Show HN: Fishoid: an ambient fish tank for your screen
fishoid.netI 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.
This is really cool and has inspired me to build something similar with Claude. A bit more „realistic“ and more to my style. But building all that yourself? You trump me easily, so kudos for the time and energy invested!
It looks cool and calming. However, it is a bit confusing that it is mixing saltwater and freshwater fish in the same aquarium.
thanks for checking it out and fair point, I perceive it rather like a fantasy fish tank, if you were on mobile, check on desktop it allows you to select far stranger optional sets of fish in settings or Halloween theme
Reminds of the Windows "Underwater" screensaver https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vOzk3bBV_M
win95 always makes me feel nostalgic, and it does look familiar, my all time favourite win95 one was 3d pipes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT84IkheeHY
So smooth! Surprisingly hypnotising and once you start playing with the settings it's super fun
Walking hands and plague doctor octopus are my absolute favourites. Oh yes and crying angel
I could look at this all day, so many creatures. It looks a bit magical.
even that I watched it for so many hours already, it still has that magical effect on me
Very cool!