development update #79
Hello everyone,
Another slightly delayed post. It has been a very busy week as you all shall read. Nothing is going badly at all. Quite to the contrary things are going very well. We think we have solved a lot of quirks that the game has and are working to un-quirk them so the game feels right for more players. But more on that in a little bit. There is no new update to the build just yet. I want to do some more testing with my colleague before we upload it which will probably be some time tomorrow (Monday the 15th). It is certainly disappointing to anyone who has been waiting for an update this past week but hopefully once you have seen what we have done it will take the edge off of the disappointment.
Discus Fish:
These lovely beauties will be making their way into the game soon along with that Oscar fish we showed last week. Discus fish are highly requested and we made a promise to put them into the game in the first half of the year. We are going to paint around 3 colour variations at first and then put them all into the game in one update. To be clear that is actually 6 separate painted textures because we paint the males and females to be different from each other but be within that particular colour variation type so things are less repetitive in many dimensions. This should be great because then players will be able to make lovely discus only aquariums that are nice and colourful.
This next part will begin with questions:
In our game which group of plants produces more oxygen while consuming more Co2 and Nutrients?
If you had thought the ones on the left... you would be wrong. If you had thought the ones on the right... you would be wrong. They in fact produce the exact same amount of oxygen and consume the exact same amount of Co2 and Nutrients.
In our game which group of fish do you think consumes more oxygen and produces more waste?
You probably know where this is going but if you thought the single big fish on the right produces more waste and consumes more oxygen you would be very wrong. The small group of fish on the left consume 5 times more oxygen and produce 5 times more waste which it totally wrong.
Now we shall have a slightly one sided discussion about assumptions and intuition. Most people (except for me apparently) have a mental model of how things should work. Most people seeing the images above without even playing the game would assume that a larger mass of plant matter produces more oxygen and a larger mass of fish matter produces more waste etc.
The silly programmer living inside my head sees every object as a single simple entity that consists of the same numbers but ignores the overall visual appearance especially when players can change the physical appearance in the case of the plants. Players can change plant scale and it felt wrong to change the plant metabolism based on an arbitrary modification to scale. It might in fact confuse players. I could not have been more wrong because I think most people have that intuition about nature. More plant matter equals more oxygen and so on.
Realising that my mistakes were many I moved swiftly to make things right. Plant metabolism is now calculated based on the volume of the plant. That is to say that the larger the plant is the more oxygen it produces and the more Co2 and Nutrients it consumes.
Changes of a similar nature are being done to the fish. Computing fish metabolism based on the volume of fish matter in the aquarium also allows us to compute what the correct population limits should be. If you were to search about how best to house fish from the point of view of aquarium size quite soon you will find the phrase "1 inch of fish should equal 1 gallon of water". We have taken that literally in regards to computing how well stocked an aquarium is.
In the spirit of making things even more clear for players we have reduced the amount of numbers on display throughout the game. Only the most meaningful data is on display and we have added small explanations and tips where it makes sense. This also means we can remove things from the help screen because it's information is on display next to the numbers that it is meant to explain.
This displays information that is universal to all things of a similar nature in the game. This should remove any worry from players who are not sure what the needs of plants are before they add them to an aquarium because most of the base needs are the same unless specified otherwise.
When it comes otherwise specified data like temperature and salinity they can differ quite a lot from species to species. We have made the ui that appears over inventory slots to be more readable and only show information that is not universal. There is no point showing the nutrients needs of plants in that place because it is displayed elsewhere and applies to all plants. We don't want things to feel too much like a jigsaw puzzle in that way.
Once players have added a plant into the aquarium and selected it, it is useful to see what needs are satisfied so here we show the universal data to be extra clear. It also gives us the opportunity to explain further about the difference between photosynthesis and respiration. Hovering you mouse over the subheading text for about 0.75 seconds will reveal the explanation. We certainly do not want players to go to a completely separate help screen to find this information. All information must be near to the point at which it is displayed.
To bring this back to mental models of nature and intuition. Most of the time in real life if you add a small group of fish to a reasonably sized aquarium you will not run into problems with the oxygen level. The same with plants. Unless you completely fill an aquarium with plants you probably won't run into problems with Co2. A lot of people have that problem in our game at the moment mostly because we have done the numbers wrong and not provided enough information but hopefully these changes put us onto the path to fixing that mess.
Ideally a player new to the game should be able to add a few plants and some fish to an aquarium and be totally fine. Only when they want to make things more complicated the game should become more complicated.
I really want to get the update out on steam tomorrow because it has some slightly important bug fixes inside but not all the fixes I talked about above will be inside and some of the user interface wont all be updated with new info. We will however fix that all this week and get another update out this coming Friday or sooner.
Now we will have a little rest and enjoy the remaining hours of Sunday. I have been terrible at responding to forum questions this week due to fixing all these mistakes. I'll spend a good chunk of early Monday morning responding to them.
We wish you all a good Sunday.
