FISHERY News

Hello everyone,

This week we have been consumed entirely with painting new fishy art content for the game so I'll just dive right into it by discussing some discus.

Based on a Yellow Marlboro Discus:
Female:


Male:


These are about 93% done. We still have to paint the texture map that hints at some scale detail that shimmers as the fish swims and catches the light just right as well as all the infinite small tweaks we always do before we call something "finished". One of them will also have some hints of pattern variation like a dark-ish stripe on the fringes of a fin and some variations in colour and/or some patterning on the body and/or face.


Based on a Blue Diamond Discus:
Female:


Male:


This was shown last week is a rougher state. More detail has been painted and things feel a bit more balanced as well as painting the male version. A finishing touch for one of these will include some faint patterning on the face and body.


Based on a Red Leopard Discus, work in progress:
Male:


The patterning of discus fish can be as complex as it is distinct. It is impossible to capture every permutation of discus patterning for our game but we will do our best. I dare say that we will end up with around 20 varieties of discus in the game when it is all done which will be a combination of all the well known and some lesser known patterns and colour configurations.


Mealworm:


The model we showed last week of this fellow has now been painted in all it's insect glory. The plan is to have this be alive and wriggling when players drop it into the aquarium but the first version of this animation will probably be a little rough but it will get better over time like everything else in the game.


This coming week will probably be mostly dedicated to painting fish as well. After some final touches are put on these discus fish we will move on to paint the Angelfish and Dwarf Gouramis. There will also be some work done on the coding side of things so we can get the next build out to you all soon.

As usual we are a little behind with everything we have planned for the next update. We still have to work on the new breeding features and a good amount of quality of life changes to certain ui panels and other things. As usual though if we cannot get everything into an update that we planned to we will just add it in the following week.

We shall now give our eyes a little rest for the remaining hours of Sunday. I'll spend a few hours early in the morning on Monday replying to forum posts. There has been some nice suggestions made to the lists we have in the forums. I do read every single suggestion soon after they appear but I don't always reply or add them to the list immediately because we need to research each suggestion and then discuss and decide if in fact we think we can add it to the game.

We wish you all a pleasant Sunday.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been a very busy week once again and no new build as of yet but it is coming closer. We made a lot of progress in a few different areas this week.


Discus fish painting work in progress:


This is the first female discus fish to be painted. Whenever we paint a new type of fish quite often we spend time trying out techniques so we have a better understanding of the visual language of a fish. For instance the clown fish requires different techniques in brush work and use of gradations of colour than would be used when painting a betta fish or a guppy. For this particular discus which is based on a Blue diamond variety it looks like we will have to paint two different colour maps. one with deeper more saturated blues and another with brighter slightly turquoise blues and they are blended based on the angle of fish's surface relative to the camera. Sort of like what you get with butterfly wings where if viewed from the right angle they have this sort of metallic brilliance to them.
Then of course we have to deal with adding some fish scale details. We knew these would be tricky customers indeed but actually the hardest part about painting this particular fish is finding the right blue colours. If you do an image search for "blue diamond discus" you will find that it is really hard to find exactly the same set of blue tones from image to image. This is important for us because we put together a colour palette for each fish and we want to try and get the true set of perfect blue tones for this variety but if all images show different blues then we have a hard time deciding what is the true blue colours of the blue diamond discus.

Mealworm:


The next food item we are working on is the mealworm. There is also a slightly sneaky agenda we have with adding this fellow. It allows us to prototype some of the kinds of animation techniques we hope to use for shrimps in the future. Specifically getting some interesting leg movement using only shader maths. We cannot use traditional skeleton based animation techniques because it takes a lot of processing per creature. We want players to have hundreds of shrimp or crabs scurrying about so we have to do things the hard way and the mealworm is the perfect vessel to try out these techniques over time.

Floaty plants:


Our first floating plants have been added to the game. The colours look a little radioactive at the moment and will be graded to look more natural this week. This is water lettuce and it is dropped into the aquarium where it floats about and makes the water's surface look more interesting. It's leaves are out of the water so it will not consume any Co2 from or add Oxygen to the water. All it consumes is Nutrients from the water. This is useful because players can reduce excess nutrients in the water so that algae levels can be controlled naturally.

