Playing Patch and Release

Since I started reworking on what was Aquasauria Park, I have been trying to focus the game’s core loop back on the animals. In today’s devlog, I’ll introduce the loop that I’ve been crafting during the past 5 days or so. I’ll also talk about the difficulties that I have encountered, and conclude on a positive note :)

Admission is where you bring new animals into the sanctuary. They all have a name, a story (which are yet to be integrated as I publish this blog note) and most have some negative condition, like parasites, wounds, infection etc. Hopefully, this will help the player feel empathy towards them - which is one of my core personal objectives. Also, they are filtered using the player level, so the most challenging animals can’t arrive right from the start. When you found the poor thing that you want to help, you can click a ‘Transfer’ button, and then drop your animal in a basin, like you would a building in an RTS.

Gotta patch’em all

Now that you have a new resident, the ‘tamagotchi phase’ can start. You must feed them (or else they’ll die!). Their favorite foods will fill their hunger more, and some foods might be non-edible. Conditions will further ‘gnaw’ on your healthbar, making it more difficult to keep an ill or wounded resident alive. That’s where you want to heal them, using items from the brand new inventory (nothing innovative here, it is a pretty classic inventory menu). I love this multi-condition bar, that makes a lot of sense to me, and it is much easier to watch than a lot of bars. However the low diversity of healing mechanics is a problem. I think that I could design more items - things like vaccines to get a shield against infection, medication that regenerates over time, etc. Regardless, healing is an easy process. Some ideas to spice it up:

• Wound the animals using other animals: I’ll create a new “aggressive” trait for animals that tend to attack others. This is actually based on fossil evidence:
• An epidemic mechanics, for animals in the same vicinity. Managing an epidemic sure can be a challenge! I’ll make sure that epidemics don’t start too early in the game though.
• Use traits to make creative limitations: Some marine reptiles had unique features that could make them more difficult to release. You may need to wait for certain conditions before curing them - such as nighttime for the abyssal plesiosaur Mortuneria.
• Design trade-off treatments: The current version of the game has ‘Metaboosts’, items used to cure the Cold condition in cold-blooded animals - but it will increase their metabolism, and thus their hunger. I want to design more items like that.

Release the Kraken!

So, your animal is healthy and alive, and it spent about 5 days in natural seawater? That means it is time to release it! I spent quite some time designing a map where you can select the right destination. For instance, it displays realistic temperature zones based on present-time sea temperature variation (Wegwerth et al . 2025). I then imagined what could be the likely effects of climate change by 2050: a global sea temperature increase, less ice in the arctic, the collapse of the Great Reef Barrier because of seawater acidification. Finally, I wrote short descriptions down for major localities of the Pacific Ocean. For some of them, I imagined what could be the consequence of free ranging giant sea reptiles - some regions became protected areas, other became unfriendly to sea reptiles. Upon releasing an animal, the player may be sad, but they receive experience points and (more importantly) money from animal protection organisms and governmental agencies (yeah!). This is important, because money will buy you equipment and food in the future (shops are not ready yet, but they’re coming soon). And the money award will vary depending on the adequation between your animal and its destination, so you HAVE to choose carefully.

The challenge of closing the loop

Okay, time to talk. I believe that minimum viable projects are a great way to stay on tracks, and I really try to follow that pattern. But this time, it was different for several reasons. First, I submitted this project to a call. I don’t want to talk about it for now - partly because it could impact the selection process. What is important though is that I had to SHOW the game to a committee, and this messed with my ability to deem what was necessary. I started reworking assets that could have honestly waited. I added some juice and even a shader so that the game would look better - and it does ! But until the last day of the call, the game loop was open. In other words, the pressure of people looking at my game made me do things in the wrong order.

Second, there were many core aspects. Too many? Maybe… I think some features have been over-prioritized (apologies if that word doesn’t exist). For instance I feel like the map selection could have been simpler in the first version. But most were actually important. That being said, another (expectable) consequence of having many core aspects was exponential interaction… and regressions. Take for instance the Metaboost I was referring to earlier:

• Suddenly, the player had to know which species were cold-blooded - therefore, it forced me to implement a Trait system much earlier than I expected
• After adding the Cold subpart into the multi-condition healthbar, I had implemented new methods, new signals etc. But even like that, it took me almost an hour to understand why some bars did not update when I used a Metaboost. Turns out they were updating using a different pipeline - which worked until I added something to remove the Cold
• It also had an impact on hunger, and needed to be accounted for when initiating hunger in cold-blooded animals.
• Metaboosts impact temperature, so they impact the money award on release - which is not what I wanted, since the effects of the Metaboost wear off after some time: in the end I had to redesign how temperature was taken into account on release
• And I did not have the time to make the effects fade away - this requires creating an instance or a condition/trait just for the Metaboost effect and solve the effects on the coldbar, the hunger, etc.

In short, the more interconnected features you have, the more likely you are to have regressions. Closing this loop proved challenging, but I feel like I have improved a lot. So should I depart from the ‘minimum viable product’ approach? Absolutely not. Will I continue to misjudge task priority? Definitely yes.

Final words

That’s it for today’s paleo-devlog. Of course this is just a beginning: the game is totally unbalanced, still feels clunky in some areas, there are only 3 dialogues and nearly not enough animals. Animals, characters and environments also need a serious glow up. Lastly, there are no options (accessibility, controls, graphics, audio…) and no saving system. Still, I’ve got a skeleton to build upon! To end this major devlog, here are not one, but two surprises: I put the current version of the game on the itch page (so you can try it out if you’re curious) AND I recorded some gameplay: