FISHERY News

Hello everyone,

We have had another productive week and are ready to update the game but there are a few small things we could not fix in time for Friday but we will be able to have it ready and uploaded for this coming Monday instead. It is rather annoying delaying things again but this will be the last delay for this update.

We can however talk about what the heck we have been working on for the last two weeks. As I have said in earlier posts we have been ripping the guts out of most of the game. We have finished that process for the user interface and can move forward.

The biggest problem that we had with the old user interface was that it had everything in the same place with lots of lots of buttons. We struggled to not have so many windows overlapping with each other and the overall space the UI took up made things feel very cramped.

This also made us realize that as we add much more features to the game the UI clutter would get even worse. So we had to come up with a solution for making the UI expandable but smaller overall. The solution was to have various UI "modes".



There is a small drop-down menu where players can switch to a mode that specifies the sort of actions they wish to perform. These modes can also be switched to via keyboard shortcuts. And yes there will be a "screensaver" mode added to this menu in the future. There will be a lot of new features and modes added and it wont disrupt previous ways of doing things or encroach on the other tasks players might want to perform.

So lets have a look.



Inspect mode is the mode you switch to when you want to see how everything is doing and view the statistics of the aquarium. Oxygen, C02 and nutrients etc has been moved to the bottom of the screen and overall made smaller. This serves a few purposes. Showing these values as percentages confused some players because there was not indication of what 100% actually meant and how could water contain 100% oxygen at the same time as 100% c02. This is our failure to communicate how it works so it is simplified to merely show the levels graphically and reduce confusion.

At the moment this new UI takes up a small amount of space. This is on purpose because there will be a lot more water attributes added in the near future. Like PH, salt, disease, hormones for breeding and stress etc. and more. This new arrangement simply makes it easier to expand without needing to redesign the UI to make things fit. The little widgets on the left are also going to be added to. At the moment they only display the number of fish and plants in the aquarium and selecting them shows the lists of each. In the future there will be widgets showing the number of coral, crustaceans, newts, jellyfish, snails, food, etc.



The shop/build mode will be added to the most and it is possible that players will spend a lot of their time here so things need to be organised. There are two menus. Category and sub-category. This helps us organise items better for players so there is no need to spend long searching for items to add into the aquarium. When we can spend less time fixing the current problems we plant to spend a lot of time making new items so these inventories will fill up fast. And yes the mouse scroll wheel now scrolls the main inventory.

When players select an item there will be no pop-up information that displays their status. That only occurs in the inspect mode. Leaving players free to just be creative without being bothered by all this pop-up UI. All creative tools will appear at the top of the screen and we will be expanding on them in the future too.



Substrate will become more important in the future. Each substrate type will effect the simulation in some way. For instance each substrate could add some nutrients or C02 or even oxygen into the water depending on what it is made of or perhaps it might even add heat. We want to get very creative with all of the choices of substrate but will also be adding the realistic variations. This is why we have have the large inventory for it.

The choice of substrate will effect the happiness/comfort of the fish and other animals. For instance some tropical fish may not feel at home with a very earthy/muddy substrate but would rather have lovely sand. But we want to be careful with that kind of functionality though because we don't want to limit the creativity of player too much by making it difficult to keep fish happy. We do not want players to be forced to place fish only in their preferred habitat because it wont be as fun and I think it is more interesting for players to figure out how to bend the rules a little.

The sculpt tool UI has also been made smaller and more out of the way. At some point the sculpting tools will have a major upgrade and there will be more sculpting options.



Photo mode is another example of simplification with a view to expanding features in the future. There will be controls for changing the overall look of the images created as well as features for slowing down time so players can spend time properly framing a shot. I personally would love to add a feature for recording a little .gif because those are always fun too.


That is a quick look at the new user interface layout. UI is never very interesting but for this sort of game it is so important. As I have mentioned before most of game logic code that has been written is related to the user interface simply because so much of the game data has to be seen, accessed and modified by the player. But from this point onward we can handle it.

What is next?
Glad you asked. Next week the guts of the simulation system will be ripped out and replaced with something much better (we hope). The simulation system governs how things like, C02, oxygen, nutrients effect everything else and how those resources are used or released.

Everyone, including us agrees the current system it is crap and not fun in it's current form. It is overly complex where it should not be and in most cases only partially does what it should do. This is usually somewhat expected in an Early Access game but it should not be like this for very long and players have given great feedback on what they expect so we now have a better idea of what is important as well as where we can fit in some of our more creative ideas.

To avoid delaying a release again we may release the updates in stages. For instance we only update the algae and waste system one week and then update the C02, oxygen, nutrients system in the following week. It depends how crazy things get. Doing massive changes can often be like going down a rabbit hole and it is very important for us that we don't delay an update very often. Stay tuned and have a great weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone

It has been an exceptionally productive week with some quite exciting things to discuss about upcoming features but unfortunately for a second week in a row we cannot upload a new build.

This is because we have been rather too enthusiastic about making progress and have broken certain parts of the game. We did say this month we plan to completely rip the guts out of the game in order to make big changes. The problems always arise when we have to suddenly put all the guts back in and expect everything to work with no problems and the culprit is as always the user interface. Despite these minor setbacks we are extremely happy with the progress being made and it is really opening doors for more gameplay features that we are going to add in the future. Some of which we are going to talk about now.

A subject much talked about in the forums and reviews is the subject of water chemistry. Specifically controlling water chemistry through the use of machines. Like filters, C02 regulators, thermometers, PH regulators etc. Specifically people talk about the current lack of such items in our game.
The problem we as game designers are trying to capture the essence of that part of the aquarium experience so we can satisfy players who want to deal with the more technical side of things, but not have it overlap too harshly with the creativity part of gameplay.

