AquaNova

🪙 A tank of fish that pay for their own food.

Drop food in the water. The fish swim to it, eat, and grow; a grown fish drops bigger coins. Click the coins to bank them. Spend them on better food, stranger fish, a weapon, a filter, and helpers that each do one job.

Then something comes out of the dark and starts eating the fish, and you click it to death.

One screen. No scrolling, no camera, nothing to pan. Everything that matters is in front of you, and so is everything going wrong.

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🐠 Six tanks, and one that is yours

The ladder runs from The First Bowl (two guppies and a tin of food) through The Kitchen Window and The Long Shelf to The Cold Room — where the water sits cold until you buy a heater. The dial you set it to is a real choice: warm water pays out more often and dirties faster, cool water is the quiet tank.

Then comes The Deep Tank, and last The Dark, where you cannot see what is eating the fish. Each asks for an amount of money before it ends, and each sells a little more than the one below it.

About half an hour to win the lot, the first time.

The heater is a fair example of how this game is put together: a small steady advantage with one way of going badly wrong. Leave the rod switched on while a crack in the glass takes the water down past it, and it runs dry and bursts.

Win all six and My AquaNova opens: your own tank, kept between visits, where nothing dies and nothing is timed. It has a shop of its own — 37 things over seven shelves, plants and rocks and wood and lamps and machines — and eleven of them do something rather than just stand there.

Two breathe bubbles. Three hide a frightened fish. Three give something up now and then. Three burn when the brass switch on the glass turns the lights off — and in the dark the rarer fish glow and the coins glimmer.

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📦 What is in it

• 🐟 25 species: Buy a breeding box, carry two fish into it, and what hatches depends on the parents — rarer ones breed rarer ones, and some pairs favour one fish in particular. A codex keeps what you have found and hints at what to try next.
• 🛠️ 9 helpers: One banks coins, one feeds, one fights, one nurses the sick fish, one keeps the glass clean. Each is won off a tank rather than bought on the first evening.
• 🏆 48 awards: Earned for things worth doing rather than just playing long enough.
• ⏱️ A time trial: Available on any tank you have won, complete with a leaderboard, plus four rules you can bolt onto a won tank to make it harder — no helpers, no filter, and worse.
• ⚙️ Three difficulties: Three save slots, an autosave, and an in-game manual that explains every single thing in detail.

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⚠️ Things that go wrong

The water gets dirty and the fish get ill. The glass cracks and the level drops. A fish nobody feeds starves. A stray fish drifts in looking for a home and you can keep it or let it go. None of that is a cutscene: it is in the water in front of you, and it is why the shop is worth reading.

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📌 Honest notes

• 💻 Windows, one file, no installer: 44 MB with every picture and sound inside the executable. Nothing is unpacked, nothing is written beside it — saves and settings go to your AppData folder. Needs OpenGL 3.3, which means any machine from about 2010 on.
• 🛡️ Windows will warn you about it: The executable is not code signed — a certificate costs more than this game does — so SmartScreen says "Windows protected your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway. If you would rather not, that is a fair choice.
• 🌐 The leaderboard sends something: When you win a tank, the name you typed and your time go to the board. Nothing else ever leaves your machine — no account, no identifier, no analytics. The button under the board on the Hall of Fame page says Posting my times; press it and it says Not posting my times, and then nothing goes out at all.
• 🎨 Every picture and sound was made for this game: 270 sprites and 42 clips, generated with a local image model and then cut out and trimmed by hand. Nothing is stock and nothing is from another game.
• 💡 Inspiration: If you have played Insaniquarium, you will recognise the shape of this. None of its content is here — no fish of its, no art of its, no music of its. The shape is all it shares.

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💬 Version 0.1.0, and how to tell me it is wrong

This is the first build anyone outside has seen. It is complete — the ladder can be won, My AquaNova opens, and the test suites pass — but nobody has played it on a machine that is not mine.

So: what went wrong, what was dull, what was unfair. All three are worth hearing, and the middle one most of all.

• 📧 Email: infomichaelmedia1@gmail.com
• 💬 Discord: discord.gg/Ej4JPmCZva

If it does something strange, there is a log at %APPDATA%\AquaNova\aquanova.log and a crash report beside it. Both are plain text, both say which graphics card and driver you have, and either is worth more than a description of what happened. The same two addresses are in the game, in the manual, on the last page.

AquaNova © 2026 Michael Media. All rights reserved.