development update #128
Hello everyone
Once again this a news only update because I was unable to get the new build of the game ready to play in time for the end of March. This has happened again for all of the usual reasons. Adding, modifying, refining, and remaking parts of the game ends up taking longer than I had hoped. They take longer to work on but the result is better than expected most of the time. Which then drives me to do the same to other features and I get onto a bit of a roll with things and before I know it I'm behind in the schedule but ahead in what I had expected the result would be. Things sort of snowball from there. I/we, (My colleague at Lilou studio and I) are really feeling good about how development is going now. Real progress was somewhat slow and with a fair bit of friction before now. For example when it comes to water chemistry in the game we made a lot of updates previously but we were going around in circles in terms of how actually good it was but now we have got it to a place that we are pretty happy with and can make a lot of tweaks without having to rewrite parts of the code again.
Note: keep in mind that not all the data in the screenshots is correct or final. especially when looking at item prices, statuses. A lot of data is still using test/debug values. but it will of course all be working correctly when the update is on steam.
water chemistry ui preview. showing saturation and demand/ supply of oxygen. mousing over the icons reveals a text label telling players what they are.
For instance the whole system for calculating how water chemistry changes over time has been rewritten in code from scratch again and for the final time. In other words the way that the numbers are crunched when it comes to calculating how oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients, algae, waste, interact with eachother and interact with items placed in the aquarium is working much better now. We are also happier with how the data is displayed to players, which for years I personally was very unhappy with.
Plant selection UI
It also ties in with the redesign of the graphical user interface which is more colourful and interesting than the old one that everyone is used to. I am particularly fond of the new icons which are everywhere now. I used a 15 year old version of a renderer called 'Mental Ray' to render the icons because it is difficult for modern renderers to get a somewhat retro look in terms of lighting and shading and I was not happy with the results of more modern renderers. Furthermore it helps Fishery to stand out among the growing crowd of aquarium games that seems to be arriving on steam every few months, but more on that later.
Various languages - (Not all data is translated or active but it will be when the update is released)
Japanese
Russian
Chinese
The use of icons in more places than before is especially important now because we have to account for the length of words changing due to all the different languages that we are supporting. We have to try and keep the user interfaces to be as concise as possible so they do not take up too much space. Some words or phrases might be short in english but longer in German or Russian. We have to find ways to accommodate that possibility without enlarging the size of UI panels or making everything look squashed together.
Shop Item Info UI
Sometimes it cannot be avoided because in the case above the UI that appears is a result of the player's mouse moving over a fish icon to reveal information about that particular fish. We cannot put icons that can be "Moused Over" on that popup UI because that popup only appears when the mouse is over a fish icon. So we have to break some of our own rules from time to time to make things work.
Powered Device Maintenance
Some features are being reintroduced. For instance all artificial devices will require maintenance after a certain time of operation. In other words when a mechanical filter is added to the aquarium it will work flawlessly for a period of time before it needs to be cleaned, unclogged, oiled, spit-shined etc. Players will have to click the maintenance button for that particular device and it will then take some time before it is ready for operation again, and depending on how a player's aquarium is setup, having a filter go down for maintenance for a short while may endanger parts of the aquarium, for instance in that time algae may start to grow because the water is not being cleaned adequately. Players will hopefully over time learn to plan and predict how the various maintenance cycles will affect the long term health of their aquariums.
You might notice in that picture that this filter has a power consumption icon. The electrical power feature is coming back because it is now useful. Each aquarium comes with a certain amount of base power but when player's want/need to add more powered devices to their aquariums they will need to generate electricity. We will be adding items like little electrical generators that bob up and down on the water's surface generating electricity and we will also add an electrical turbine that is very similar to the electrical turbine that used to exist in the plumbing system that was removed. This electrical turbine will be attached to the outside of the aquarium, either on the side of the bottom, and will pump water through a turbine to generate more power.
There will be a lot more of these "pseudo-plumbing system" devices that can be placed inside and outside of the aquarium that perform various tasks. One of which will be a kind of automatic "water changer" or "water cleaner". We will be removing the current way of doing water changes which is just some button in a UI panel that performs magic water changes. Water changes will instead be done by a device that requires power and maintenance, and will be constantly cleaning the water until it is turned off. But players who play the campaign wont have access to that immediately because it will need to be researched and unlocked with the right amount of money and experience. But I will come back to that a bit later too.
