development update #52
Hello everyone,
This week was a "tying up loose ends" week for the game due to me not being able to complete all of my work last week because of a family emergency. The family member in question is doing well. Thank you to all who expressed their well wishes.
There were quite a few small/trivial changes made to the game this week which are not terribly interesting to speak about. One slightly interesting change is to the way we display the version of the game when it is started. Before this week it has been displayed as a slightly cryptic software version number like 0.45. That has now changed to a simple build number. Our latest build released onto steam is build 35.
Plumbing Backdrops:
One of the more interesting changes made was adding the possibility for players to change the backdrop of the plumbing area. Up until now players could change the backdrop behind the aquarium only. Now that has changed and once we add more choices of backdrops players can make their creations feel a little more unique and interesting.
The only backdrop available for the plumbing area for the moment is solid colour. It will not share all the same backdrops as the aquarium itself. This is because there is meant to be a distinction between the plumbing area and the aquarium. The aquarium represents creativity, a sort of colloquial definition of chaos theory and butterfly effect, ecosystems etc. Whereas the plumbing area represents artificial life support, rigid parameters, machinery, limited choices etc. This distinction should be present is the type of backdrops available so things are thematically consistent.
Last week the backdrop list was posted on the forums which has some ideas for the directions we are going for both backdrop types and as always you are invited to make suggestions. We are working on some new backdrops already and are fixing up the existing ones to be better.
We also managed to fix a few minor bugs for backdrops. Mostly these were around robustness and efficiency. One interesting fact is that both backdrops are loaded at the same time and sit on top of each other in the scene but they are attached to certain "visibility" layers which the camera chooses to see or not. This means switching between plumbing and aquarium modes will not trigger the unloading and loading of backdrops because that would be slow and inefficient. This method will use a little more memory but it is not like loading a huge level from a AAA game.
A new entry into the quick help window was added that talks about backdrops.
Selection/Manipulation Tool Settings UI Toggle:
A toggle button was added for showing/hiding the selection and manipulation tool options. These options are quite useful but they can get in the way sometimes. Players can now hide them to avoid unnecessary clutter in the UI.
Another small thing that has caused much irrational irritation to myself was the design of the water level UI. In previous builds players would need to adjust a horizontal slider in order to change the vertical height of the water which disturbed me. The weird thing is that it was myself who implemented the first version of that UI which forces me to conclude that I must have temporarily taken leave of my senses when creating it. Gladly this has now been fixed and I am feeling much better about the whole situation.
Marquee selection or the "selection rectangle" feature is about 90% finished. This sort of thing is commonly found in realtime strategy games where players can draw a box across the screen and anything that is fully or partially inside that box will get selected. The only thing left to do for this feature is to fit it into the game and have it not clash with existing selection features that use the same mouse clicks and gestures. It is not a particularly hard thing to do but I would rather not rush to squeeze it into this week's update because I am sure I would miss something. I am pretty confident it will be in the game next week though.
Work has been progressing on making new fish. The next fish pair are rather special and require changes made to the fish ai before we release them into the game. These changes are long overdue anyway so I am personally happy to be getting them done. Hopefully we will have something to show you all next week.
Well now I am off to the forums to curate the lists some more. There have been a large amount of suggestions and questions that I have fallen behind on yet again.
We wish you all a good weekend,
The fishery Team
This week was a "tying up loose ends" week for the game due to me not being able to complete all of my work last week because of a family emergency. The family member in question is doing well. Thank you to all who expressed their well wishes.
There were quite a few small/trivial changes made to the game this week which are not terribly interesting to speak about. One slightly interesting change is to the way we display the version of the game when it is started. Before this week it has been displayed as a slightly cryptic software version number like 0.45. That has now changed to a simple build number. Our latest build released onto steam is build 35.
Plumbing Backdrops:
One of the more interesting changes made was adding the possibility for players to change the backdrop of the plumbing area. Up until now players could change the backdrop behind the aquarium only. Now that has changed and once we add more choices of backdrops players can make their creations feel a little more unique and interesting.
The only backdrop available for the plumbing area for the moment is solid colour. It will not share all the same backdrops as the aquarium itself. This is because there is meant to be a distinction between the plumbing area and the aquarium. The aquarium represents creativity, a sort of colloquial definition of chaos theory and butterfly effect, ecosystems etc. Whereas the plumbing area represents artificial life support, rigid parameters, machinery, limited choices etc. This distinction should be present is the type of backdrops available so things are thematically consistent.
Last week the backdrop list was posted on the forums which has some ideas for the directions we are going for both backdrop types and as always you are invited to make suggestions. We are working on some new backdrops already and are fixing up the existing ones to be better.
We also managed to fix a few minor bugs for backdrops. Mostly these were around robustness and efficiency. One interesting fact is that both backdrops are loaded at the same time and sit on top of each other in the scene but they are attached to certain "visibility" layers which the camera chooses to see or not. This means switching between plumbing and aquarium modes will not trigger the unloading and loading of backdrops because that would be slow and inefficient. This method will use a little more memory but it is not like loading a huge level from a AAA game.
A new entry into the quick help window was added that talks about backdrops.
Selection/Manipulation Tool Settings UI Toggle:
A toggle button was added for showing/hiding the selection and manipulation tool options. These options are quite useful but they can get in the way sometimes. Players can now hide them to avoid unnecessary clutter in the UI.
Another small thing that has caused much irrational irritation to myself was the design of the water level UI. In previous builds players would need to adjust a horizontal slider in order to change the vertical height of the water which disturbed me. The weird thing is that it was myself who implemented the first version of that UI which forces me to conclude that I must have temporarily taken leave of my senses when creating it. Gladly this has now been fixed and I am feeling much better about the whole situation.
Marquee selection or the "selection rectangle" feature is about 90% finished. This sort of thing is commonly found in realtime strategy games where players can draw a box across the screen and anything that is fully or partially inside that box will get selected. The only thing left to do for this feature is to fit it into the game and have it not clash with existing selection features that use the same mouse clicks and gestures. It is not a particularly hard thing to do but I would rather not rush to squeeze it into this week's update because I am sure I would miss something. I am pretty confident it will be in the game next week though.
Work has been progressing on making new fish. The next fish pair are rather special and require changes made to the fish ai before we release them into the game. These changes are long overdue anyway so I am personally happy to be getting them done. Hopefully we will have something to show you all next week.
Well now I am off to the forums to curate the lists some more. There have been a large amount of suggestions and questions that I have fallen behind on yet again.
We wish you all a good weekend,
The fishery Team