FISHERY News

Hello everyone,

This week we spent a lot of time focusing on substrate. It's visual appearance has remained more or less unchanged since the initial release and it was high time that we worked on it. We were also able to add some more functionality to it and of course we could not resist the urge to optimise and improve it's code.



We have added an additional substrate 7 materials. I did so much painting this week that my thumb hurts from holding my art tablet stylus. The shaders, which are the small programs that control how the graphics card renders the substrate have been remade to use less memory and less computations while looking better than the previous version.



Each substrate now has the capability to modify the water chemistry. For instance some substrates that contain earth/soil increase the nutrients in the water while other substrates made of rocks and other minerals increase CO2 and oxygen. This means that the reason for choosing which substrate to have will not be based solely on appearance. Another way of thinking about it is that we are attempting to add the butterfly effect into the game in an indirect way. Every change the player makes to their aquarium by adding or removing something will affect the simulation. The full consequences of these actions will make themselves known later. That does not mean that every outcome will be sinister in nature. We want to allow to very cool positive things to happen and be made possible. A lot of the numbers that govern this are not final to keep in mind that an item's inputs and outputs are far from final as we test and test what works well.

What we have added is but a small sample of where we plan to go with substrates. We are going to be adding more varieties of materials in the upcoming months. Some materials are quite traditional while others are a little more creative and surreal.


Hotkeys for using the manipulator tools have been added. These have been on the to-do list for a while and this week someone mentioned it on the forums and we were able to squeeze it in at the last minute. The hotkeys are X, C and V. They allow players to activate the Scale, Rotate and Translate manipulators. The reason we have gone for these hotkeys instead of using S, R, T as suggested in the forum post are because they require less finger stretching to use them.
Their use is also historical. They were also the hotkeys used for the same purpose in a 3D program named Softimage which was one of the earliest commercial 3D programs which was used widely across the 3D industry. So we are confident in our thinking that players will find this comfortable since countless artists have collectively spent thousands of years using them.

As is usual most weeks this was not the only things we focused on. Typically we focus on a small set of things that we know are almost ready to be put into the game at the same time as working on more complex/larger things that take more than a week to get right. Occasionally our plans get derailed somewhat if there is an major bug or set of features that are really in need of modification. We have some quite useful and interesting things lined up to be added into the game this month. As usual they include things that we often say are "coming soon" or "are being worked on" but we really do mean it.

We wish you all a relaxed weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

The build was updated last night so check it out when you have time. A lot of improvements were made to the water chemistry simulation as well as to the art style of the algae And we threw in a few rendering performance improvements for good measure.



As algae levels increase a new algae texture appears on the surface of objects in addition to the plant like tufts that we added last week. You can see in this image that the airstone objects do not get covered in algae. Our reasoning for this is that they are quite important objects that need to be easily identified by players and because they blast gas bubbles our from their surface it does not allow algae to settle and grow.

The next step for algae is to add it back into the materials for the substrate.

Power can now be consumed by items that need it in order to function. Airstones are such items. They will not produce CO2 or Oxygen unless there is sufficient power. For now the only way to produce power is to connect one or more power generators to your aquarium's plumbing system.

OLD UI:


NEW UI:


The airstones selection UI has been updated to better reflect how it changes the water chemistry and power. Hopefully this makes it very clear and simple for players to tweak gas output without feeling unsure of the outcome of such tweaks. If you compare the new UI with the old one. It is very easy to see why we needed to change it.



Similar changes have also been made to the Selection UIs of all plumbing objects. More numbers are on display to make things clear.

The usual pile of bug fixes and tweaks have been made that make everything work much better overall. We focused a lot this week on reducing the complexity of shaders for all decorations (rocks, wood, fossils, etc). There are a lot less lighting calculations happening per pixel which drastically reduces the time your graphics processor needs to render things per frame. Shadow performance has also been improved. Hopefully these changes also reduce some shadow flickering at lower shadow resolutions. However we are far from satisfied with shadows so expect them to improve over time.

We have also been putting a lot of work into things that we are still not ready to show yet. Regarding the career mode. It is shaping up to be very interesting but there is a lot of text to write on top of planning. We are also working hard on the next iteration of the art style for fish, decorations and plants. Soon when we are satisfied we will show you progress.

As you can imagine we are working flat out at the moment. There are so many improvements that are being made but also so many still to be made that overall it seems progress is a little slow even though we get a lot done in the space of 1 week. But we are focused and highly motivated to get this all done so keep checking back at these posts every week to see all the progress made.

Have a great weekend,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Apologies for being a bit late with this week's update. We have finally added the new algae system into the game and later tonight a new build will be uploaded to steam for you all to try.

The underlying code that governs how algae works is a lot cleaner and more robust than what was previously in the game. Algae's growth is far less volatile and players are able to tweak the water chemistry to keep algae levels where they want.

In order for algae to spawn in the first place players need to maintain relatively high levels of CO2 and nutrients. This can happen by design or by neglect. Once algae spawns it is intentional by us that it is difficult to remove entirely. However having algae growing in your aquarium is not necessarily a bad thing and if players keep an eye on their water chemistry it's growth can be stabilised. Furthermore it can be used as a natural way to control the levels of co2, nutrients and oxygen. It will also be a food source.

In the not too distant future there will be fish that eat algae and hopefully not to far beyond that we will add other algae eating organisms like shrimp and snails.

We are also going to make it look more pretty. There is certain type of beauty that can be found in the natural world when nature becomes a little overgrown and buzzing with life. We want to try and capture that in Fishery and algae will play a big part in that.

