Fish Game News

Hello Fish Gamers! Big update this month. A lot of these improvements were from discord suggestions, so if you haven’t already be sure to join by clicking the button on the bottom left.

First up! One many players have been looking forward to but the fish certainly have not:

DISEASE



We consulted with the lovely scientists & experts at the Gettin’ Fishy With it Pod on which diseases we should include and how they should be treated and spread. We have 6 gross ailments spread across 2 categories:

Bacteria

• Body Fungus
  
• Fin Rot
  
• Popeye
  

Parasite

• Velvet
  
• Hole in Head disease
  
• Ich
  

For those more into escaping the disgusting realities of fishkeeping, you will be able to toggle both the visual nastiness or diseases as a whole in the options.



But, good news, we’ve also added medicine for each of these afflictions. Standard recommended treatments of reducing stress and using hospital tanks is of course also vital!



Other great stuff!

• Cloud Saves! They work now. And save files will be smaller. Hop between machines or between your steam deck and PC.
  
• Fish love you back. Fish will recognize when you’ve come back to see them and say hi. Naturally skittish fish will hide, and they will warm up to you over time if you take good care of them.
  
• Varied fish & plant max growths for a more natural and realistic experience.
  
• Plants are now rotatable for even more detailed scaping!
  
• Plant root needs now matter! For instance: rhizome plants will not survive in substrate.
  
• We’ve improved the appearance and UI/UX of the shops for easier use; no more (or at least less!) bonkers floating hardscape, and some of them–while still procedurally generated–might even look pretty darn nice and inspire some scapin’ ideas.
  
  
• New music! New tunes from A Shell in the Pit. Also some updated sounds and audio fixes.
  
• Improved UI scaling for Steam Deck, and updated controls. We should be ready to upgrade our sad “playable” to “verified” shortly.
  
• Player cursor variable speed option added to settings. A discord request!
  
• Smoother tank transitions
• Improved Alerts so they are less chaotic and more reliable.
  
• Fish Respawn only in places they’ve been to recently, so they should no longer appear in random locations. You can finally build your two sided tanks with a mountain in the middle!
  
• Fixed Revenge Death Spirals and lowered the amount of injury sustained from nipping. If one aggressive fish bit a second aggressive fish they would immediately trigger a “revenge” attack which would trigger another attack (etc) until someone died…very quickly. Revenge should only happen once now.
  
• Many other bug fixes and improvements including Chemistries loading correctly, dragging hardscape out from the inventory without vanishing issues, fixed fish ages not tracking while the player was not present, fixed plants attached to hardscape getting lost when moving hardscape to the inventory, fixed fish bouncing on the top of the water, improved world lighting to reduce harsh shadows, and improved polish on some UI elements/buttons.
  

Original broadcast date: Feb 9, on Twitch. Check out our behaviour design systems and see the depth with me (Gord) and fish biologist and youtuber/twitch streamer AVNJ, as we design behaviour for AVNJ's favourite fish, the endangered Bridle Shiner. You can't keep'em in real life, but you can in our game!

We adjust everything from how long they live, to where they prefer to hang out in the tank and how tightly they like to shoal. We adjust their animation system to get them swimming realistically and adjust all kinds of other behavioural attributes.

Watch here.

Hello everyone! We are thr-gilled to announce that in time for Valentine’s Day, we are welcoming female fish to the game! You can expect to start finding male and female fish in shops with this update. We can’t get too romantic, however, as the breeding update will be a while.

https://youtu.be/RfITvIkz1Ms

For some of the species, female fish will be visibly different from the male counterparts, either in size, color, or model. For other species, even scientists can’t seem to find a difference, so females will look the same.



Keep an eye out for new behaviors that these gal pals will introduce. We don’t want to spoil anything, but–love them or hate them–betta sororities are now a possibility!

And some more exciting news: the bridle shiner will be making its debut in this update!



The bridle shiner is a species of special concern for one of our favorite YouTubers, AVNJ, who even helped us design the behavior! You can watch that in action here. We’re hoping its inclusion will bring awareness to an at-risk fish species.

That’s all for now, but we’re deep into work for the next update already. In the meantime, we’re looking forward to seeing your Valentine’s date night tanks!

If you want to talk to us or share and chat with the community, come on over to our discord.

The limited-time winter market has been removed.

Gordon McGladdery, one of the developers of Fish Game, plays the game and shows off the latest updates, plus his aquascaping and fishkeeping skills. Fishy shenanigans ensue!