Development Status Update
A belated Happy New Year from the Fishery Team.
We have been working like busy beavers mostly on the programming aspects of the game over the Christmas and new year break. Here is a quick run-down of our progress.
- Automatic creation of all in-game objects when the game starts. This one sounds a bit weird but what it means that every fish, plant, ornament, aquarium etc is created automatically through code when the game starts. This means we do not have to spend time manually creating and editing the game objects when we want to make a change. Of course we still need to spend time manually editing model and texture files which we are happy to do but the process of combining that data with game components for the selection, AI, saving and load systems etc is quite tedious and prone to human error.
We plan to have well over 100 objects in the game by the end of the Early Access period and having an automatic system that tells us if it finds the wrong data or can't find data at all for an object is much better than us checking by hand. Which also means we can make dramatic changes to a lot of objects in the days before a release and we don't have to spend hours checking everything and becoming paranoid.
- More progress has been made on the AI for fish, plants and other objects. It might sound a bit odd for plants to have AI but the behavior and state of a plant must be controlled somehow. For instance if there is not enough nutrients in the aquarium for the plants to live off then they will starve, die and decay. This is a complex set of steps that happens over time and works differently for each plant. That is just one aspect of how they interact with the world. We will be showing more of the AI system as we make more progress and have some really interesting stuff to show.
- We have started making more "real world" fish and plants. This is due to an increase in feedback from people asking for it. We had always planned to have a mixture of real and made up content but have decided to prioritize the real world stuff a bit more. Here is a look at some of the real world plants we have started prototyping. You also might notice the aquatic plant pots. All plants will be capable of having these visible or not. We will post some of the new fish soon.
- The variation system has been re-engineered to have even more possibilities. It is a bit tricky to explain only with text so we will make a post in the coming weeks that shows it with images.
- We will be at GDC 2019 in San Fransisco in March. We will have a booth where you can come and play Fishery. More information will be available as we get closer to it.
We will give another update in around a week from now. Stay tuned!!
The Fishery Team
We have been working like busy beavers mostly on the programming aspects of the game over the Christmas and new year break. Here is a quick run-down of our progress.
- Automatic creation of all in-game objects when the game starts. This one sounds a bit weird but what it means that every fish, plant, ornament, aquarium etc is created automatically through code when the game starts. This means we do not have to spend time manually creating and editing the game objects when we want to make a change. Of course we still need to spend time manually editing model and texture files which we are happy to do but the process of combining that data with game components for the selection, AI, saving and load systems etc is quite tedious and prone to human error.
We plan to have well over 100 objects in the game by the end of the Early Access period and having an automatic system that tells us if it finds the wrong data or can't find data at all for an object is much better than us checking by hand. Which also means we can make dramatic changes to a lot of objects in the days before a release and we don't have to spend hours checking everything and becoming paranoid.
- More progress has been made on the AI for fish, plants and other objects. It might sound a bit odd for plants to have AI but the behavior and state of a plant must be controlled somehow. For instance if there is not enough nutrients in the aquarium for the plants to live off then they will starve, die and decay. This is a complex set of steps that happens over time and works differently for each plant. That is just one aspect of how they interact with the world. We will be showing more of the AI system as we make more progress and have some really interesting stuff to show.
- We have started making more "real world" fish and plants. This is due to an increase in feedback from people asking for it. We had always planned to have a mixture of real and made up content but have decided to prioritize the real world stuff a bit more. Here is a look at some of the real world plants we have started prototyping. You also might notice the aquatic plant pots. All plants will be capable of having these visible or not. We will post some of the new fish soon.
- The variation system has been re-engineered to have even more possibilities. It is a bit tricky to explain only with text so we will make a post in the coming weeks that shows it with images.
- We will be at GDC 2019 in San Fransisco in March. We will have a booth where you can come and play Fishery. More information will be available as we get closer to it.
We will give another update in around a week from now. Stay tuned!!
The Fishery Team