FISHERY News

Hello everyone,

It has been a very busy week indeed and build 45 has been uploaded. We have added our first species of macroalgae to the game. It has not been long since we added marine fish and we were in desperate need of some sort of plant life that can photosynthesise in a saltwater environment.

Mermaid's Teacup:


Mermaid's Fan:


Red Bush Macroalgae:


Neomeris Annulata:


A lot of the freshwater plants that are currently in the game are quite interesting but also quite "standard" when it comes to their shape. Macroalgae on the other hand comes in quite a variety of shapes and it is always refreshing when we get to make items for the game that are quite different from other things. It is also useful because it ensures that our saltwater aquariums will look quite different from the freshwater aquariums when we are done. We have not added sea sponges or coral yet and that is when things really begin to look different but stay tuned because that is coming along with more macroalgae in the near future.

Inflated Amazon Puffer:


The inflated shape of our puffer fish have been modelled. But they are not in the game yet but we are still working on the code. There has been quite a lot of change and progress made with the fish behaviour, animation and locomotion code in the previous months and there must be some clean up done before anymore progress is made. Time was also spent this week speeding up certain parts of the code for fish and plants in preparation for adding more specific behaviours.

An example of a specific behaviour for a fish would be the puffer fish inflating. Only puffers do this and as tempting as it is to allow this behaviour for neon tetras I fear there would be a backlash. So the code must be written in a way that allows for the addition of species specific behaviours without a large amount of logic being done every frame to perform the correct behaviour. This sort of programming is not new or difficult but it must be done in a way that does not make things messy or difficult to understand from a code perspective.

For those of you that are waiting for stress behaviours and species specific behaviours to be added to the game I can assure you that you won't have to wait much longer.

As usual we wish you all a good weekend and shall see you next week.

The Fishery Team

Hello and happy new year to everyone,

Build 44 will be uploaded later this evening. We had a little bit of a rest this week with us only working half a day each day but we still managed to knock a few nice things off of the to-do list.

Black And White Clownfish Female:


Black And White Clownfish male:


These lovelies are Black and White Ocellaris Clownfish. We did not realise how many varieties of clownfish their are until doing research for this game so it was a pleasant surprise and gives us more opportunities for interesting fish varieties to add into the game in the future.

Sponge Filter and Swim Levels:


Most of my time this week was spent on adding the sponge filters into the game and working on fish behaviour and animation.

Sponge filters are a new type of item added into the game. They work differently than the waste filter found in the plumbing system. These filters require electricity to run and they have a maximum amount of waste that they can hold. They take waste from the water and store it within themselves where it decays into nutrients. We are going to be doing a lot more testing to determine exactly how much waste should be consumed and contained within sponge filters as well as the speed that they consume and recycle the waste so keep that in mind when using them. There are 3 sizes of sponge filter. We might add larger versions in time.

Another small feature that was added was the "Swimming levels" of fish. Certain fish like to hang around at specific depths in the aquarium. In the above picture with the sponge filter you can see the guppies swimming around near the surface and the tetras swimming around the middle. All fish in the game have their preferred swimming level but it does not display in any UI yet. They do go away from their swimming levels when they feel like it. For instance if they wish to nibble a rock or some substrate they will swim from their preferred depth to do so. The same for food that sinks or floats all fish will swim to eat it so there is no worry about your fish starving because you dropped the wrong piece of food. However that will change somewhat in the future when more food varieties are added. Certain fish prefer to eat at the surface while others prefer to eat near the bottom. This will be a feature too.

Here is a quick rundown of some other changes:

• Last week all the first were swimming a little slowly which was not intended and has been fixed.
  
• The puffer fish act a little more curious and swim around the bottom checking things out. If you have some interesting little caves/tunnels made out of rocks or wood then they seem to wander into them more often.
  
• New help entry that talks about the new sponge filters.
  
• Changes to fish obstacle avoidance. The size of the fish's collider is taken into account when determining if it needs to avoid an object. making it more accurate in certain circumstance.
  
• Placement settings in the shop are visible by default. We have the feeling not everyone knows they are there.
  
