FISHERY News

Hello everyone,

Here is some more progress.



Spherical aquariums will be in the next update. There are a few small things still left to iron out (like the floaty water particles staying inside the glass) but most of these are fairly simple to fix. The only issue that will remain with spherical aquariums is sculpting on the substrate. When sculpting in a cylindrical or cuboid aquarium the sculpting algorithm only needs to worry about pushing the polygons of the substrate up or down; However when sculpting inside a sphere the polygons on the edge of the substrate that are touching the glass not only move upwards but also have to move outwards or inwards depending on how high on the sphere they are.
This is actually quite complicated and it means creating a whole new system for generating the substrate mesh. I must say that this is a little beyond my capabilities at this point in time especially when taking into account everything else that needs to be programmed. The solution is that players will have a selection of pre-sculpted substrates for all spherical aquariums to choose from. This is not ideal and is inconsistent with the other aquarium shapes but I think I as the programmer have to compromise here for the time being.

I'll quickly talk about the new-ish "Maintenance" system that we are getting ready to put into the game. There are a number of utility items in the game like filters and heaters that are mechanical and would in real life require cleaning and unclogging. In the very early versions of Fishery we had a version of the maintenance system that would stop utility items from functioning after some time has passed so simulate their becoming clogged with waste. Players would then have to press the maintenance button and after a short period of time the utility item would work again. Hopefully during that maintenance process the entire aquarium does not descend into chaos just because a filter was not working for 5 minutes.

This became very tedious in those early days and we ended up removing it because it was just wasting players' time by giving them buttons to press at certain time intervals with no real sense of progress. What is different this time is that we are combining it with the new "Research" system in the game where players would be able to decrease the amount of maintenance needed on items by unlocking and completing the maintenance research tree. Over time this means that players will be able to decrease how often maintenance needs to be performed and speed up maintenance but it will require that the player spends time unlocking the research by completing objectives and milestones and then spending in-game money performing the research. Eventually getting to a point where maintenance is done automatically after all the maintenance research is completed but it will take a while to progress that far.
By that time players will have really complicated aquarium setups that will require all this research in order for things to run smoothly. Especially when we add proper auto-feeders and more devices for modifying the water chemistry. Eventually fishery will indeed play like a proper management game.

Keep an eye out for more news soon.

We hope you are all keeping well and enjoying Sunday.

The Fishery Team.

Hello everyone,

We are still working hard on the next update. A lot of good progress has been made but things still feel a little too incomplete and lacking in a lot of areas. Some of which I have talked about in recent posts so I wont repeat them but I can show you all some of the more interesting changes that have been made recently.

New aquarium shapes


I have been talking about adding this change for years and finally players will be able to have aquariums shapes other than cuboids. We are also going to be adding spherical shaped aquariums in the next update too which are going to look really cool.

You may or may not be able to see in the image that some of the little water floaty particles are outside the glass. I still have to go in and tell the particles where their limits are. When something as simple as an aquarium shape is changed it usually means that every other feature could be impacted in some way and it is a matter of playtesting over and over again and seeing what is not correct.

Updated shop and storage ui:


The shop and storage ui has been given a small makeover. The icons are now bigger so you can actually see the items and they display the cost of each item. I'll explain a bit about in-game money in a little bit. I have also made it so the storage feature works with shrimp and snails now too.

Money is usually a big part of most creation/management games and it will play a big part in Fishery. In the screenshot everything is the same price. This is just because we have not priced every item in the game yet but for now it is the underlying mechanism that is important. And yes we are stealing the old french franc money symbol purely because it is a fancy "F" for fish.

Money is the first of the campaign/career features. Players will start off with an amount of money which will be enough to buy an aquarium, some fish, maybe some plants and a few decorations. Players will then be able to breed the fish and raise their offspring so they can sell them and buy more expensive fish to breed and sell and so on.

That is the basic career loop that we are working on and it will expand into completing specific objectives and career contracts. We are also working on adding a "research tree". Not every feature will be available for players to use from the beginning. For instance water changes will be something that needs to researched by the player before being able to use it.

It will sort of function like it does in other management sim games like jurassic world evolution, surviving mars, or even tavern master. Players need to make a certain amount of progress or reach some sort of milestone before being able to research a particular item or feature. Researching that item will then open the door to new unlockable research and so on. It is also a good way to teach players about each feature one at a time so everything is not so overwhelming to new players and things can be properly explained and knowledge of the game is built upon piece by piece.

I am going to do another news update post in a week or so which is going to show how the new maintenance systems in the game are going to work and also some small changes to how substrates work and if I can squeeze it in, a nice picture of a spherical aquarium.

I will not fall into the trap of trying to predict when we might have this update ready and on steam again because I am so terrible at it. The good news is that nothing is going wrong, everything is going quite well but it is just taking time. One change leads to another change which leads to another change and so on. But the game is getting so much better as a result, so I think I will just end by saying I'll try to be more regular with news updates and show lots of nice pictures and share more information in the mean time.

