FISHERY News

Hello to all of you,

There will be a new build uploaded within the next 24 hours but if all goes well it will be tonight. We have added some nice new art content:

Rummy Nose Tetra Female:


Rummy Nose Tetra Male:


I'm sure some of you are asking, what about the male guppy from last week that was promised? I got a bit too tired of staring it and needed to reset my brain so instead I looked at the unfinished fish list in the forums and found the Rummy Nose Tetra. Quite lovely little fish and they were a lot of fun to paint. The male blue grass guppy should arrive in the game next week, hopefully it will not defeat me again.

Banana Slice:


More food has been added. It just felt so right to add into the game. It also has a dual purpose. Bananas are high in Potassium which is a valuable nutrient that plants require. Soon the code will be updated so that certain food items rich in nutrients can be used to feed fish and also provide nutrients for plants. That way players won't necessarily have to depend on the artificial fertilizer balls or the plumbing nutrient injector to help sustain their ecosystems.

Ruins:


We also added two more ruin pieces that we introduced last week. The new pieces added are the single pillar sections that are not attached to a base block. Next week we hope to finish painting some more brick like blocks of various dimensions so players can start building things with a bit more structure. You can also see a lovely array of banana slices elegantly scattered around the aquarium.

Fungi:


This is Mitrula Paludosa. It is not in the game yet but it will be next week if all goes to plan. It is a species of fungi that grows in the water. We have not found pictures of it actually submerged more than halfway underwater but that is good enough for us to put it into the game.

Fungi is new object type to the game and it will be very useful. Fungi is what is known as a "decomposer" which simply means they break down dead organic matter. Their main job in fishery will be to provide a way to manage waste levels. Players may wish to keep waste at acceptable levels using purely natural means without a plumbing filter. Fungi will get the job done and will help make things look interesting in your aquarium. We have not decided precisely what their needs will be but it will be similar to the other forms of life currently in the game. They will be sensitive to temperature, PH and saltiness and they might add nutrients and other chemicals into the water in exchange for removing waste.


Busy times indeed. When working on art content it often feels like we make more progress than when working purely on code features which is good for the morale of us and anyone who has been following us for a while. The game is really coming together nicely and if we keep going at this pace it means we could add at a minimum 4-5 new species of fish per month. On top of that we looking to add more decorations, plumbing objects, food items, plants, substrates and backgrounds. At some point we will also return to adding more features but our updates were quite feature heavy at the start of the year and we need to balance it out a little before we go deep into code again. Some of the features that have been planned and ready to be coded are the undo system, a much better help system, selection sets, marquee selection, selection filters, more complex fish behaviour and emotions, floating plants and many many many more. The to-do list is enormous but we shall prevail.


We wish you all a great weekend

The fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It is Friday once again and we are very glad to be able to say once again say that we have in point of fact actually succeeded in uploading a brand new build of the game on time and as planned.

We have been hard at work adding more new art content into the game.

Female Blue Grass Guppy


The is a female blue grass guppy. Unfortunately most female guppies look rather similar to each other. They have fleshy semi-transparent bodies and quite often mostly transparent fins. We used a bit of artistic licence with this one to keep it looking interesting and identifiable. As some of you may know the male guppies are more elaborately coloured. They are similar to peacocks in the way that they have larger tales with bright colourful patterns. He is still being worked on and we are aiming to have him done next week.

Ruined Pillar:


We have not added a new decoration in a while. This ancient ruin of a pillar is the first of a "themed pack" of ancient ruins that will give players more creative options. That is after all one of the main points of the game, creativity. There are lots of things that will be added to the ancient ruins pack. Statues, ornamentations, pillars, bricks, mosaic pieces, pottery etc. Hopefully it will be enough for players to design their own crumbling temples, streets or even an amphitheatre.

Kiwi Slice:


Kiwi Invasion:


More food has been added. A delicious slice of Kiwi fruit. Perhaps it is not a good idea to put a slice of kiwi into a real aquarium because it's PH is close to 3 which might upset the PH balance in an aquarium considerably. We have not added PH to the game yet but we will and there will be numerous items that modify the PH such as the kiwi.

Duck:


Quack!...There will be some items added to the game that may at first seem bizarre but are all part of the fun and will affect other things in the simulation. For instance there will be some items that cause behavioural changes in fish and other animals that will not be revealed be us but will instead only be revealed by players experimenting and observing. I shall therefore reveal no more about the secret of the duck. It's secret has not yet been added into the game but it will be added at some indeterminate point in the future.


Next week we hope to have more decorations finished and the male blue grass guppy finished and in the game. We hope you all have a great weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello Everyone,

At long last we should have a new build uploaded Sunday (tomorrow). We are just fixing a few small bugs. The update will include all the fish we have shown in previous posts as well as more bug fixes, performance tweaks, changes to fish behaviour and fish needs.

Aside from making sure all the changes we have made recently are not messing with the game's stability we have added yet more things this week.

