development update #8
Hello everyone,
This weeks update will be delayed until next week.
The main problem is that we tried to do a little too much and we cannot get it all polished enough done in time. Especially when it comes to the artwork. On top of that there are some rather urgent issues with the user interface that are annoying players and that requires some aggressive redesigning from a programming perspective.
We would like to show you a sneak peak of some of the things that are almost ready and will be in the game soon. Today is of course Halloween and we have some Halloween decorations to add to the game.
The current small selection of fish we have in the game are all based off of real world fish. We want to continue adding lots and lots of real world fish but we will also be adding lots of non-real/surreal fish into the game over time because its very fun to design and create such creatures and each fish will effect the ecosystem in more interesting ways if not only visually.
For instance this fish is loosely based off of the design of a piranha. It will swim around the aquarium in groups looking for dead or dying fish and then proceed to eat them. Players could see this as a natural mechanism for waste management. They will never get hungry and die they just roam around and eat what they feel should be eaten.
When a fish dies it's spirit will break free from it's body and aimlessly roam around the world until it's body has been removed from the aquarium. The ghost will not actually interact with anything. It will pass through every object in the world and scare the crap out of nearby fish. This will be especially important once we have reconfigured the fish ai to be susceptible to stress and fear. There will also be mechanisms added later in the game that allow for the spirit to recombine with it's body and thus be resurrected but this will happen only in the right set of circumstances and will require exact steps to be followed by the player.
On first inspection perhaps it makes no sense at all to place a severed arm into an aquarium for reasons of decoration. It does however make things more interesting and allows for some really creative aquarium designs. If fish swim a little too close to this it will twitch and even attempt to grab the fish causing certain fish's stress levels to sky rocket while other more scary/mean fish wont care very much at all.
Obviously a lot of this stuff requires more programming and a lot of testing to get it all working well. This is part of the cause for the delay. We work on this all month and things pile up when higher priority bugs or features need to be worked on.
What we will try to do for the updates in November is to balance the release of art content and programming changes much better on a per week basis. Next week for instance we will release a version of the game with bug fixes and some of the art content showed above and we will try to repeat that every week from now on.
The Fishery Team
This weeks update will be delayed until next week.
The main problem is that we tried to do a little too much and we cannot get it all polished enough done in time. Especially when it comes to the artwork. On top of that there are some rather urgent issues with the user interface that are annoying players and that requires some aggressive redesigning from a programming perspective.
We would like to show you a sneak peak of some of the things that are almost ready and will be in the game soon. Today is of course Halloween and we have some Halloween decorations to add to the game.
The current small selection of fish we have in the game are all based off of real world fish. We want to continue adding lots and lots of real world fish but we will also be adding lots of non-real/surreal fish into the game over time because its very fun to design and create such creatures and each fish will effect the ecosystem in more interesting ways if not only visually.
For instance this fish is loosely based off of the design of a piranha. It will swim around the aquarium in groups looking for dead or dying fish and then proceed to eat them. Players could see this as a natural mechanism for waste management. They will never get hungry and die they just roam around and eat what they feel should be eaten.
When a fish dies it's spirit will break free from it's body and aimlessly roam around the world until it's body has been removed from the aquarium. The ghost will not actually interact with anything. It will pass through every object in the world and scare the crap out of nearby fish. This will be especially important once we have reconfigured the fish ai to be susceptible to stress and fear. There will also be mechanisms added later in the game that allow for the spirit to recombine with it's body and thus be resurrected but this will happen only in the right set of circumstances and will require exact steps to be followed by the player.
On first inspection perhaps it makes no sense at all to place a severed arm into an aquarium for reasons of decoration. It does however make things more interesting and allows for some really creative aquarium designs. If fish swim a little too close to this it will twitch and even attempt to grab the fish causing certain fish's stress levels to sky rocket while other more scary/mean fish wont care very much at all.
Obviously a lot of this stuff requires more programming and a lot of testing to get it all working well. This is part of the cause for the delay. We work on this all month and things pile up when higher priority bugs or features need to be worked on.
What we will try to do for the updates in November is to balance the release of art content and programming changes much better on a per week basis. Next week for instance we will release a version of the game with bug fixes and some of the art content showed above and we will try to repeat that every week from now on.
The Fishery Team