The Fishery Team
Another slightly delayed post. It has been a very busy week as you all shall read. Nothing is going badly at all. Quite to the contrary things are going very well. We think we have solved a lot of quirks that the game has and are working to un-quirk them so the game feels right for more players. But more on that in a little bit. There is no new update to the build just yet. I want to do some more testing with my colleague before we upload it which will probably be some time tomorrow (Monday the 15th). It is certainly disappointing to anyone who has been waiting for an update this past week but hopefully once you have seen what we have done it will take the edge off of the disappointment.
Discus Fish:
These lovely beauties will be making their way into the game soon along with that Oscar fish we showed last week. Discus fish are highly requested and we made a promise to put them into the game in the first half of the year. We are going to paint around 3 colour variations at first and then put them all into the game in one update. To be clear that is actually 6 separate painted textures because we paint the males and females to be different from each other but be within that particular colour variation type so things are less repetitive in many dimensions. This should be great because then players will be able to make lovely discus only aquariums that are nice and colourful.
This next part will begin with questions:
In our game which group of plants produces more oxygen while consuming more Co2 and Nutrients?
If you had thought the ones on the left... you would be wrong. If you had thought the ones on the right... you would be wrong. They in fact produce the exact same amount of oxygen and consume the exact same amount of Co2 and Nutrients.
In our game which group of fish do you think consumes more oxygen and produces more waste?
You probably know where this is going but if you thought the single big fish on the right produces more waste and consumes more oxygen you would be very wrong. The small group of fish on the left consume 5 times more oxygen and produce 5 times more waste which it totally wrong.
Now we shall have a slightly one sided discussion about assumptions and intuition. Most people (except for me apparently) have a mental model of how things should work. Most people seeing the images above without even playing the game would assume that a larger mass of plant matter produces more oxygen and a larger mass of fish matter produces more waste etc.
The silly programmer living inside my head sees every object as a single simple entity that consists of the same numbers but ignores the overall visual appearance especially when players can change the physical appearance in the case of the plants. Players can change plant scale and it felt wrong to change the plant metabolism based on an arbitrary modification to scale. It might in fact confuse players. I could not have been more wrong because I think most people have that intuition about nature. More plant matter equals more oxygen and so on.
Realising that my mistakes were many I moved swiftly to make things right. Plant metabolism is now calculated based on the volume of the plant. That is to say that the larger the plant is the more oxygen it produces and the more Co2 and Nutrients it consumes.
Changes of a similar nature are being done to the fish. Computing fish metabolism based on the volume of fish matter in the aquarium also allows us to compute what the correct population limits should be. If you were to search about how best to house fish from the point of view of aquarium size quite soon you will find the phrase "1 inch of fish should equal 1 gallon of water". We have taken that literally in regards to computing how well stocked an aquarium is.
In the spirit of making things even more clear for players we have reduced the amount of numbers on display throughout the game. Only the most meaningful data is on display and we have added small explanations and tips where it makes sense. This also means we can remove things from the help screen because it's information is on display next to the numbers that it is meant to explain.
This displays information that is universal to all things of a similar nature in the game. This should remove any worry from players who are not sure what the needs of plants are before they add them to an aquarium because most of the base needs are the same unless specified otherwise.
When it comes otherwise specified data like temperature and salinity they can differ quite a lot from species to species. We have made the ui that appears over inventory slots to be more readable and only show information that is not universal. There is no point showing the nutrients needs of plants in that place because it is displayed elsewhere and applies to all plants. We don't want things to feel too much like a jigsaw puzzle in that way.
Once players have added a plant into the aquarium and selected it, it is useful to see what needs are satisfied so here we show the universal data to be extra clear. It also gives us the opportunity to explain further about the difference between photosynthesis and respiration. Hovering you mouse over the subheading text for about 0.75 seconds will reveal the explanation. We certainly do not want players to go to a completely separate help screen to find this information. All information must be near to the point at which it is displayed.
To bring this back to mental models of nature and intuition. Most of the time in real life if you add a small group of fish to a reasonably sized aquarium you will not run into problems with the oxygen level. The same with plants. Unless you completely fill an aquarium with plants you probably won't run into problems with Co2. A lot of people have that problem in our game at the moment mostly because we have done the numbers wrong and not provided enough information but hopefully these changes put us onto the path to fixing that mess.
Ideally a player new to the game should be able to add a few plants and some fish to an aquarium and be totally fine. Only when they want to make things more complicated the game should become more complicated.
I really want to get the update out on steam tomorrow because it has some slightly important bug fixes inside but not all the fixes I talked about above will be inside and some of the user interface wont all be updated with new info. We will however fix that all this week and get another update out this coming Friday or sooner.
Now we will have a little rest and enjoy the remaining hours of Sunday. I have been terrible at responding to forum questions this week due to fixing all these mistakes. I'll spend a good chunk of early Monday morning responding to them.
We wish you all a good Sunday.
The Fishery Team