Black molly
Dalmation molly - texture will probably be tweaked. painting anything white is very tricky with lighting
sailfin molly models - will be fully textured for the release.
There will be some new fish. I promised someone in the forums that the next update will include these Mollies. Black and Dalmatian mollies, and still left to paint are the sailfin mollies. I also have to program in the Seahorse that was shown in the last news update. A large amount of effort has been spent making it easier and faster to program new object types into the game. For instance when the shrimp and snail were added to the game there was a lot of duplicated code needed to get them to work even though they share certain characteristics and interact with a lot of the same systems.
In fact there was a lot of duplicated code throughout all of the different object types. This is not unusual because often a lot of progress can be made quickly by not striving to make a perfect system that connects everything together without the programming equivalent of duct tape. But as time goes on and things get bigger and more complex it becomes cumbersome and inefficient. The last three months have been spent going through almost all of the game code and removing the "duct tape" in favor or making something that requires much less code to do exactly the same functionality. As a result thousands of lines of code have been deleted and making changes to how things work takes much less time and is much less error prone.
Campaign Mode And Research Trees
To return to what I spoke about earlier on the subject of in-game experience and research. There will be a quite large research tree in the game that will be the core of campaign mode. Players will start campaign mode with only a few things unlocked. 1 fish species, 1 aquarium, 1 plant species, 1 food item, etc. From there on wards the gameplay will be taught to players and as their experience allows them to level up they will have access to more objectives that reward them with more experience and money which can then be used to unlock new items in the research tree. Almost everything in the game will need to be unlocked. Not just animal species, decorations, backgrounds, and devices, but important game features like the time controls, substrate sculpting and painting, the number of slots in animal storage, etc.
Steam Achievements
This will also tie in with steam achievements which a fair number of players have asked for. I don't really know how many achievements there will be eventually but I think it will be a good amount. I have found that some players on steam use achievements as a way of tracking progress in a game. Once they have unlocked all the achievements for a game then they know that more or less everything the game has to offer has been played. which is an interesting way to see it. There will be achievements that track the player's experience levels as they unlock them. For example when players become a `level 2 aqua-botanist` there will be an accompanying steam achievement. There will also be other normal achievements that one might expect in games similar to this like "Breed 100 fish", or "Earn ₣1000". etc. There will also be a lot of hidden achievements that get added over time and we will not talk about much.
Steam Sync, changes to the save system, and old file incompatibility.
The next update will include support for steam sync which is the steam feature that uploads and downloads game progress so players can play their games on multiple computers and have all saved progress copy over to every machine. This meant that I have had to change how the saved game files are named and organized on player's computers so steam sync finds and saves the correct files with ease. There are additional changes made to the folder and file structures to account for the addition of campaign mode. Aquariums files, animal storage files, campaign progress files all need to be stored and organized according to each campaign profile and separated from all sandbox aquarium files.
All previous saved games in sandbox mode will NOT work from the next version of fishery. The game will simply ignore them. It is not the fault of Steam sync that this is happening. It is my fault entirely. I had to make structural changes to how data is stored inside the files themselves because it was getting a bit messy and inefficient. This should be the only time this has to happen during the early access period and it certainly will not happen after the game is out of early access but unfortunately it has to happen now. It also means I have to spend a bit of time making all new example aquariums for people to learn from.
a selection of sound files that we have made. The teleport sounds are for when a fish or other physics object glitches through the substrate or outside of the glass. The system detects it and re-drops them into the aquarium from above. and it's more interesting to add a sound and there will also be a nice particle effect.
There are a lot more sounds now. The game is very quiet in the current version and everything feels very empty. We have added sounds for most interactions. For example when players place an item into the aquarium it makes a nice soft impact noise. This week I will also add some nice particle effects to that so it looks like there is some "underwater dust displacement" occurring when the item is summoned into existence that accompanies the sound. There are also sounds for other interactions like sculpting and painting the substrate, and we will continue adding new sounds in every update.
Fish selection ui. again mousing over the icons will reveal the parameter name.