The Nudge Tool:


Floating plants cannot be manipulated in the same way as other plants in the game because they rely on physics calculations to give them buoyancy to make it look like they are actually floating on the surface of water. Our solution which is quite well timed is to introduce the nudge tool. I say that it is a well timed solution because this tool was suggested by players who want to be able to move fish if they get stuck while navigating.

Fish Harassment:


You can see here that it is now possible to confuse the heck out of your fish by telekinetically moving them through the water. It is a short term fix for their navigation problems but It also has other uses.

Food Presentation:


Other physics objects like food sometimes fall into hard to reach places and fish cannot get to them. Well not anymore because players can now drag food into a neat little pile if they so wish.


Debug Menu Additions:


The next thing to be added to the debug menu is the ability to turn of the pre selection UI. When you move your mouse over any interactable object in your aquarium a little UI panel appears that says it's name and some other information. Now it can be turned off. It is especially nice to turn off when using the new nudge tool as you can see in the gifs.


Well that is it for this week. It has been quite busy with a few different areas of the game being worked on. This coming week we intend to focus on fish painting entirely so we should have some finished discus to show you all. Hopefully we will have two pairs of varieties to show you which will amount to four uniquely painted fish and the painted mealworm and perhaps even get started with an angelfish. We will do our best.

We wish you all a relaxed Sunday.

The Fishery Team.

Hello everyone,

As predicted there is no update to the build this week because we have been painting non stop and consequently this post will be somewhat shorter.

Oscar Fish Male, work in progress:


Oscar Fish Female, work in progress:


Good progress has been made with our pair of Oscars. They are not finished just yet. Some time this month before our update they will be revisited and finished with fresh eyes. At the moment the orange patterning looks a little like both fish were attacked by a jar of marmalade, their skin feels a little too smooth to my eyes and the black patterning on the male could be more widespread.

Fly:


This is one of the next food items that will be added. Insects are a plentiful source of nourishment to fish in the wild and much more interesting to look at. The fly will look a lot more dead when we add it to the game and It will come in 3 slightly comical death poses. This is probably the closest players will ever get to it because they are quite small but we added enough detail in the model and painting that from a distance it is recognisable as a fly. We painted it at a resolution of 1024x1024 but it will probably be scaled down to something like 256x256 or less when it is in the game.

More interesting foods are in the works and of course more fish will be painted in the coming week. I am still a little too intimidated to paint the boesemani rainbowfish so I will probably paint the discus fish instead. There are also more decorations being worked on. We are certainly bored of looking at the same rocks all the time and hopefully we will have something nice to show you in the coming weeks. We are also almost ready to show you all the first floating plants to be added to the game. If all goes to plan we can show that next week. Until then we wish you all a very good Saturday.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 53 has been uploaded. It includes some really nice quality of life improvements and fixes. But before we talk about that:

Dwarf Gourami Pair:


Our Dwarf Gourami pair has been modelled and is ready for painting. We are glad to be adding these into the game soon as they are another popular request from players.

We have a nice pile of newly modelled fish that we have been making over the past few weeks and now the time has come to paint them all. Our aim is to have them all painted and added into the game by the end of the month. We will be showing our progress at the end of the week as always.

Debug Menu:


This is another requested feature. A menu for controlling sandbox parameters and other options. It only have 1 option at the moment but much more will be coming soon. The option that is included this week is a visualiser that we find useful when debugging fish movement. It creates a trail behind every fish so we can see where the fish have been swimming for the previous 16 seconds. We find it quite mesmerizing and even though it does not really have much use in terms of gameplay it perhaps brings an extra layer of interest for players.



It is especially useful for us when we debug fish movement through tricky or confined places. The shape of the lines help us to see if the fish navigates cleanly between obstacles or just whacks into them. Other options we will be adding will be the usual sort of sandbox options. For instance players will be able to turn off fish getting stressed or dying. Fish wont care about the oxygen levels, plants wont care about Co2 levels etc.

