development update #20
Hello everyone,
It has been quite an interesting week with lots of things being worked on. There is no update to the build today but there was one at the start of the week we made a patch update that fixed a nasty bug that effects some players. Most of the small tweaks that would have gone into a build today from previous weeks ended up being part of this patch.
The bug occurred when loading older save files into more recent versions of the game. It should have been something that we found during testing and has given us ideas on how to make the loading code more robust. The person who found the bug would like to be known as "King Rensu". Well done your majesty for finding the bug and blessing us with an email with the saved files attached.
This is still very much a work in progress showing only the colour texture map. We are calling this a "blue mosaic fancy" guppy. It is really difficult to figure out the correct naming terminology. There are lots of sources of information on the internet from which to research but quite often there are differences in specifics. No doubt any fish experts among our players will be very vocal when we get a name wrong which will help.
This guppy model is brand new. It is the base female guppy model. As we said a few weeks ago all fish we make from now on will be gendered to prepare for when we add the breeding features. A slightly different animation rig will be applied to this model with the aim of getting better movement in it's tail fin as well as a bit more articulation in it's dorsal fin.
Once we have finalised both male and female models we can paint many different skins for any particular body shape. This is in anticipation of players wanting lots of different types of guppies because having lots of colourful fish that are all different is fun.
It will also allow for players to become guppy experts in the career system. Breeding guppies, collecting guppies etc. This will be done with most fish species. For instance there are a lot of types of goldfish body shapes and many different colourings for each body shape so it might be easy to imagine that we could have over 100 fish in the game just because of all the variations. Molly fish have a few variations of body shape but many variations of colours for instance.
Unlockable Modes:
Unlockable shop inventory items.
We have made progress adding features specific to the career system. Unfortunately it's a lot of rather boring stuff but quite important.
Unlockable items and modes. The whole point of a campaign/career mode in most games is so that it serves as a mechanism for limiting the availability of items and features to players. It is done like this usually because it makes more sense to start with nothing and then as the player increases their skills and is better educated in the game's mechanics they are given new things to play with.
However it is not our plan to make players spend hours and hours grinding to unlock new features and items. Because there will be lots and lots of things to unlock, unlocking items will be quite frequent and given as rewards for gaining qualifications, completing jobs, discovering secrets and more.
The modes will not take long to unlock because they will be part of the initial "aquarium school" tutorial.
Before:
After:
A minor change we made was to incorporate the aquarium selection interface into the main shop interface. This was simply because it was inconsistent with how all other items are created in game and no longer made sense.
inventory before:
inventory after:
The inventory itself has been modified slightly so it takes up less space on screen.
Players will need to define how the system treats any new aquarium that is created. Either sandbox or career. At the moment career mode is not available so the game will play just the same as before. Changes like this modify how the game is saved and loaded for each mode. As was said before this is boring stuff but extremely important to have in the game before any of the fun things can be added.
More progress has been made with the plumbing system. Manipulators have been added into the plumbing mode so it is possible to move and rotate each piece after it has been placed in the world. There have been some changes made to how manipulation is handled in this mode because everything sits in a 3d grid. Therefore rotation is limited to increments of 90 degrees and when an item is translated (moved) it does so at increments equal to the size of each grid cell. Hopefully the .gif clarifies exactly what that means.
The system now calculates the flow of water through the pipes as seen by the blue line in the gif. This will automatically detect if the water coming into the plumbing system from the aquarium actually makes it's way back to the aquarium.
This code calculates all the connections and water flow has to be executed in a very specific order and synchronise with the physics system so all the components are updated with the correct positions. It all seems to be working at the moment but much effort will be made to break it during testing.
Here are some images of prototype plumbing pipe pieces. The valves dont have a purpose at the moment other than just creating some visual interest. We are still figuring out the correct diameter of the pipes and what is an optimal polygon count for each piece. The rest of the aquarium will be hidden whilst the player is in plumbing mode so that means these items can have a few more polygons than usual.
It's a matter of weeks, not months until the first versions of the plumbing and career systems will be in the game. We will see what we can squeeze into the game build next week.
