Here Fishy Fishy — how to play
A pond. Tap the water and the koi come to feed. There is no score to chase and nothing to unlock. It is meant to be picked up for a minute and put down again.
Feeding
Tap or click anywhere on the water to drop a pellet. Koi swim to it and eat it. Feed them enough and another koi joins the pond, up to the limit you set.
The counter in the bottom right shows how many pellets have been eaten.
Letting it run itself
Feed itself in the settings hands the pond over to itself. Pellets drop on their own, koi arrive, the golden koi comes and goes, and the alligator turns up when it turns up. If the pond wins or loses while it is running itself, the result shows for a few seconds and then a fresh pond starts — so it can be left going as long as you like.
Turn it off and the pond waits for you again. Nothing is dismissed on its own while you are the one feeding.
Starting over
Restart sits at the bottom of the screen, next to How to play, and there is a matching Restart the pond at the bottom of the settings panel. Either gives you a new pond whenever you want one — not just a new round.
The one in the footer asks first: tap it once and it becomes Restart?, tap it again within a few seconds and the pond starts over. Walk away and it forgets it was asked. It is a tap away from anywhere, and a stray tap while you are waiting on a golden koi should not wipe the pond. The koi, turtles and tadpoles start again, the counters go back to zero, and the lily pads and rocks are laid out afresh, so it is a different pond to look at as well.
Your settings are left alone. Restore defaults, just below it, is the one that puts the settings back.
The golden koi
Every so often a golden koi crosses the pond. It is larger than the others and it glows, so you will know it when you see it. It does not stay — it swims in one side and out the other.
Feed it before it leaves and you win. A badge appears, and Again starts a fresh pond.
A pellet you drop within its reach is left to it. The other koi will swim past that one and the turtles will not touch it, so aiming at the golden koi means feeding the golden koi.
You are not the only one who wants it.
The turtles
Turtles eat pellets too, and a turtle that has grown large enough starts hunting koi — but only koi smaller than itself. The golden koi is bigger than an ordinary one, so it takes a well-grown turtle to catch it.
If a turtle takes the golden koi, you have lost that one. Wait for the next.
A few koi are never hunted, so the pond can always recover. You can change how many.
The alligator
Rarer than the golden koi, and worse. It comes in hungry, picks out whatever is ahead of it, turns onto it and lunges. It will take koi, turtles, pellets, and the golden koi if it finds it.
The pond does not just sit there. Koi and turtles get out of the way — they break sideways out of its line, dropping whatever they were doing, and a turtle will abandon a hunt to do it. Swerve early and you live; leave it late and you do not, because the lunge is committed and it is faster than you.
It kills with its mouth, not its sides — brushing past it is a fright, not an ending. When it has had enough it stops hunting and drives out of the pond.
You cannot stop it. You can only wait it out.
Tadpoles and frogs
It is a pond, so there are tadpoles in it.
They keep to the shallows near the edge, wriggling about, and they eat pellets — but never one the golden koi has claimed, so they can never cost you a golden koi.
Feed a tadpole enough and it becomes a frog. The frog leaves the water and takes up residence on a lily pad, where it sits until it feels like hopping to another one. Frogs do not eat pellets; they have their own arrangements.
Nothing hunts them. The turtles ignore them and so does the alligator — though a frog sitting in the alligator's way will hop out of it, which is only sensible.
Tadpoles in the settings sets how many the pond keeps.
The pond itself
The water is an oval, and you decide how big it is.
Pond size runs from a small pool with a wide bank around it, up to a pond so large its edge leaves the screen entirely and the water runs corner to corner. In between, the rim sits somewhere on the screen and the corners are bank.
Around it is ground — grass, a sand shore at the waterline, and rocks along the edge. It is not water. Tapping it drops nothing, and no fish or turtle will swim onto it: they turn back at the rim. Shrink the pond while it is running and anything the new edge left behind is put back in the water.
Water sets the color of the water. The ground does not follow it — grass is grass whatever color you make the pond.
Lily pads sets how light the pads are. Their color comes from the water, so they stay part of the pond rather than sitting on top of it, and this decides how far they lift above it. Each pad has its own shape and its own shade of green; none of them is a copy of another.
All three take effect immediately. None of them resets the pond.
Settings
The cog in the top right opens the pond settings:
| Setting | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Pond size | How large the oval is — small pool to edge-to-edge water |
| Water | The color of the water; the ground does not follow it |
| Lily pads | How light the pads sit above the water |
| Koi limit | How many koi the pond will hold |
| Turtles | How many turtles are in the water |
| Koi never hunted | A floor of koi turtles will leave alone |
| Turtle growth | How quickly a turtle grows when it eats |
| Hunts at size | How large a turtle must get before it hunts koi |
| Food per new koi | Pellets eaten before another koi arrives |
| Golden koi every | Average seconds between golden koi |
| Alligator every | Average seconds between alligators |
| Alligator size | How big they are. Each one still varies around it |
| Water bubbles | How often rings surface on the water |
| Starting koi | How many koi the pond opens with |
Restore defaults puts everything back.
Turn the alligator right down and the golden koi right up if you would rather just win. Turn them the other way if you would rather it were hard. Neither is wrong — it is your pond.
Sizing it to your eyes
View size is its own section of the settings panel, just above About. It has three sliders, and because the panel sits over the pond you see the effect — on the water and on the panel's own text — while you drag rather than adjusting blind.
| Control | What it sizes |
|---|---|
| Text | Every word in the app — the settings labels and their numbers, the hint, the footer |
| Controls | The sliders, checkboxes and readouts themselves |
| Panel | How wide the settings panel is |
Auto is the default, and it sizes the app to whatever screen you are on — a tablet gets a little more than a phone. Move any slider and it switches to manual, so nothing jumps to a number you did not choose. The button below the sliders switches back to auto whenever you want it.
Your choice is remembered on that device. Restore defaults resets the view sizes too — back to auto, along with the pond settings.
Tap targets never shrink. However small you set the text, every button and slider keeps a 48-pixel touch area, so a smaller setting never makes the app harder to hit.
The pond itself is sized separately, by Pond size in the settings — it changes the game, not the view.
Finding your way around
How to play at the bottom of the screen opens a short summary in place. The same is true of the underlined terms in the settings panel — tap one and it tells you what it does, with a link through to the section here that covers it.
Read the full guide at the bottom of the settings panel opens this document.
A coffee is welcome, never expected
If you find this game fun, please buy me a coffee. It is not expected but it is gladly accepted and helps offset the building and publishing costs. Thank you.