Chillquarium Version 1.3 Update!

Happy New Fish Day Everybody!

Hi y'all! I'm extremely excited to announce that after a bunch of work, Chillquarium version 1.3 is finally here! I am continually grateful to all of you for playing my game and letting me spend my time doing what I love, and as thanks I plan to keep adding stuff to Chillquarium for as long as people are interested in playing it <3

So without any further ado, here's a quick rundown of what's changed!

Patch Notes

New Stuff!

• Added 26 new fish in the "Pelagic Dudes" pack!
• Added 8 new tank decorations, doubling the amount in the game! Some of them even feature mildly interactive elements!
• Added Golden Tickets, which allow you to directly purchase golden packs after raising all painted fish of a given pack!

Minor Changes and QOL Improvements

• Alternate painted varieties are now displayed in the collection by hovering over the painted version of the fish, so you can tell which ones you're still missing!
• Golden packs now grant double the chance of producing rainbow fish
• Removed the upper bound on money
• Fish cards and packs now persist if the game is save+quit before they are added to the tank
• Added a "Sort by type" option in the tank menu so all fish of the same type are grouped together regardless of color variant
• Improved golden pack visuals

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug where money was sometimes set to negative value on launch
• Fixed bug where saltwater tanks displayed wrong name when first bought
• Sorting in tank menu now groups like fish together.
• Various minor optimizations

One of the most consistent pieces of feedback I've received is that getting all of the gold fish achievements is far too grindy, and I agree! My original intention was just to have something to recognize the accomplishment of those few die-hard fans that were invested enough to open thousands of packs. What I've realized, though, is that including something as an achievement carries an implication of being worth your time, which was frustrating to many players. Less than 3% of players ever completed a gold row in their collection.

To remedy this, the most natural solution was to allow players to buy golden packs directly. The difficult part was to try to implement this in a way that doesn't cheapen the experience of getting natural goldens. My solution was to allow players to buy golden tickets for each pack, but only after all of the painted fish for that pack (not counting alternates) have been raised to adulthood. My hope is that this helps the achievement hunters of the world (like me!) to 100% the game without having to sell a portion of their soul to the RNG gods.

Happy fishing! (and eventually, birding?)
-Ben