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I'm very glad that my comments came across positively! 

Without knowing the structure of your code, my first thought as to why you sometimes get teenage mutant ninja goldfish growing out of control is maybe an interruption in a change in said goldfish. Like if you have the scale of the fish change at some point and then the player somehow either interacts with that fish or triggers a state change for the fish, then the scaling process is interrupted and instead of getting the trigger to stop, it just keeps going. Your guess is way better than mine though. 


Here's a bit more on feedback:


I like the idea of particle effects for eating. Depending on how many fish can end up eating at once, a sound for eating may be irritating to the player unless you limit it (if I feed 20 fish and then hear the same soundeffect go off rapidly for 10 seconds it could sound like audio artifact. I don't mean to discourage sounds from eating, I'm just not sure what the right balance would be.

As for evolution, a gradual change in color/size might be too subtle for players to feel like they accomplished things. Unless you did a slight gradual change to show the player its progress toward a new evolution, then give it a finale with something like a morph animation from its current size and color to the new one. 

Giving the fish the ability to change their environment would be visually appealing to the player. For example, if when swimming by flora or objects, those things could move or react slightly. Like if a fish swam through some falling food, the food would change its path slightly because of the movement of the fish. 

Since this scene is so close to surface, some god rays that get interrupted by slightly moving lilipads could enhance the scene. 

With feeding/growing/evolving is the core mechanic, I think it would be cool to have different ways to feed. I have enjoyed my fair share of clicker games, but clicking for a 1:1 work:reward ratio forever will get dull. Maybe being able to hold down to spawn a bundle of feed. Or click and drag to spawn a line. Maybe add a food shaker (like a salt shaker). I think your current direction with growing/evolving is good - feeding different combinations of food to see what the fish evolve into will keep engagement for a time. 


What I am wondering about is the player's goal. What are they striving for? What will be the loop that gets tied to your core mechanic?  Maybe you said so in your video or in the story intro and I missed it. 

That was pretty much spot on about the Goldfish. There was a trigger for when it reached a certain size to stop growing until it gets moved to a larger area but I had used "<=" when I should have used just  "<" in the If statement so it was triggering continuously. Simple enough to fix!

Your suggestions on the audio and visual cues for things happening are helpful. I'm sure that will take some experimentation when I get to it. 

I imagine the core of the game like one of those merge games, where you merge two or three things to make one larger/better thing and repeat. So it takes 40 pieces of food to turn a Minnow into a Goldfish, Tetra, or Danio to start. To evolve them further they would need perhaps twice as much food or a smaller amount of a higher quality or larger food. (I haven't built that particular difference into the demo quite yet. All evolutions take 40 foods right now.) Once you unlock a predatory fish, you may need to feed it 40 minnows, or 40 of the larger fish to get it to the next stage. Other than feeding them more, it may simply become more complicated what you have to feed them. Maybe they need a specific combination. Maybe they need to be in a specific biome to evolve. Maybe they have to perform some other action first. 

You may need a large population of some of the lower stage fish to evolve the higher ones. This is where the ecosystem management comes in. You'll want to keep the lower populations large enough to keep the larger fish fed. The player may unlock some sort of auto-feeder as they get further, to automate the lower fish's evolution so they can focus on the higher fish. 

And that goes into the ultimate goal of the game, which is to keep evolving the fish, discover all of the species and fill all of the biomes. So my focus at the moment is making that clear at the beginning of the game (needs some work obviously) and making it engaging and rewarding early on. 

I'm wondering if an evolution tree would help show the player what they are striving after. It could be a menu that shows the unlocked evolutions as images of each fish, then either darken an outline of the next evolution or have a small white node indicating that there is more to do with the last unlocked fish. I'm probably not explaining it very well, but the best example can think of is the game Cells to Singularity: Evolution. Its a pretty popular clicker game with multiple branching evolution trees. The game also features little environments with the related unlocked animals/plants/things. You can even click on the items in those little scenes and the cam follows that clicked object similar to the way yours is implemented. 

There is an evolution tree on the right side when you click on a fish. It wouldn't have shown up for you until toward the end of the Tutorial so maybe you didn't make it that far. 

I would like to make a larger version of it in its own menu and I agree it helps the player understand what they are working toward. I like your suggestions about how it could work.