I set the concept, game design direction and art direction, playtested every build and relayed real players' feedback; Claude wrote the code, drew the pixel art in code and composed the music under my direction.
From angler to cat
The prototype's angler was a person; I made it a cat, then iterated: the tail was too thick to read as a cat's, it needed to be more anthropomorphic, cross-legged, in a bucket hat. Once it sat in the boat it floated apart from the hull, so we cut it to the upper body. Whiskers came last. The whole screen is 180×320 and the cat is about twenty pixels wide, so every pixel has a job.
Why does Kairosoft look better?
I asked this after the first café pass. The breakdown: our shapes were stitched from ellipses and triangles, had one or two shades, a uniform near-black outline, and two pixel sizes on one screen. I chose to fix the method first: automatic light-from-top-left shading, coloured outlines (dark orange around an orange fish), one pixel scale in the café, and a lot more props.
Comfort over punch
Players told us the puffer fight shook so hard it made them dizzy. We softened the shake into a small smooth sway; some still felt it, especially right before the line snaps. So we removed struggle shake and fast flicker entirely and let the red line, the action bar and phone vibration say “let go”.
One fish, one dish
The café borrows Dave the Diver's idea of feeding your catch to a sushi bar, not its mechanics. “Orders” didn't read at a glance, so we just sell dishes: one per fish, each with pixel art and a recipe-book entry. Every guest is a cat — kittens, house cats, and tigers, lions and leopards in suits — in an isometric pier shop modelled on Kairosoft's camera.
Let a bot play first
With all nine seas in, I had Claude write a bot to play the game. Running at four reaction speeds, it found the curve was upside down: uncapped buff stacking let the final boss fall in seven seconds, while slow players died over a hundred times in the Ice Bay. The fix was diminishing buff stacks plus an extra shield each time you retry a sea.
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