I hope this is not too disappointing, if anything we are working hard on this update to offset any disappointment you have felt in the many months since the last build update we have uploaded. Our hope is that when we do this update it will keep you busy and happy for many hours exploring all the changes instead of maybe 15 minutes like it would have with previous updates. It is all about putting as much valuable gameplay into the experience as possible.

On that note we wish you all a very happy Sunday evening.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been a quite a while since our last post and we have been busier than ever in that time. The majority of freelance work and other projects are out of the way and as a result we are able to work more on our little aquarium game. We were not working on the game 100% in that time but we have still managed to get quite a lot done.

UI:
Firstly I managed to fix a lot of the issues that have been irritating me about the UI. Specifically how much code there is devoted to the UI and how often it gets executed. As a result we both notice a performance boost overall when playing the game which is good. It also means adding new UI is less painful and requires less code. There is still some UI related code that needs to be update, cleaned up, reduced or deleted but most of the time consuming work is done.

Language Support:
We have also made a lot of progress with adding support for languages other than English. We have decided on a good way of doing it after doing some quite time consuming and rigorous testing. Fairly soon the game will have this feature implemented. Ideally I would like us to support as many languages as possible but we will start with supporting 12.

General Code Cleanup:
There are parts of the code that were written years ago that are now simply obsolete both technically and philosophically. Think of it like rust on a car in the way that it only ever gets worse over time unless it is addressed. Much of that "code rust" was in the UI code but there are chunks of it in various other parts of the game which are in the process of being fixed.

Water Chemistry And Metabolisms:
We have come to call this part of the game "The Widow Maker", and for good reason. It is just so difficult to get right. It is hard to make it fun for players that are experienced in the real world with keeping fish and for players that know nothing about fish. It also has to be balanced in such a way that it allows for chaotic and non-chaotic outcomes without us specifically directing it to do so. The potential for players to manipulate the water chemistry in interesting ways is meant to be a big part of gameplay, but it is very hard to get the numbers to balance correctly.

On the one hand it can be fun and interesting to see everything go wrong in the aquarium for the first few times playing the game but it has to be something that experienced players can tame and understand without it feeling so difficult and chore like. It is also very uninteresting to have to wait a long time for things to happen. If fish take too long to breed then most players will be fast forwarding the game for most the of the time just to get breeding to happen more often.

I don't think that is very fun or interesting. It would be much more interesting if players had the option to add fertility pills into the aquarium which speed up a fish breeding cycles instead. This way players are more engaged with what is going on with the water chemistry and are having fun experimenting with modifying it. We will also tweak breed times too. Needless to say the water chemistry is changing a lot and I am happy to be adding things to it that I have been talking about on the forums for a long time.

Steam Features:
The next version of the game released will include support for steam sync. That means you can play the game on different computers and still have access to all of your aquariums without having to manually copy aquarium files.

There will also be support for steam achievements. To start off with there will be a small amount of achievements and we will keep adding new ones as time goes on.


Tutorials And General Help:
A proper set of interactive tutorials are being added to the game that explain every feature.


When will the next release be?
We are really hoping to get the next release ready for the first half of April but it could change. We will keep you all updated with what is happening and once this next update is finally done we can go back to updating the game more regularly.


We hope you are all doing well and have a great weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone

It has been quite a few months since the last news/update post and I would like to quickly allay any worries you might have. We are alive and well and we have not stopped working on fishery. We have been taking things a little bit easier over the summer. The last updates that we made involved adding entirely new item types, shrimp and snails, and it really took it out of us. Then all of a sudden it was summer and was very hot indeed. It was so hot that we could only really be productive in the morning and early afternoon because after that time the temperatures became unbearable. We decided to just take things a lot easier and recharge our 'fishery' batteries so to speak.

As summer was coming to an end we got an amount of requests to do freelance work which was more than usual. We have always done freelance work in parallel to working on fishery to help keep things going. Though as I said it was more than usual and therefore has taken more time away from working on fishery that we would have otherwise liked.

This is not necessarily a bad thing because having some time away from fishery has allowed us to see it with fresh eyes. One of the things I realized is just how much fishery is beginning to creak under it's own weight and probably more disturbingly is creaking under the weight of things that are yet to be added.

User interface and code in general:
There is quite a substantial amount of code which is related to the user interface that must be reduced and simplified. This is especially important because there is still more UI to add and at this point adding more would just make things even more bloated from a code perspective. The code in general across the whole game needs a good cleanup because as our ideas have evolved over time the code has not always kept up with those ideas and as a result things are a little ugly and making changes becomes difficult or time consuming.

It is sort of like decorating a Christmas tree with new decorations while the old decorations are still attached to the tree. There is an extra amount of work needed that is not related to the decorating at all but it is for making sure things do not snag on other things or knock off other ornaments. It becomes like performing surgery which I must say is what programming the game feels like these days and that is not good.

