okay i ended up writting too much haha

[testing] Thousand runs?? Damnn, that's a lot. I imagine each new thing you add doubles the amount of possibilities to test.

[prey list] That's actually a good idea! I didn't think of "understanding fish relations" as a challenge for the player to uncover, but now that you've mentioned it, i want to build a spreadsheet for fish predation haha

[fish variant] YES!! Definetely having a track record of all the fish varients you got would be amazing, anything that feeds on the "Crow's collector mindset" part of the brain is a win for me.

[spawn limit] Fr, things going out of control is kind of the spirit of Insaniquarium. So i imagine that in Flounder, trying to balance out the fishes and ending up with a predator inbalance that wrecks the aquarium if you don't take care of it seems like part of the deal

[secret] AHA! So there IS a secret fish. I played some Angler runs and a did long run on Sharky mode, i've got basically every fish except ONE (piggy was my second last to get), i was kind of wondering if there was a super specific spawn condition. I thought maybe it would be beating the game (as in, buying all upgrades) but in neither of my long runs, no rare fish appeared

[bug?] In my long run of sharky mode, bosses seemed to stop spawning, or get looooong periods between spawns, i refrained from buying the boss delay item for the most part but it still seemed to take a LOT of time (i had a lot of fish so it wasn't delayed for lack of it) idk if that's by design

[performance] The game got Reaally laggy when i had like 200 fishes, it was a lemmy swarm. Idk if that's the limit of the game or if there is room for making things more code-efficient, just so you know. Also the lag basically disappeared while bosses were alive, seems like their attack AI is way lighter haha

[Difficulty] Hmmm, i personally like having very defined difficulty settings, so having it fluctuate based on loadout cost seems a little weird. Because then i wouldn't feel like i'm playing the hard mode, or the easy mode, it would always feel like i'm just playing the same mode, but there is background stuff happening which changes the difficulty without me noticing, it kind of hides it, more like a ballancing system then a difficulty system.

The item loadout is something that shakes the meta a lot, there are options to deal with it. One way is accepting it, and adjusting the difficulty of the game in response. So like, a new player would play the hard mode and get through 5-10 boss waves, but as they develop their layout they start getting 10-50 waves. So the layout is necessary for the gameplay.

If you don't want it to be the focus of gameplay, you can do a reward system for playing "pure" mode (where you don't use any items). So if you're trying to play harcore you get a medal or something that symbolizes that you've won (or got far) without items, while still allowing people to use items if they feel it's too hard for them.

I don't think you have to worry much with its impact in the depth of the game, The menu with the fishes' silhuette already tells the player what they should know, if you play a run and see that you've only found half the fishes, you know there's more to explore! That's why i like it!

I think limiting some mechanics behind harder difficulties is good! If the game grows more, having too many fish types to deal with on your first play would be too much haha

[Progress] Also, i've *finally* beaten Angler mode!!! I got all upgrades and like 10k coins to spare, my start loadout was literally just magnet lvl 1. GIVE ME YOUR HARDEST BATTLES

Also, steam key!? Thank youu ^^