Shrimprium Devlog

Devlog

Notes from the tank

  1. Shrimp that move on their own Shrimp now swim, dash and flip by themselves, growing through good water rather than taps. Along the way, I cut back a lot of what the game had accumulated.
  2. A house for every player Every player now has a house with a gallery of their tanks, animal visitors who come to see it, a painted look and new sound settings.
  3. A new window into a tiny universe We rebuilt the website around the constellations of microscope mode.
  4. A big September update: a tiny universe, new plants and tanks on air The microscope became a living map of the tank's chemistry, plants and rocks were redrawn, and players can now put up to four tanks on air.
  5. Shrimprium wins a gold prize at GIGDC Shrimprium won a gold prize at GIGDC, an indie game competition held in Korea. Next, I'm putting resources into the graphics.
  6. Growing plants that feel alive Plants now grow from seeds, bending toward light and responding to nutrients, which meant moving Shrimprium's rendering from the DOM to WebGPU.
  7. Shrimprium enters GIGDC Shrimprium is entered in the mobile category of GIGDC, an indie game competition held in Korea, with player feedback open until July 13.
  8. Shrimprium is on the App Store My small game is now on the App Store. An introduction to the tiny world inside it, where the player sets the difficulty and the shrimp never die.
  9. Looking back: 1,000 commits and 66,000 lines A step-by-step look back at how Shrimprium was built, from the first physics model to logic blocks, and the AI tools used at each stage.
  10. Not selected for Indiecraft, and what I took from it Shrimprium didn't make it through the competition, but preparing for it made the game friendlier, and the iPhone app is now in TestFlight.
  11. From game to service: getting ready for the App Store Shrimprium moves into the app stage, which means moderation, save protection, a new MacBook, zero-budget marketing and a first indie game competition.
  12. Building the community: visiting tanks instead of real-time play I planned for shrimp to meet in real time, but logic blocks made latency a real problem. So players now visit and explore each other's tanks.
  13. Introducing logic blocks A new Minecraft-style logic block system lets you build circuits and contraptions in the tank, including black holes and white holes.
  14. Trial and error in building the backend What a non-developer learned from cloud saves and sign-in: think in analogies, split the flow into gated steps, and never stop testing.
  15. Cloud saves are here Saves now live in the cloud with Supabase, so you can pick up where you left off on any device, with Row Level Security keeping each save private.
  16. Is it becoming a game? Quests, famous paintings, affection and flips. Each fix revealed a new gap between a detailed tank engine and a game people want to play.
  17. I tried multi-agent automation, and it didn't work out With the core engine in place, I handed the polish work to parallel AI agents. The code grew fragile and opaque, so I rolled it back.
  18. The simulation engine behind the game A tour of the engine so far, from the tick order and heat balance to the nitrogen cycle, plants and algae, genetics and the energy economy.
  19. How I use AI to build Shrimprium Concept, specification, implementation, testing, then back to the physics. Breaking the work into small pieces is what makes vibe coding hold up.
  20. The limits of vibe coding, as I found them AI builds the structure quickly, but balancing heat and water quality until they feel right is still slow, hands-on human work.
  21. Modeling the first shrimp How the shrimp went from floating microbes to two small, walking shrimp, with GPT, Gemini and Cursor each playing a part.
  22. How I got into vibe coding From an Excel building energy model to a Roblox prototype, and the Cursor, Copilot and GPT workflow behind the shrimp game.
  23. Why a refrigeration and HVAC blogger started making a game After more than ten years of blogging, AI changed what my writing could offer. This project is my answer.
  24. From Roblox to a shrimp tank Why I set aside a Roblox project and started building an ecosystem simulation around eight cherry shrimp.