It is not visible yet but every animal in the game will have a "Fertility" bar in the well-being section that shows how successfully they will be able to breed. For example if a fish has a full fertility bar then they have a very good chance of producing offspring, but having a low "Fertility" bar will mean the opposite. The fertility bar changes based on how happy and healthy the animals are. You can also see that there is a Sell Price. Every item now has a sell price. Nothing is ever deleted anymore it is simply sold. The sell price for animals and plants will change based on the condition of the animal or plant. If for instance they are in poor health then it will sell for much lower than if they were fully healthy.
Casual Mode
Sandbox mode is changing to be "Casual Mode". At the moment full blown campaign mode is still not ready to play. I am concerned that there is not much for players to do in campaign mode other than unlock stuff that has existed already in the game for a few years now. The mechanisms for buying and selling fish and other items are in place and working but there are not enough story lines, contracts, research items, experience levels, etc for players to play yet. However the core mechanism of buying, breeding, and selling fish and the other animals is fun to play and also needs a lot of testing from players.
To repeat, Casual mode is what will be released in the next update. Campaign mode will not be playable yet, but casual mode will encompass a lot of the mechanisms used in campaign mode that give it a nice gameplay loop. Such as starting with a relatively small amount of money, buying an aquarium, some fish, plants etc. Then breeding fish, nurturing them into adulthood and selling them for a profit so more expensive fish, aquariums, plants, etc can be bought and that cycle can keep on going. As time goes on we will be working more on campaign mode features and they will come into casual mode for players to play and test.
Think of it like the default mode in cities skylines. It does not have a story or explicit tasks and objectives per say but it is something that has a challenge and players have something to actually do.
It is the next best way to let players play the latest features of the game without making them wait for another 6 months until campaign is much more complete and complex. And of course it is purely my fault. I am still just not able to deliver everything I want to do on time with this game. It is just monstrously difficult and I realise how disappointing I have been lately.
When we do upload the new build It will just go online on steam without a news post like this explaining that it is now live and all the features it has. This is because the next build will support 29 different languages and we have to spend quite a few hours, possibly days, updating all of the text and images for the steam store page and write a news post that that supports every language. And this is a lot of clicking and paranoia checking that we have to do. But the update will be there to play.
I will be happy to answer questions as usual, but I will pile up for a few days before answering them so I can answer as many of them in on shot as possible.
We wish you all a very nice Saturday evening,
The Fishery Team
Once again this a news only update because I was unable to get the new build of the game ready to play in time for the end of March. This has happened again for all of the usual reasons. Adding, modifying, refining, and remaking parts of the game ends up taking longer than I had hoped. They take longer to work on but the result is better than expected most of the time. Which then drives me to do the same to other features and I get onto a bit of a roll with things and before I know it I'm behind in the schedule but ahead in what I had expected the result would be. Things sort of snowball from there. I/we, (My colleague at Lilou studio and I) are really feeling good about how development is going now. Real progress was somewhat slow and with a fair bit of friction before now. For example when it comes to water chemistry in the game we made a lot of updates previously but we were going around in circles in terms of how actually good it was but now we have got it to a place that we are pretty happy with and can make a lot of tweaks without having to rewrite parts of the code again.
Note: keep in mind that not all the data in the screenshots is correct or final. especially when looking at item prices, statuses. A lot of data is still using test/debug values. but it will of course all be working correctly when the update is on steam.
water chemistry ui preview. showing saturation and demand/ supply of oxygen. mousing over the icons reveals a text label telling players what they are.
For instance the whole system for calculating how water chemistry changes over time has been rewritten in code from scratch again and for the final time. In other words the way that the numbers are crunched when it comes to calculating how oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients, algae, waste, interact with eachother and interact with items placed in the aquarium is working much better now. We are also happier with how the data is displayed to players, which for years I personally was very unhappy with.
Plant selection UI
It also ties in with the redesign of the graphical user interface which is more colourful and interesting than the old one that everyone is used to. I am particularly fond of the new icons which are everywhere now. I used a 15 year old version of a renderer called 'Mental Ray' to render the icons because it is difficult for modern renderers to get a somewhat retro look in terms of lighting and shading and I was not happy with the results of more modern renderers. Furthermore it helps Fishery to stand out among the growing crowd of aquarium games that seems to be arriving on steam every few months, but more on that later.
Various languages - (Not all data is translated or active but it will be when the update is released)
Japanese
Russian
Chinese
The use of icons in more places than before is especially important now because we have to account for the length of words changing due to all the different languages that we are supporting. We have to try and keep the user interfaces to be as concise as possible so they do not take up too much space. Some words or phrases might be short in english but longer in German or Russian. We have to find ways to accommodate that possibility without enlarging the size of UI panels or making everything look squashed together.
