A virtual interactive aquarium designed for public installations.
The Project
Tank it Easy is a virtual interactive fish tank designed for installation in public spaces. Users can watch the interactions of a simulated ecosystem displayed on a large touchscreen or alter the ecosystem by playing with fish, adding food sources, and even releasing their own custom fish into the tank. Tank it Easy started as a student project for a class at Champlain College in spring 2020; we continued to develop it throughout 2020 with support from Champlain’s Emergent Media Center.
My Involvement
While I wore many hats working on Tank it Easy, my primary responsibility as design lead was taking our product owner’s vision and communicating it to the larger team through written documentation, pitches, and team meetings. Additionally, as the only designer consistently on the team across every development cycle, I was intimately familiar with the project’s internal and player-facing systems.
Building an Ecosystem
One of they key goals of Tank it Easy was creating a simplified but believable ecosystem; achieving this goal involved designing and balancing systems for fish to interact and react to their environment. I designed a number of stimuli and reactions for fish behavior which influenced by a ‘fish stats’ profile, dictated how fish acted in the face of simulated hunger, overcrowding, and predation.
Balancing these behaviors was a long and at times painful process involving lots of iteration alongside the project’s vision holder and AI programmer. It was surprisingly difficult to make our fish truly feel believable, especially as we had to design for a wide range of possible fish stats.
User-Facing Design
Tank it Easy proved additionally challenging due to its unique model of interaction — unlike many games, users interact for short periods of time and won’t necessarily return. As such I often focused on creating the varying levels of interaction afforded by the game, ensuring that any duration of play could be engaging. Low-interaction users might simply watch the display, while higher-interaction users wanted to interact with the fish and add their own to the tank.
Additionally, communicating gameplay ideas quickly and cleanly to users was vital on Tank it Easy; as such, I spent a lot of time designing user feedback so that players could best understand the tank. This took the form of visual indicators, such as particle effects and UI emotes, as well as clear and intuitive audio cues.