Female Guppy (Unfinished)


Male Guppy (Unfinished)


A lot of time was spent on making the new guppies. Quite a bit more re-modelling and the painting process is under way. But we are not done with the guppies just yet as you can see in the images above. Both are partially painted and I think the male guppy needs some shape adjustments to it's tale. There is usually a lot of back forth in this process. Going from modelling to painting, then perhaps painting could use a little help by having a better shape to the model, so back to modelling and then back to painting. Then repeat until we are happy with the result. This is a fantail guppy. We do plan to add more types of course.







This week we have added some new fish food. The fish food currently in the game is extremely boring and we are in the process of making it more interesting. The first more interesting items of food are the slices of carrot and cucumber. They stay around long enough so that fish can have quite a few nibbles before the food item disappears whilst providing excellent nourishment. This also means players wont need to feed their fish so much. Furthermore we have made it so fish get hungry less quickly. There are a lot more interesting food items that we have planned aside from vegetables. Players will be able to drop dead flies onto the surface of the water and drop live bloodworms into the water and we are looking at adding live mosquito larvae because it is summer and I hate mosquitoes.

These changes to food tie into future changes we will be making to the needs of fish. Feeding them these new food items instead of boring fish pellets will increase fish happiness, which is a parameter not yet added but will play an important part in the game, instead of just decreasing their hunger.

It is a very busy time indeed with a lot more art content being worked on. Expect more interesting things becoming part of the game in the coming weeks.

We wish you all a good weekend,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been another week and we have remade another fish! No update to the actual build this week as we had hoped which is very disappointing but we shall explain why further down.

The Sunburst Platy.
The model had been remade a few weeks ago but on closer inspection we felt it needed another day's work to get it's overall silhouette correct and clean up parts of it's wireframe topology. That is why we are a little late with this post. Perfectionism forced us to delay by 1 day. However we think it was worth it.

Female:


Male:


There is not too much difference between male and female platy fish in real life. The females tend to be a bit bigger and the fin next to their butt is a different shape. We did add some differences to their models and skin which hopefully you can see in these tiny compressed gifs.



This is what the inventory looks like at the moment. Players will be able to choose explicitly whether to add a male or female of a given species. We are also exploring the idea of having players be able to pick baby or juvenile fish from the inventory but their gender will be determined at random once added. We won't be adding any non-adult fish just yet though.

Hopefully in the coming week we can upload a new build. The reason it is taking so long is because we are also working on a serious update to fish behaviour. Specifically we needed to change the flocking behaviour in such a way that males and females of the same species would swim together. We have also worked on generally improving how flocking works in terms of creating something that looks pleasing to the eye. We have also improved the performance in some small areas which is also good. We are also working on adding the capability for fish of different species to flock together. That means for instance that guppies and neon tetras could swim together in flocks. Not sure when that will be in the game but it will come soon.



Here is just a quick example showing the latest version of the flocking. We are also working to improve the code for obstacle avoidance. Sometimes the fish swim into objects as if they did not see them which is undesirable and makes them look a little too stupid for our liking so obstacle avoidance has been worked on more and improved. It is still not perfect but each time we go back to try to improve it we do actually improve it which is good.


In the coming week we will work on replacing the current neon blue tux guppy with brand new versions and actually have a new build for you all to play with.

Thank you all for being patient and have a great weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Our quest to replace the oldest versions of our fish is going well. This week the old version of the Tiger Barb has been replaced with new male and female versions. We wont be releasing a new build with these fish in it just yet. There are still some tweaks yet to be made to the fish behaviour code and a few other things before we upload a new build. However we are aiming to release a new build next Friday on the 26th of June.

Female:


Male:


The next fish we are going to replace in the upcoming week is the Sunburst Platy and the Guppy. This actually amounts to 4 new fish. The colourings and body shapes can differ quite a lot between the genders. This should mean that once we have replaced all the current fish in the game there will automatically be more visual variety in player's aquariums even though there are the same number of species. After the current species have all been updated we will focus on adding entirely new species to the game.

Be sure to check out the fish list on the forums. Lots of people have been making suggestions for fish they want to see in the game and I have been doing my best to quickly research each suggestion and then add it to the list if I am fairly sure that we can actually put it into the game. Someone suggested adding a "Peacock Eel" and other similar animals but it has not been added to the list yet because eels and snakes require a lot more research before we can say with confidence that we can actually put them in the game and make them good. Certainly we can make them look good but the animation requirements for these types of animals are very tricky indeed. But do keep suggestion such animals.

Making progress with the fish art feels really good. If you can believe it we are just over three months away from the anniversary of the early access release of fishery. There have been an enormous amount of changes made to the game since that release but most of that is code related and not much of it is art related. We added some new art content here and there but overall it looks more or less the same than it did last September. So in preparation for the anniversary of the game's release we will be focusing mostly on the art aspect of the game for a while. I personally am mostly focused on fish, I will also spend some time work on plants as well. I have a colleague working on backgrounds and decorations.

There is much excitement and much work to do so we better get back to it hehe. As usual we bid you all a great weekend.

The Fishery Team