Hello, I’m Crafty Olive.
Back in April, I wrote that the interaction with the shrimp still felt mechanical: tap, the shrimp reacts, a number goes up, and when the conditions are met the next stage unlocks. It worked, but it felt calculated rather than alive.
This week, I finally changed that at the root.
1. Shrimp that act on their own
Tapping a shrimp no longer makes it perform tricks or earns points. Instead, the shrimp now swim, dash and flip on their own, choosing when to use the skills they have.
Each shrimp can equip up to two skills, and it uses only what it has equipped. The skills include a front flip after three rising swims, a backflip with a splash, a dash, a dash flip, a slow hovering swim that leaves a trail of white glitter, rope tricks, and a spike that kicks off a block wall to change direction. There is also a pass-through skill that lets a shrimp glide through the sides and undersides of platforms. A single button copies one shrimp’s skill set to all the others.
Getting the movement right took a lot of small adjustments: how often a shrimp starts swimming, how gently it drifts down, how high a dash arcs. I also added a quiet recovery for shrimp that get stuck bouncing inside an enclosed space of blocks, so they slowly sink out instead of teleporting.
2. Growing through good water
New skills unlock as a shrimp’s GRADE rises, and GRADE now grows in a different way. It no longer comes from tapping. Instead, every ten seconds that a tank’s water conditions are all within a healthy range adds a point, and if you keep four tanks healthy, they all count.
I like this much better. The way to help your shrimp grow is now simply to keep their tank in good shape, which is what the game was about from the start.
With this change, I retired the per-shrimp affection system and the gift objectives that went with it.
3. Taking things away
Adding the autonomous behavior made me look again at everything else the game had accumulated, and I ended up removing a lot.
The heater and cooler now set their temperatures automatically, holding 22°C and 24°C, and the temperature quests are gone. The quest list was trimmed, with shorter titles and hints, and quests are numbered without gaps. I removed the ledger and then, the next day, brought it back. Some things are only clear once they’re gone.
The native apps are now locked to portrait, and the gallery house was redesigned to match: a two-story house in portrait with a roof garden, painted as warm stucco and lit at night through its windows.
4. Seeing the tank breathe
Two changes make the simulation easier to see.
The machine view, which shows the equipment and the nitrogen cycle, was redrawn with neon light flowing through gray wires and nodes drawn as pixel-art gems. Color now appears only where something is actually flowing.
I also added what I’ve been calling the feed domino. When you feed your shrimp, part of the microscope’s constellation appears briefly over the normal tank, showing how that food spreads through the living things in the water. It’s a small glimpse of the system without leaving the tank.
Finally, the loading screen is now a shrimp constellation, in the same style as the microscope view and this website.
Closing thoughts
For a long time, I kept adding features to make Shrimprium feel more like a game. This round was the opposite. Letting the shrimp move on their own, and taking away what no longer fit, made the tank feel more alive than any feature I could have added.