I have built a cosy fish tank simulation you can leave on a large screen and watch from time to time. I like pixel art but didn’t want to be religious about it, so I think of it as pixel art adjacent.

This summer, down with the flu, I started a small experiment. It ended up taking about 50-70 hours of my time, iterating over several months.

There is a 24-inch display in my kitchen powered by a used Lenovo mini PC (previously it was a RPi, but I had to upgrade to get a better GPU). I used it to show a rotation of my home photos, but now I’ve switched it to show this fish tank.

No prior game dev experience, but years of backend development and all the time spent reading indie dev blogs (honourable mentions Factorio and Banished) helped.

I used LLMs to give me a hand. It rather felt like playing a game, maybe like Factorio a bit, switching from system design to art direction and back and learning more about game dev to make it look better and better. For me it became a way to express creativity I might otherwise not have had time for. Along the way I learned what marine snow is and how fish swim. One funny story was me curiously asking an LLM if it could find some research papers on fish swimming patterns and styles and base the implementation on that, and it did.

I also used it to create a surprise for my wife’s birthday: on the day, three fish with QR codes appeared, each leading to a quest in the real world. But that is another story. Halloween is around the corner, so try the Halloween theme.