Shop Item Info UI
Sometimes it cannot be avoided because in the case above the UI that appears is a result of the player's mouse moving over a fish icon to reveal information about that particular fish. We cannot put icons that can be "Moused Over" on that popup UI because that popup only appears when the mouse is over a fish icon. So we have to break some of our own rules from time to time to make things work.
Powered Device Maintenance
Some features are being reintroduced. For instance all artificial devices will require maintenance after a certain time of operation. In other words when a mechanical filter is added to the aquarium it will work flawlessly for a period of time before it needs to be cleaned, unclogged, oiled, spit-shined etc. Players will have to click the maintenance button for that particular device and it will then take some time before it is ready for operation again, and depending on how a player's aquarium is setup, having a filter go down for maintenance for a short while may endanger parts of the aquarium, for instance in that time algae may start to grow because the water is not being cleaned adequately. Players will hopefully over time learn to plan and predict how the various maintenance cycles will affect the long term health of their aquariums.
You might notice in that picture that this filter has a power consumption icon. The electrical power feature is coming back because it is now useful. Each aquarium comes with a certain amount of base power but when player's want/need to add more powered devices to their aquariums they will need to generate electricity. We will be adding items like little electrical generators that bob up and down on the water's surface generating electricity and we will also add an electrical turbine that is very similar to the electrical turbine that used to exist in the plumbing system that was removed. This electrical turbine will be attached to the outside of the aquarium, either on the side of the bottom, and will pump water through a turbine to generate more power.
There will be a lot more of these "pseudo-plumbing system" devices that can be placed inside and outside of the aquarium that perform various tasks. One of which will be a kind of automatic "water changer" or "water cleaner". We will be removing the current way of doing water changes which is just some button in a UI panel that performs magic water changes. Water changes will instead be done by a device that requires power and maintenance, and will be constantly cleaning the water until it is turned off. But players who play the campaign wont have access to that immediately because it will need to be researched and unlocked with the right amount of money and experience. But I will come back to that a bit later too.
Black molly
Dalmation molly - texture will probably be tweaked. painting anything white is very tricky with lighting
sailfin molly models - will be fully textured for the release.
There will be some new fish. I promised someone in the forums that the next update will include these Mollies. Black and Dalmatian mollies, and still left to paint are the sailfin mollies. I also have to program in the Seahorse that was shown in the last news update. A large amount of effort has been spent making it easier and faster to program new object types into the game. For instance when the shrimp and snail were added to the game there was a lot of duplicated code needed to get them to work even though they share certain characteristics and interact with a lot of the same systems.
In fact there was a lot of duplicated code throughout all of the different object types. This is not unusual because often a lot of progress can be made quickly by not striving to make a perfect system that connects everything together without the programming equivalent of duct tape. But as time goes on and things get bigger and more complex it becomes cumbersome and inefficient. The last three months have been spent going through almost all of the game code and removing the "duct tape" in favor or making something that requires much less code to do exactly the same functionality. As a result thousands of lines of code have been deleted and making changes to how things work takes much less time and is much less error prone.
Campaign Mode And Research Trees
To return to what I spoke about earlier on the subject of in-game experience and research. There will be a quite large research tree in the game that will be the core of campaign mode. Players will start campaign mode with only a few things unlocked. 1 fish species, 1 aquarium, 1 plant species, 1 food item, etc. From there on wards the gameplay will be taught to players and as their experience allows them to level up they will have access to more objectives that reward them with more experience and money which can then be used to unlock new items in the research tree. Almost everything in the game will need to be unlocked. Not just animal species, decorations, backgrounds, and devices, but important game features like the time controls, substrate sculpting and painting, the number of slots in animal storage, etc.
Steam Achievements
This will also tie in with steam achievements which a fair number of players have asked for. I don't really know how many achievements there will be eventually but I think it will be a good amount. I have found that some players on steam use achievements as a way of tracking progress in a game. Once they have unlocked all the achievements for a game then they know that more or less everything the game has to offer has been played. which is an interesting way to see it. There will be achievements that track the player's experience levels as they unlock them. For example when players become a `level 2 aqua-botanist` there will be an accompanying steam achievement. There will also be other normal achievements that one might expect in games similar to this like "Breed 100 fish", or "Earn ₣1000". etc. There will also be a lot of hidden achievements that get added over time and we will not talk about much.