• fixed a bug where plant fertilizers particles are not playing when a scene is loaded and the fertilizer is already underwater.
  
• Changes to the wander and flock code ensures that if for some reason a fish cannot reach it's target because of an obstruction it times out and picks a new target to wander to.
  
• When running the game in windowed mode it will not pause if the player clicks outside the window.
  
• fixes to maths behind calculating how much food each fish eats with a single bite and how much should be removed from the hp of the food item.
  

Next week we are back to full days and lots more things to work on. If all goes well we will finally be able to replace our googly eyed red terror cichlid though I think it might return much later in the game as an easter egg. There are also a few other loose ends from last year that need to be tied up. Busy times indeed.

Once again we wish you all a happy new year and a good weekend.

The Fishery Team.

Hello everyone,

It is finally the end of a very tricky week and a new build uploaded to steam. Build 43 has some new fish and a lot of modifications done to fish animation in general.

Amazon Puffer:


Hawaiian Whitestopped Toby:


The gif quality is not great but hopefully that will give you a sense of what they are like. Getting the game ready to add these fish has been the big challenge for the last few weeks. This is mostly because they required a few things to be done differently. They don't undulate their bodies like most other fish in order to propel themselves through the water but only use their smaller fins to do so. This is a problem for us because suddenly there are less interesting things happening with their animation and they look like odd little puppets floating through the water. For these fish we need to make their actual movement through the water from the point of view of position and rotation more interesting which is what we will work on next.

This is somewhat disappointing because I had hoped we would get their animation a little further along than it is right now but due to time and I dare say a bit of tiredness we were not able to do so. To add to that disappointment we were also not able to get the inflating behaviour into the game either so it is a double disappointment.

On the bright side though we have completely overhauled the fish animation and locomotion systems and improved all the current fish behaviours in the game. All fish should have more fluidity in their movements and there is now independent control over their pectoral and body swim motions. Breeding animations are now more interesting. The partners swim around each other in a more interesting way rather than just headbutt each other. It is not final but it is a good next step for it.

Once we have added the inflating behaviour for puffer fish it will be triggered as a result of the fish becoming too stressed. All fish species will have their own stress behaviours. Some fish will act aggressively and attack other nearby fish while other fish might simply stop eating. Other fish might start comfort eating and begin eating every piece of food that it can find in the aquarium.

There will also be "health behaviours" which will be triggered when conditions are such that their life could be in danger. For instance a lack of oxygen in aquariums will leave the fish gasping for air near the surface. Lack of energy as a result of not being fed enough will lead to slow, lumbering movement.

There are also further improvements that are going to be added to existing behaviours. One important aspect that is missing is the different levels of the aquarium that fish prefer to swim at. For instance guppies swim more towards the top level of the of the aquarium and fish like Platies, tiger barbs and neon tetras tend to swim around the middle. Other fish like Corydoras prefer to swim around the bottom because that is where they get a lot of their food. At the moment all fish just swim about anywhere and it makes them all look like they have the same brain but that will change soon.

Other behaviours that are being worked on are different types of shoaling behaviours, more interesting rest behaviours, territorial behaviours, playfulness, fear, loneliness and more.

We will have a little bit of a break next week. The work days won't be as long but there will still be a development update post on Friday and there may also be a new build uploaded so keep an eye out for that. We will still be working on some new art content as well as some new fish behaviours that have been mentioned above so we will certainly have something interesting to share.

We wish you all a relaxed and restful weekend.

The Fishery Team.

Hello everyone,

A new build has been uploaded. build 42 contains a nice chunk of new art content including our Christmas mystery fish. Which is not particularly Christmassy but its a fish that a lot of people always ask about even if they know nothing about aquariums. The Clownfish.

Clownfish Female:


Clownfish Male:


The Ocellaris Clownfish is a fish on the short list of fish that you must have in an aquarium game. Sort of like having a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a dinosaur game. The Tyrannosaurus Is in many ways synonymous with the word Dinosaur for a lot of people. The same seems to be true that the Clownfish is synonymous with pet fish or aquariums thanks in no small part to Pixar I am sure.

