Calm Cove per Jason

Calm Cove is a calm, ambient 3D cove for Firefox, in the sidebar and in a full game tab. Watch hand-drawn, cel-shaded characters swim, drift and walk past rising bubbles and shimmering light, with the water tinted for the time of day and the season at your location -- then feed them, care for them and watch your cove grow.

The Cove
- A dozen species: guppy, clownfish and angelfish (which now and then appear in rare colours), jellyfish wind chime, crab, whale, submarine, polar bear, koinobori, sunflower pinwheel, snowman and seaweed -- each with its own way of moving. Sandbox coves add the arowana and the nautilus.
- Four tools under your pointer: Hand, Food, Cleaner or Pet. With the Hand, fish notice the pointer and are startled by a tap; tap for bubbles; hold the Food tool to sprinkle food and watch the fish come for it.
- Your own cove: choose which characters live in it on the My cove page; each cove gets a generated name, boulders and a rock arch to hide behind, and sand with dunes and pebbles.
- Day, night and seasons: the water shifts through night, dawn, day and dusk from sunrise and sunset at your location, tints with the season, and the light shafts lean with the sun.
- Gentle on your computer: draws at 30 frames a second in a background worker (up to 60 with the Smooth motion switch, off by default), steps its outline quality down only when frames run slow, drops to 15 with the battery saver, and can be paused or reduced from the Accessibility page. It also honours your reduced-motion setting.

The Care Game
- Feed daily, earn coins: feed your fish each day to earn coins, and unlock shop items as the days add up.
- Names and quirks: every resident has a name and a personality -- bold, zippy, dainty, loner or timid -- and shy ones hide behind your rocks.
- A shop and a budget: buy ornaments, rocks and treats for friends who share a quirk, and keep chequing, savings and emergency accounts. Pollution is light, and clearing it by hand earns a few coins.
- A cove that lives on: new residents arrive over the months, and after time away the cove looks neglected until you visit.
- Your way to play: mouse, touch (with a phone-friendly toolbar) or a game controller; text and controls meet WCAG AAA contrast.

Visit a Friend
- Swap two short codes out of band (a message, an email) to link two computers directly -- up to eight friends at once. Off until you switch it on.
- Visit each other: see a friend's cove, ornaments and plants, watch each other's pointers, send one emoji at a time, feed together (they are told when their fish eat), and leave a gift or say thanks.
- Direct link: the cove is drawn from a small recipe both sides share, so nothing is uploaded to a server. Your friend sees your IP address and the link goes through the STUN server you choose on the Visit page.

Weather (optional)
- Off by default: switch it on from the Network page and the surface shows rain ripples and dimmer light under cloud.
- Your location stays vague: one request every 30 minutes to Open-Meteo, carrying only your coordinates rounded to about 10 km.

Privacy and Control
- Nothing leaves your browser unless you turn it on: the sky is calculated locally. Visits and weather are opt-in and listed on the Network page, where an Offline switch stops everything.
- Geolocation is optional: the tint uses your real coordinates if you allow it, then manual coordinates, then a time-zone estimate.
- Available in English, German, French, Italian and Japanese.

Art

The characters are original cel-shaded 3D models, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; the code is MPL 2.0.