Languages:
Another problem related to UI is about making fishery support other languages than English. Now is a good time to start coding in support for other languages because if we do it later when the game is more complete it will just take longer. It makes sense to do it at the same time we are fixing up the whole user interface. The number of non English speaking players contacting us asking for the game to be released in their language continues to go up every year and it makes a lot of sense from a sales point of view to put this in sooner rather than later.

Tutorials/Help:
After we did the snail update we started working on tutorials and found that we cannot really seriously start working on tutorials until the user interface and language support are in better shape because any help or tutorial system will require a lot of UI and language related work.

Campaign/Story mode:
Really soon we have to start adding campaign features. But it is a massive chunk of the game. It also cannot be added until we have the UI, language and tutorials in place and working really well.

Sound:
There is not a lot of sound effects throughout the game at the moment but there absolutely should be way more sound than there is. Sound has really been neglected and I think it really hurts the atmosphere of the gameplay to have it absent.

We have come to the conclusion that we have to prioritize these key areas before we add anything else to the game.

When will the next game update be?
I am not entirely sure but it won't be a very very long time. The next update will include all of these significant changes including campaign mode features. It will be the largest update we have ever done. We have put a lot of these changes off for a while because they would take a long time but now they cannot wait any longer. What we have realized in the past few months is that in order to enable a lot more progress to be made in all other parts of the game we have to fix these large issues first.

We still have the freelance work and other commitments that we have to fulfill in parallel to fishery which does not always improve our speed but it makes sure that we can actually continue to work on the game. We will show off any cool progress we make in a news post and I will be responding to comments and forum threads as usual.


We wish you all a very good Thursday

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 81 has been uploaded to steam and it contains three major new features that we have been talking about for a long time.

Snails:


Yes snails are now a part of the game. We just have one species for the moment, the zebra nerite snail, but more will be added. They work pretty simply. Players drop them into the aquarium and they slowly move about minding their own business. They crawl over everything including the glass and make your little ecosystems feel that little more complete. They grow over time and when they have grown enough they will breed. Also now that we have a good technique for achieving this sort of creature navigation it does open the door for us to eventually add sea slugs ;)

Multiple substrate paint materials:
Using the same technique that we used for painting algae onto everything we are now able to apply multiple substrate materials to the substrate model data. For the time being players can choose to have just two substrate materials applied to the substrate at one time but we will most likely make it possible to add three or four. It is not difficult to add but we need to do some testing about how it may impact performance and see if players actually want more than two.

Choosing substrate materials:


Substrate materials are no longer chosen via the shop/inventory but now have their own UI where players can choose the layers used. The substrate materials button can be found in the bottom left toolbar and that will open up the special UI.

Defining where layer 2 appears.


Players will then need to use a spherical substrate paint volume to define where layer 2 shows up on the substrate. These volumes are placed like any other object.

Paint Volume Settings:


The settings for substrate paint volumes are identical to algae volume settings. Players can define overall strength and spherical falloff of each volume. There is a maximum of 32 volumes that can be used.

Our next step for substrates is redefining how the actual model data works in terms of adjusting it's shape and resolution. We would like to go beyond just having a sculpting brush and have a more fine tuned set of tools for modifying the substrate's shape. I cannot say exactly when it will be added into the game but it will be relativly soon after we have ticked off a few more important things from our to-do list.

Camera bookmarking:


We have added a nice little tool for saving camera positions so the it can be set back to those positions in the future at the click of a button. The 'Camera Bookmark' button is placed next to the 'Reset Camera' button in the bottom left toolbar. It will bring up a UI where camera bookmarks can be created, managed and activated.

The code that governs how cameras work has also been improved. When the camera is set to orbital mode, which it is by default, it is now a lot less fiddly to rotate the camera and get nice positions. When the camera is framed in and following a fish, which is done by double clicking a fish or selecting it and pressing 'f', the mouse wheel can be used to zoom in and or out and it wont stop the camera from following it like before. In general camera interactions should be less tedious and fiddly overall.

The Lower jaw of the T.Rex

We wanted to add more coral, plants and other decorations into this update but the snail navigation code took a little longer to get right which meant that this update only has one new decoration unfortunatly.

There are also various bug fixes including a bug that made it so shrimps more or less never breed. The crystal red shrimp texture was also reworked to better resemble it's real life counterpart.

The next update will most likely focus soley on adding in-game tutorials because it really is well past time that we add them especially since some of the newer features are a little more complicated to set up like substrate painting.

It is also getting very hot in our part of the world and when things get really hot it can affect our productivity so working on something relativly simple like in-game tutorials/help is preferable because it does not require a lot of intense brain activity and we have gone without good in-game help/tutorials for far too long.

We hope you all enjoy the rest of the weekend and enjoy the steam summer sale.

The Fishery Team