There’s one thought that keeps coming back to me as I make this game.
I’m working hard on something, but is it actually becoming a game?
At first, building the engine was fun. As I added a heater, a cooler, lighting, plants, nitrification logic and even genetics, things grew more and more convincing on the inside.
As a developer, I really enjoyed this. Working out how everything connects and how each variable affects the others, designing that structure, was a pleasure in itself.
At some point, though, I began to feel uneasy. A great deal had clearly gone in, but when I actually looked at it, it felt less like making a game and more like building a complicated aquarium engine.
That was, of course, part of what I wanted. But it wasn’t enough on its own. However sophisticated the internal logic, I suspected players wouldn’t know what they were supposed to do, why they should keep watching or where the fun was meant to be. (People around me reacted much the same way.)
So I added the quests and levels that come to mind when you think of games. I expected them to make it feel more like a game, and they did give players a sense of direction. I also found that handing out goals one at a time works much better than simply dropping players into a complex system.
Even so, something was still missing. The weight seemed to fall entirely on managing the tank and getting the numbers right. The game was certainly less daunting than before, but that didn’t necessarily make it more appealing.
It still felt somewhat stiff. There was now a structure for diligent management, but the feeling I’d first imagined, a shrimp tank you’d want to look at, was weak.
From then on, I thought more about aesthetics. Rather than a game with lots of systems, I wanted one with an atmosphere that makes you want to leave the screen on and gaze at it for a while. So I started using elements such as famous paintings in the background.
A slightly dark, lonely mood, slow jazz playing and a famous painting: this was an atmosphere I loved, and it helped give my tank a more emotional feel.
But then another problem appeared. This time the background was too strong, and the shrimp seemed to disappear into it.
That was a real dilemma. I had strengthened the aesthetics because I felt they were lacking, but doing so weakened the presence of the shrimp, who were supposed to be the stars. Yet if I toned the background down again, I felt the atmosphere I wanted would be lost.
So next I began adding ways to interact directly with the shrimp. Features such as affection came out of this. I wanted the game to be not about watching the whole tank, but about looking at a particular shrimp, tapping it and looking forward to its response.
Here too, something didn’t quite sit right. There was interaction now, but it still felt mechanical. Tap and it reacts, a number goes up, and when the conditions are met the next stage unlocks. Functionally it worked, but it still felt calculated rather than alive.
So recently I’ve been reworking the shrimp’s behavior to flow more like a continuous performance. For example, after a triple jump, a well-timed tap links into a backflip or a front flip.
There is still a lot to think through. Every time I fix one shortcoming, another appears, and fixing that one creates yet another problem. It feels like an endless cycle.
Sometimes I wonder why I’m holding on to this so tightly. But even if no one ever sees it and the project fades into obscurity, I feel I’m learning a great deal along the way.