A quick update on the puffer fish. They will be in the game next week. They are about 80% painted and we are working on how their animation will work. Puffer fish do not use the motion of their spine and tail to propel themselves through the water but instead use two pairs of smaller fins to swim around. They are sort of like underwater humming birds. This means that there needs to be a rethink about how we animate our fish via code and make the appropriate changes.

We have also been making substantial changes to how non puffer fish are animated. You might notice some of these changes in this build. There is a lot more movement in the Pectoral fins (Arm fins). The body motion is a bit more fluid and based on fish skeletal mechanics. There is still much work to be done next week on fish animation so if it looks a little strange for some fish just know that hopefully most of that will be fixed in a week or so.

We added a whole load of sea shell decorations too.


Limpet, Turret, scallop, oyster, asian clam, Nautilus shells have been added. Most of which have more than one variation which all together total at 17 shells. We also added a coconut which is the first of 5 coconut model variations to be added and we added 5 new bogwoods. the above image is a little sneaky peak. We encourage you all to check them out in the game for real and get creative with them.

We were not able to get the sponge filters ready this week like we had aimed to do and next week we will be focused almost entirely on puffer fish and fish animation so sponge filters will have to come in very early January along with a new backdrop and a few other loose ends that we have promised.

It has been a good week indeed and we look forward to next week. We wish you all a good weekend.

The Fishery Team.

Hello everyone,

It has been quite a good week indeed and we have uploaded a new build of the game. Build 41.

We have been focused quite heavily on art content this week as we were last week.

Updates to plant shaders:


The little programs that tell the graphics card how to draw plants have been updated. These plant shaders have been vastly simplified which should result in them rendering faster. They also use less GPU memory which is very nice as well. As you might be able to see from the above gif we have made changes to the underwater "wind" movement. This is going to be tweaked quite a lot in the near future because each plant requires slightly different settings to get the movement to look nice. The new algae and waste textures also appear on plants now.

Black Sand Substrate:


White Sand Substrate:


It has been a while since we have added some new substrate materials. These two have been on the to-do list for quite some time. We have also modified the "default" sand substrate to look a little nicer and the shader for sand substrate has been modified to have those tiny reflective glittery specs that you sometimes see in sand. This hopefully will make things just that little bit more charming.

Sponge filter progress:


The lovably ugly sponge filters have been painted. These will be in next weeks update once I have written the new code for how they work. The code for waste filters is being updated specifically for these items but more details shall be revealed next week. It will also affect how waste filters work in the plumbing area too. At some point we will also add different coloured sponges.

Triceratops Skull Model:


I have been working on this skull in the evenings for about half an hour at a time for a while now and this week I decided to finish it off and it is on the list of things to be painted. We already have a Tyrannosaurus skull in the game but I feel like it is getting a bit lonely. That Tyrannosaurus skull will need a bit of an artistic rework in the near future because it is starting to look a little dated. We will certainly be adding more fossilised bones to the game because they are so fun to make and to look at.

Auto Mode Help:


A new entry has been added to the in game help. It does it's best to simply explain what the auto mode for powered items is but I foresee changes to it's text over time.

There have also been a lot of tiny tweaks here and there to various different parts of the game. Small reduction in memory use for every dissolvable item that uses particles. Separating the gold used for the treasure chest into it's own gold shader rather than having a complex combined shader. Turning off shadow casting for small plants like glosso and flame moss to reduce rendering times. Really small or thin objects have no business casting shadows because shadow rendering really does slow things down and I feel like the performance cost is not worth it. They do of course still receive shadows and their shadow casting might be turned back on in the future once I am more happy with shadows in general.

Progress has been made with painting the new fish. Unfortunately I cannot show it here because we are painting the surprise fish first so we are sure it will actually be in the game when we said it would be. Otherwise we just look silly. But you can expect to see painting progress with both puffer fish next week if everything goes well.

Also for next week's update.... Sea shells! and more.

Busy times indeed. As usual we wish you all a very good weekend.

The Fishery Team.