The little tufts of algae that grow on the surface of the objects in the pictures below are not final at all and they will be replaced soonish with better models. Another part of the algae visualisation that we are working on are the various painted maps that will appear on the surface of objects, substrate and glass. We are also going to experiment with having algae particles floating around in the water as well as experiment with algae appearing on fish when levels are really high.




At the moment algae is only visible on the surface of decorations so you will need them in your aquarium in order to see it. Above you can see what it looks like as algae grows from nothing to it's maximum level.




Algae grows on the surface of objects over time. You can see it's progress on a per-object basis by selecting it. In the real world if you add a rock into an aquarium full of algae it will take a bit of time before algae is covering it. This is a simple attempt to emulate that behaviour. It serves only as a visualisation and it is not adding more algae into the system.


There has also been a small tweak to the overall water chemistry system that we wanted to add a little later but needed to be added now in order to get the algae working correctly. This change is to the speed that the water chemistry adjusts to changes.



There is an additional parameter added to the water chemistry UIs. "Output". Using the example picture above, The output is 28.4. This represents how much is actually being added into the system by some object/s. However the CO2 level is far greater. This is because the output must have previously been around 40 and suddenly it was reduced. Over time the CO2 level will decline and settle to the value of 28.4 because 28.4 is the amount of CO2 being put into the aquarium and no more. When players modify the CO2 level the output adjusts instantly to reflect the change. This allows players to make changes with precision and know that in a short while levels will rest at that number.

Many of the numbers that govern how the algae and water chemistry system work will be changed a lot over time as we playtest and get feedback from you all, so keep in mind that this is all going to change and improve week by week as is the rest of the game. We did do more work this week on other parts of the game but priority was given to getting algae ready and it sort of took over everything.

We wish everyone a good weekend and shall update you with more progress next week.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

We uploaded a small patch to game a short while ago. It fixes a few silly bugs/mistakes.

- Bugfix. When fish eat medicine or food. The fish get all the nourishment from the edible item but it never disappears.

We are doing a lot of tweaks to the simulation system. At the moment fish loose their hunger satisfaction in their entirety in about 3 minutes. As a fix for now we have doubled it to 6 minutes. At the moment all fish have the same metabolisms. This will change and soon we are going to introduce the first versions of an auto-feeder device to ease any tedium.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone

New build is uploaded!

Fortunately my life by default is one of social isolation and self quarantine. Therefore much progress has been made this week. Not everything that has been worked on is in the current update but that will be explained near the bottom of the post.




Inspect mode now has more functionality. We made it so the manipulation toolbar works in this mode and players can creatively fiddle about without needing to be in the shop mode. The shop mode now allows for the selection UIs to appear. Now that things are improving with the simulation and the numbers are starting to become meaningful to players. It makes sense to allow them to be seen in the shop mode when things are selected. It was completely dumb to have these mode-specific restrictions and now when we play the game it feels much less cumbersome.




The creation UI has been improved. It is a bit more clear and organised and there is more information about what is assigned to the brush. When the brush is turned off the part of the UI that shows brush-specific options becomes darker which is to show that it is turned off. These settings mean nothing while in that state. There are also several tweaks that make things feel less clunky when switching between brush mode, translate mode, etc.

There is still more work to be done in these areas. There have been a lot of great feedback from players and we are going to put these ideas into the game in the upcoming weeks. Here is a small list of some of the most interesting features:

- Delete brush. For deleting lots of things without the need to select them individually. There will be additional controls added so players can define specifically what should not be deleted by accident when using this tool.

- Undo. sometimes mistakes are made or a creative choice does not turn out as envisioned. Players need to quickly correct that.

- Object attachment. If players create an object on the surface of another object it makes sense to literally stick it to that object so if the base object is moved then it moves the stuck object/s too.

We will aim to add one of these features per week along with the usual assortment of tweaks and new stuff.




This was actually added last week but we completely forgot to show it. To help make sure players can see clearly when plumbing objects are connected correctly we have a better visual overlay that shows the difference between input and output connectors. Inputs will not connect to other inputs and outputs will not connect to other outputs. This is just the first step in showing how this works. We will probably have a small alert icon show up when connectors are incorrectly connected in the next week or perhaps 2 weeks depending on how everything else goes. There will also be clear instructions written in the new help system once that is added.




Algae reactors are really cool. They exist in the real world for use in aquariums as a means to filter out excess carbon dioxide and nutrients from the water to prevent algae from growing. Since we are about to add the new and improved algae system into the game we needed a solution to allow players to prevent algae from growing out of control. We are not super happy with the design. We will change it to be more detailed and have a more "sciencey" feel to it so keep that in mind. It wont stay boring forever.



We almost got the first part of the new algae system into the game this week but as we were testing it. Algae would just grow out of control and steal all the resources from plants, eventually killing them all which then kills a lot of fish. It is actually quite cool to see this sort of chaos unfold in realtime but it will for sure frustrate anyone who plays it. We will spend the weekend and next week tweaking this so everyone does not have an algae catastrophe or an algastrophe....

We made some small-ish tweaks to the fish AI. We were hoping to get deeper into fish AI this week but a few things got in the way. We will prioritise these changes for next week.

There are also quite a few features and art content being worked on that we are not ready to show just yet. Especially the next versions of fish. Certain types of fish require more work than others and they require a few more technical and artistic problems to be solved. There are so many shapes and colour appearances of fish. Each type needs it's own stylized art language in which some are more complex than others but we are making good progress and hope to show some progress very soon. We are also writing text for the career mode which is really going to add depth to the game.


We shall see you all next week with lots of juicey progress.

The Fishery Team