish are just a ”?” — even a silhouette felt like a spoiler.

The Stickers tab: rows of fish, each with a line of earned and empty sticker slots — Filled dots are earned, hollow ones are the to-do list. The bred-only barbs at the bottom already wear their pink Line stickers.

The one that didn’t make it

Honesty corner: I spent a day building a perspective “depth box” — the tank drawn like a real box, back wall inset, substrate edges following the perspective lines. It worked, technically. It also never quite looked right, through three different versions. So it’s gone. The one piece that survived is directional cast shadows — decor now throws shade away from the light, and you can drag the light angle and watch every shadow in the tank swing together. Sometimes the experiment’s souvenir is better than the experiment.

Smaller things that landed this month: mid-stream donations (with confetti), a gravel-vac siphon tool, light beams that pour in from the tank’s rim instead of starting at the waterline, and a much slimmer tank frame so the scape gets nearly every pixel.

Next up: more device playtesting, and probably a long-overdue balancing pass on the breeding odds once I’ve watched a few people chase their first Red Dragon. If you’re new here — Aquavale is on Steam, and wishlists genuinely help a solo dev more than you’d think.