Window shopping at the fish store

It’s been a couple of weeks since the last post: one of those stretches where half the game got touched and the blog had to wait its turn. Let me start with the headline: you can press your nose against the glass now.

The store became an aisle

The fish section of the store used to be a row of display tanks on a counter. It’s a wall now: three shelves of tanks, each species swimming in its own little display, each tank sitting on its own board with a white name plate and a gold price tag. You browse it the way you’d browse a real fish store: drag along the aisle, or page through with the arrows while the shop interior drifts past behind the tanks.

And when something catches your eye, you click the tank and the camera walks up to it. Not a popup, not a menu: the whole scene dives in: the shop wall grows, Suki slides out of frame past your shoulder, and the tank you picked fills the view while everything behind it blurs like a photo. Arrows on all four sides of the tank step you to its neighbours, up a shelf, down a shelf, along the row, like leaning from one display to the next.

Click a fish inside and you get the same little card the tank fish have in-game, following it around as it swims: its name, temperament, hobby, what decor it favors, and a growth range instead of an exact size, because how big this particular fish gets should stay a surprise until you raise it. Cancel, or buy. It turns buying a fish from a transaction into meeting it first, and honestly it’s my favorite thing in the game right now.

Housekeeping came with it: Rocks and Driftwood got their own shelves (in the store and the aquascape menu: they’d been mixed into general decor), the store panel is a proper full-height fixture at any window size instead of a floating phone, and there’s a debug arrange mode where I can drag Suki, her speech bubble, the nav arrows, and the whole tank wall around until the shop composition feels right, then save it.

The UI got my handwriting

Confession: almost every icon in the game has been procedurally drawn placeholder art since June. This week I finally sat down and made my own set, and hooked up something like thirty of them. The phone’s app grid, the aquascape side tabs, the substrate tools, the curate palette, the store’s category rail, the stat icons in the bottom bar, the phone button itself. The game finally looks like one person drew it, because one person did.

The phone got a rethink while I was in there. The shortcut dock at the bottom is gone: in its place, back / home / forward buttons that walk a real history of the apps you’ve opened, browser-style. Open Messages from a sponsor mail, jump to the Store, press back twice and you’re reading that mail again. Little thing, feels great.

And the store’s fancy lettered header, S T O R E with the hairline rules, spread to every app, in ink instead of brass. Small typographic thing, big “this is one game” feeling.

The chat got taste (and honest math)

Livestreams got a balance pass with a spreadsheet open. The old numbers were… let’s say aspirational: five thousand viewers and fifteen people chatting. Real streams run more like 6–10% of the room talking, so the recap now models the actual crowd, hundreds of chatters, thousands of comments, while the on-screen chat stays a readable sample of it. Follower gains scale honestly with the crowd too, instead of flatlining at big counts.

Two chat features I’m fond of:

• One person per name, forever. The chat pulls from a proper cast now: a name can never belong to two different “people,” and every regular keeps their color for life.
• Chat notices your aesthetic. If your tank has a committed theme, six pieces of the Day of the Dead set, an all-pink recolor job, a full rainbow of plants, a couple of viewers will actually say something about it mid-stream, and a little wave of likes follows. The game reading your artistic choices back to you is exactly the kind of validation I want this whole thing to run on.

The tank pushes back (gently)

Two bits of ecology landed. First: if your cleanliness sits at “Fair” for too long, algae now creeps in from the edges of the glass: slowly, inward, like real algae colonizing a pane. Your cleanup crew can slow it down but can’t fully stop it; getting the water genuinely healthy (plants, a filter, fewer skipped cleanings) is what stops it, and the squeegee is always the instant fix. It’s the gentlest possible nag: the tank just starts looking like you’ve been away.

Second: the cleanup crew learned manners. Shrimp used to march straight through buildings like tiny ghosts. Now decor is an obstacle: they pick a side and walk visibly in front of or behind each piece, and props with authored floor contours get properly climbed, up one side and down the other. Watching a snail summit a rock it used to phase through is deeply satisfying.

Odds and ends

• Every fish species now shows in the same aspect ratio everywhere, so a Chili Rasbora doesn’t look Angelfish-sized in the field guide.
• The loot box got a proper reveal: a buildup, then escalating fanfare by rarity tier. It also costs real money now ($3,000), because the fish inside are worth it.
• A pile of new art went in, eleven Platy strains, a Danio breeding family, refreshed Egyptian and Day of the Dead decor sets, all wired into breeding trees, quests, and the store.
• Fish stopped “snapping” between depth layers; they only change planes in open water now, with their whole body clear.

Next up: I want to keep pushing on the store’s feel, and there’s a sponsor idea brewing that I’m not ready to talk about yet.

What’s your fish-store ritual: do you beeline for one species, or walk the whole wall first? Chat will notice your taste now, so choose wisely.

Wishlist Aquavale on Steam if you haven’t, it genuinely helps.

— K.