The Fishery Team
It has been quite an interesting week with lots of things being worked on. There is no update to the build today but there was one at the start of the week we made a patch update that fixed a nasty bug that effects some players. Most of the small tweaks that would have gone into a build today from previous weeks ended up being part of this patch.
The bug occurred when loading older save files into more recent versions of the game. It should have been something that we found during testing and has given us ideas on how to make the loading code more robust. The person who found the bug would like to be known as "King Rensu". Well done your majesty for finding the bug and blessing us with an email with the saved files attached.
This is still very much a work in progress showing only the colour texture map. We are calling this a "blue mosaic fancy" guppy. It is really difficult to figure out the correct naming terminology. There are lots of sources of information on the internet from which to research but quite often there are differences in specifics. No doubt any fish experts among our players will be very vocal when we get a name wrong which will help.
This guppy model is brand new. It is the base female guppy model. As we said a few weeks ago all fish we make from now on will be gendered to prepare for when we add the breeding features. A slightly different animation rig will be applied to this model with the aim of getting better movement in it's tail fin as well as a bit more articulation in it's dorsal fin.
Once we have finalised both male and female models we can paint many different skins for any particular body shape. This is in anticipation of players wanting lots of different types of guppies because having lots of colourful fish that are all different is fun.
It will also allow for players to become guppy experts in the career system. Breeding guppies, collecting guppies etc. This will be done with most fish species. For instance there are a lot of types of goldfish body shapes and many different colourings for each body shape so it might be easy to imagine that we could have over 100 fish in the game just because of all the variations. Molly fish have a few variations of body shape but many variations of colours for instance.
Unlockable Modes:
Unlockable shop inventory items.
We have made progress adding features specific to the career system. Unfortunately it's a lot of rather boring stuff but quite important.
Unlockable items and modes. The whole point of a campaign/career mode in most games is so that it serves as a mechanism for limiting the availability of items and features to players. It is done like this usually because it makes more sense to start with nothing and then as the player increases their skills and is better educated in the game's mechanics they are given new things to play with.
However it is not our plan to make players spend hours and hours grinding to unlock new features and items. Because there will be lots and lots of things to unlock, unlocking items will be quite frequent and given as rewards for gaining qualifications, completing jobs, discovering secrets and more.
The modes will not take long to unlock because they will be part of the initial "aquarium school" tutorial.
Before:
After:
A minor change we made was to incorporate the aquarium selection interface into the main shop interface. This was simply because it was inconsistent with how all other items are created in game and no longer made sense.
inventory before:
inventory after:
The inventory itself has been modified slightly so it takes up less space on screen.
Players will need to define how the system treats any new aquarium that is created. Either sandbox or career. At the moment career mode is not available so the game will play just the same as before. Changes like this modify how the game is saved and loaded for each mode. As was said before this is boring stuff but extremely important to have in the game before any of the fun things can be added.
More progress has been made with the plumbing system. Manipulators have been added into the plumbing mode so it is possible to move and rotate each piece after it has been placed in the world. There have been some changes made to how manipulation is handled in this mode because everything sits in a 3d grid. Therefore rotation is limited to increments of 90 degrees and when an item is translated (moved) it does so at increments equal to the size of each grid cell. Hopefully the .gif clarifies exactly what that means.
The system now calculates the flow of water through the pipes as seen by the blue line in the gif. This will automatically detect if the water coming into the plumbing system from the aquarium actually makes it's way back to the aquarium.
This code calculates all the connections and water flow has to be executed in a very specific order and synchronise with the physics system so all the components are updated with the correct positions. It all seems to be working at the moment but much effort will be made to break it during testing.
Here are some images of prototype plumbing pipe pieces. The valves dont have a purpose at the moment other than just creating some visual interest. We are still figuring out the correct diameter of the pipes and what is an optimal polygon count for each piece. The rest of the aquarium will be hidden whilst the player is in plumbing mode so that means these items can have a few more polygons than usual.
It's a matter of weeks, not months until the first versions of the plumbing and career systems will be in the game. We will see what we can squeeze into the game build next week.
The Fishery Team