Hello, I’m Crafty Olive.
The biggest change in the past two weeks is that every player now has a house.
1. Starting at home
When you open Shrimprium, you now arrive at your house at night before going into your tank. After the logo, the inside of the house appears, and when the game is ready, a gentle “Press to continue” takes you into the tank. This screen also replaced the old loading gate, so the time spent preparing the tank now has somewhere to be.
From the tank, a door button takes you back to your house at any time. While you’re in the house, time in the tanks is paused.
2. Visiting neighbors
The house is also how you visit other players now. At the gate, you’ll find a list of public houses by nickname, with search. Choosing one walks you to that neighbor’s door, where a short greeting lets you visit, ask for an explanation or leave.
Inside, each house is a gallery. Players’ tanks hang on the walls as framed pictures, and you can step into a frame to visit that tank. There’s an attic with a ladder, and you can customize your house’s materials, with your design saved to your account.
3. Animal visitors
Houses also get visitors of their own. Twelve kinds of small pixel animals come to look at the pictures in your gallery. They queue at the gate, come in, walk to a picture, sit and look up at it, and leave when they’re done.
How many come depends on the gallery’s star score. A house with few stars might have two visitors at a time; a well-loved one can have up to ten, with a line forming outside. I spent quite a while tuning this so the crowd grows smoothly rather than jumping at fixed thresholds.
4. A painted house
Once the structure was in place, I worked on how the house looks. The props, walls, awning and even the little figure who lives there now share the same painted grain as the blocks in the tank. The lights are broken into soft painted blotches, the figure is lit by the lamps in the scene and has a scarf that flutters as it walks, and the night sky and mountain ridges were repainted to match.
5. Sound
I also spent some time on sound. There’s now an occasional bubble ambience in the tank, the synthesized sound effects are softer, and the settings have separate volume sliders for music and sound effects. On iPhone, the music no longer lingers in the system’s Now Playing controls after you leave the app.
A small detour
Not everything stayed. I built an in-game Korean and English keyboard for every text field, then went back to the device’s own keyboard the same day. It worked, but the device keyboard is simply what people expect. On iPhone, it now uses a dark keyboard to match the game.
Closing thoughts
The tank has always been the heart of Shrimprium, and it still is. But I think the house gives it a place to live: somewhere you come home to, show your tanks off, and see who else has been by.