This should hopefully prevent some frustration felt by players who just want to create something nice but not have to worry about balancing all the water chemistry at the same time. It also should prevent some frustration caused by us not tweaking the numbers to their optimum values just yet. If fish get too hungry too fast then players will be able to turn off fish hunger so they can continue to play the game instead of turning it off in frustration. We will aim to add a few new options every time we make a new build.

Quality of life changes were made to some fish behaviour options. Semi-aggress and aggressive fish will not gobble up every fry in sight. They will only eat them when their hunger dips below 50% and there are no other food sources in the aquarium. This is a temporary change until we have ways for players to separate fry from the adults.

Tweaks were made to how fish navigate so they don't get stuck so often and then starve to death in confusion. Their obstacle avoidance abilities should also work better than before.

Pre-selection UIs have been made more clear and have been updated to match the selection UI style.


Some of the changes that we plan to do this month are quite large so we cannot guarantee that we can upload a new build every week but we will of course be posting our progress every week so everyone is kept up to date with what is coming. Some of the more interesting changes that we are aiming to add are:

- The ability for some fish to give birth to live fry.

- Fish predation V2, it wont just be fry that can be eaten whole but larger fish will be able to swallow smaller adult or juvenile fish in one gulp.

- Floating plants,

- More food choices for carnivorous and insectivorous fish.


As usual we wish you all a lovely weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 52 will be uploaded in a few hours. It has been a busy-ish week. Time has been spent all over different parts of the game. Making new models for fish, plants and hardscape items. 3 new music tracks have been added. A lot of tweaks to the underlying simulation numbers have been made and of course more UI changes.


Freshwater Angelfish (Pterophyllum Scalare):


Our first Angelfish pair has been modelled and is ready for painting. This is a much requested fish. We will of course be adding various varieties of marine angelfish in the not too distant future too. When we actually add these freshwater ones into the game we will try to have two colour variations per pair which means 4 distinct fish added all at once.

Food population UI:


A new UI panel has been added that shows information about the food that has been dropped into the aquarium and also gives some nice information about the perils of over feeding. This UI will be updated in the coming weeks to show all the different diet types of the food currently in your aquarium. Soon we will add some carnivorous and insectivorous food to the game and that is when we will update this UI.

A lot of time has been spent tweaking various numbers in the game:


This is a look at some of the values that govern the metabolism of plants. If we take a look at the variable called "s_co2_in". This is the number that governs how much Co2 is consumed by a plant per second. It is multiplied an approximation of the mass of the plant in question. e.g if the plant was made up of around a cubic inch of plant matter then you multiply s_co2_in by 1 during the update. Players can scale plants to whatever size they want and that will increase the Co2 consumption.

The actual value that the mass is multiplied by, which is the part to the right of the equals character, is a very small number that is computed by dividing the maximum co2 capacity of the smallest aquarium by the length of a day in seconds and then dividing that number by 1200. This gets us a very small number. Somewhere around 0.01. Which means every second every plant will consume 0.01 co2 multiplied by it's approximate mass. Then of course all the other values are doing their things as well.

It is slightly complicated to test because we have to test it with different numbers of plants in different sizes of aquariums. We ask ourselves questions like "How long should it take for an aquarium full plants to consume all the nutrients in the water?" We read lots of information about keeping planted aquariums and aquascapes that have a huge amount of plant life and sometimes the maintenance involves adding fertilizer every 4 days. Some even recommend adding a small amount every day. We have to take all that information and try to distil it into something that is interesting for players to do without being frustrating. Though I think at the moment it is mostly frustrating and it is hard to get right but we will get it right eventually.

Hopefully anyone playing this week's update should see a difference in how the numbers change in their aquarium. All the numbers except for the algae calculations have been modified. Algae is whole different beast that will be tackled in due course. These changes have been made to make things not happen so fast. Fish don't deplete their energy as quick and plants don't require as much resources to live. For sure this is not the last time we tweak these numbers at all.


Next week I will model the first pair of Gouramis, add more help text into the game as well as tweak many more numbers and add even more UI that will show more meaningful data to players.

Busy times ahead. April is going to be a content heavy month but more on that next week. As usual we wish everyone a happy Friday and lovely weekend.

The Fishery Team