At A Glance
- Lonnies Fishtank: I post my thoughts on ways to improve the gameplay of Lonnie’s Fishtank and overview of the basic fish interactions in the game.
Lonnies Fishtank
Reimagining the Gameplay
After having recently played citizen sleeper, shroom and gloom, kingdom come deliverance and the dice of Los suenos, I began thinking of Lonnies Fishtank in a new light. One element from all of these games that I really appreciated was the balance between choice and consequence. In citizen sleeper, choosing where to allot your dice and what to do during your day progresses a portion of the game, but has the consequence of not allowing you to meet objectives in another part of the game. This is a similar case for the indie game the dice of Los suenos. For example, you may spend time collecting food and water for some refugees, but at the expense of allowing people hunting you down to get even closer to finding your position. In shroom in gloom this simply comes in the form of engine building and being strategic about which cards you end up picking over others and when you decide to play those cards. This is enhanced by the randomize deck shuffling and limited use cards in the game. In Kingdom Come Deliverance, it is the most forgiving in terms of how you chose to spend your day: whether you decide to go hunting for game to turn a profit, or training your swordsmanship. It does however mirror the other games in that if there’s a time limited mission, then doing other activities instead of progress on that mission can have the consequence of that mission failing. Persona 5 and potentially Stardew Valley also feature this how you spend your day matters gameplay mechanic.
I’d very much like to do something similar for Lonnies Fishtank in order to make it more of a playable and entertaining game, as opposed to a hyper casual virtual pet simulator. This is an interesting idea because I don’t think anyone has ever consider making a virtual pet simulator or a creature collector where how you spend your time with your pets / creatures matter, in addition to which pets you give the most attention. Similarly, I don’t think I’ve played many cozy rogue like games where your decisions have weight to them.
The basic idea that I have in mind is to have the player responsibility for managing the condition of each fish that they own. Players could manage this by balancing the following four attributes of their fish: mental health, physical health, hunger, and energy. Each day these features may change in both predictable and unpredictable ways, much like owning a really pet. It is up to the play to spend the time and money to keep these things in check. However, the big catch is that time is limited. While the focus is still for this to be a cozy and lax experience, most actions take up time to do, and each day only has time available for a limited number of actions. Additionally, the player must continue the day in some way to accumulate money. The more fish they own that are in healthy condition at the start of each new day, the more money they are able to earn as a result.
I think this premise is really cool and unique. I imagine players having to make a couple of the following choices:
- Choosing between walking on fish over another to improve their physical health (fitness),
- Prioritizing one’s diet over another’s so they may avoid sickness
- spending time training one fish particular fish over others to improve their mental health
With the time mechanic, I think this would be an interesting way to tie in the competition system. If players want to let their fish compete in the local fish show, they need to spend time training them so they can perform well. However, fish only have so much energy available in a day, and if they’re constantly worked until exhaustion, then they wont have the chance to train as effectively and it may reduce their ability to learn or increase the chance of getting sick. Competitions are held every month for players to their fish and perform at.
In conclusions, this concept of time, choice and consequence seems like a really interesting mechanic for many games to adopt. Instead of just focusing on leveling up all of your characters/quests/skills, you are either rewarded or punished for leveling up certain characters/quests/skill and neglecting the others.
other notes
- concept: if animal crossing had limited time during the day and how you spent it mattered
- feature: option to turn this setting off for hyper casual gamers
Basic Fish Interactions
I started adding basic fish interactions to the game. While I haven’t added much functionality to the mechanic, players can at least pet their fish and see a variety of different status effects as a result. Soon I also plan on implementing fetch and tug of war with the fish as different ways to train them. I could even add a training mechanic similar to Nintendogs where you speak into the microphone 🤔