Steam Sync, changes to the save system, and old file incompatibility.
The next update will include support for steam sync which is the steam feature that uploads and downloads game progress so players can play their games on multiple computers and have all saved progress copy over to every machine. This meant that I have had to change how the saved game files are named and organized on player's computers so steam sync finds and saves the correct files with ease. There are additional changes made to the folder and file structures to account for the addition of campaign mode. Aquariums files, animal storage files, campaign progress files all need to be stored and organized according to each campaign profile and separated from all sandbox aquarium files.
All previous saved games in sandbox mode will NOT work from the next version of fishery. The game will simply ignore them. It is not the fault of Steam sync that this is happening. It is my fault entirely. I had to make structural changes to how data is stored inside the files themselves because it was getting a bit messy and inefficient. This should be the only time this has to happen during the early access period and it certainly will not happen after the game is out of early access but unfortunately it has to happen now. It also means I have to spend a bit of time making all new example aquariums for people to learn from.
a selection of sound files that we have made. The teleport sounds are for when a fish or other physics object glitches through the substrate or outside of the glass. The system detects it and re-drops them into the aquarium from above. and it's more interesting to add a sound and there will also be a nice particle effect.
There are a lot more sounds now. The game is very quiet in the current version and everything feels very empty. We have added sounds for most interactions. For example when players place an item into the aquarium it makes a nice soft impact noise. This week I will also add some nice particle effects to that so it looks like there is some "underwater dust displacement" occurring when the item is summoned into existence that accompanies the sound. There are also sounds for other interactions like sculpting and painting the substrate, and we will continue adding new sounds in every update.
Fish selection ui. again mousing over the icons will reveal the parameter name.
It is not visible yet but every animal in the game will have a "Fertility" bar in the well-being section that shows how successfully they will be able to breed. For example if a fish has a full fertility bar then they have a very good chance of producing offspring, but having a low "Fertility" bar will mean the opposite. The fertility bar changes based on how happy and healthy the animals are. You can also see that there is a Sell Price. Every item now has a sell price. Nothing is ever deleted anymore it is simply sold. The sell price for animals and plants will change based on the condition of the animal or plant. If for instance they are in poor health then it will sell for much lower than if they were fully healthy.
Casual Mode
Sandbox mode is changing to be "Casual Mode". At the moment full blown campaign mode is still not ready to play. I am concerned that there is not much for players to do in campaign mode other than unlock stuff that has existed already in the game for a few years now. The mechanisms for buying and selling fish and other items are in place and working but there are not enough story lines, contracts, research items, experience levels, etc for players to play yet. However the core mechanism of buying, breeding, and selling fish and the other animals is fun to play and also needs a lot of testing from players.
To repeat, Casual mode is what will be released in the next update. Campaign mode will not be playable yet, but casual mode will encompass a lot of the mechanisms used in campaign mode that give it a nice gameplay loop. Such as starting with a relatively small amount of money, buying an aquarium, some fish, plants etc. Then breeding fish, nurturing them into adulthood and selling them for a profit so more expensive fish, aquariums, plants, etc can be bought and that cycle can keep on going. As time goes on we will be working more on campaign mode features and they will come into casual mode for players to play and test.
Think of it like the default mode in cities skylines. It does not have a story or explicit tasks and objectives per say but it is something that has a challenge and players have something to actually do.
It is the next best way to let players play the latest features of the game without making them wait for another 6 months until campaign is much more complete and complex. And of course it is purely my fault. I am still just not able to deliver everything I want to do on time with this game. It is just monstrously difficult and I realise how disappointing I have been lately.
When we do upload the new build It will just go online on steam without a news post like this explaining that it is now live and all the features it has. This is because the next build will support 29 different languages and we have to spend quite a few hours, possibly days, updating all of the text and images for the steam store page and write a news post that that supports every language. And this is a lot of clicking and paranoia checking that we have to do. But the update will be there to play.
I will be happy to answer questions as usual, but I will pile up for a few days before answering them so I can answer as many of them in on shot as possible.
We wish you all a very nice Saturday evening,
The Fishery Team