In other words filters, regulators etc. can be a little bit big, bulky and ugly and may visually ruin an aquarium. However we think we have solved this conflict.
Quite often for medium to large and extremely large aquariums there is fairly large amount of plumbing involved just to keep the water nice for the plants and fish but the size of the filters and regulators are themselves so large that they could not fit inside the aquarium at all and must be placed either next to or beneath it. This is known as a "plumbed aquarium". This is how we will implement filters and regulators and all the wonderful machinery and piping associated with it.

These images are just a quick concept mock-up made in our 3D software and are made only to represent the possibilities of what things could look like.



There will be a menu button the quickly switches to a new mode where the aquarium becomes invisible and the area underneath the aquarium becomes visible and the focus point for the camera. Players can then work on constructing the plumbed filter system. There is an intake pipe and an output pipe represented in the images by those two arrows. Players will need to connect the water coming in from the input pipe to various devices such as filters, temperature regulators, PH regulators, C02 regulators and then connect to the output pipe which brings the modified water back into the aquarium.



Each aquarium is a different size and so is the size of it's "plumbing area" meaning larger tanks have more space for this than smaller ones. This means players will need to think creatively about how they connect up their systems to best make use of the space. The end result is that players will have full control over the water chemistry and it wont be annoying either visually or technically.

It also goes beyond having simple filtration and C02 regulations. For instance, there will be fish and other organisms added to the game that love eating algae so there must be a plentiful supply in the aquarium for them eat. Players will be able to tweak their systems so they can have a perfectly balanced, high algae content aquarium.
There will even be little devices that can be added to the system that put algae spores into the water to keep algae growth at a consistent level.

The possibilities are huge, we could have hormone injectors that add special breeding hormones to the water to increase fish fertility (when we have added the breeding system). Or players could harvest breeding hormones from the water and sell them in career mode (when we add career mode). Players might also want more electricity so they can have more powered decorations or air stones in the tank. Why not add a few mini electricity generators into the pipeline so the power output is higher, or even add a small nuclear reactor which increases power and water temperature so you can have tropical fish and plants. Certainly no downside or unforeseen consequences to surprise players with there.

It is such a fun and exciting set of features that I fear I am rambling so I shall wrap this up by saying this is being worked on and we are going to try and get the first version of this mode into the game before the end of the year and of course we shall keep you updated with it's progress.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

This weeks update will be delayed until next week.

The main problem is that we tried to do a little too much and we cannot get it all polished enough done in time. Especially when it comes to the artwork. On top of that there are some rather urgent issues with the user interface that are annoying players and that requires some aggressive redesigning from a programming perspective.


We would like to show you a sneak peak of some of the things that are almost ready and will be in the game soon. Today is of course Halloween and we have some Halloween decorations to add to the game.





The current small selection of fish we have in the game are all based off of real world fish. We want to continue adding lots and lots of real world fish but we will also be adding lots of non-real/surreal fish into the game over time because its very fun to design and create such creatures and each fish will effect the ecosystem in more interesting ways if not only visually.



For instance this fish is loosely based off of the design of a piranha. It will swim around the aquarium in groups looking for dead or dying fish and then proceed to eat them. Players could see this as a natural mechanism for waste management. They will never get hungry and die they just roam around and eat what they feel should be eaten.



When a fish dies it's spirit will break free from it's body and aimlessly roam around the world until it's body has been removed from the aquarium. The ghost will not actually interact with anything. It will pass through every object in the world and scare the crap out of nearby fish. This will be especially important once we have reconfigured the fish ai to be susceptible to stress and fear. There will also be mechanisms added later in the game that allow for the spirit to recombine with it's body and thus be resurrected but this will happen only in the right set of circumstances and will require exact steps to be followed by the player.



On first inspection perhaps it makes no sense at all to place a severed arm into an aquarium for reasons of decoration. It does however make things more interesting and allows for some really creative aquarium designs. If fish swim a little too close to this it will twitch and even attempt to grab the fish causing certain fish's stress levels to sky rocket while other more scary/mean fish wont care very much at all.

Obviously a lot of this stuff requires more programming and a lot of testing to get it all working well. This is part of the cause for the delay. We work on this all month and things pile up when higher priority bugs or features need to be worked on.

What we will try to do for the updates in November is to balance the release of art content and programming changes much better on a per week basis. Next week for instance we will release a version of the game with bug fixes and some of the art content showed above and we will try to repeat that every week from now on.


The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

This weeks update comes with a few, but very nice quality of life fixes and yet more re-organising of the shop inventories ui. We have also been working on the content update that is scheduled for release next week which is really coming together and should be a lot of fun for players. But we shall talk about that a little bit later. For now I'll talk you through this weeks tweaks.



Shop inventory re-organisation:
yes once again the shop ui has been changed around. There are now sub-categories for each main category. For instance, the decorations category has been split into four sub-categories. Natural, Garden, Wreckage and Misc. It is planned that the number of categories and their contents will expand greatly over time which is why we are doing this re-organising now rather than later.



Duplication tool:
players can now duplicate any object they have created in their aquarium. At the moment it can only be done via a keyboard shortcut, holding Left Control and pressing the "d" key, the aim of this tool is to eliminate more tedious clicking when creating similar objects. It works for everything, fish, food, decorations, medicine etc.

Camera zoom sensitivity:
sometimes when scrolling the mouse wheel to zoom the camera it can zoom more than we might like. especially if we are close to an object but only want to get a tiny bit closer. If players hold Left Control and scroll the mouse wheel to zoom, it will now zoom at a much slower rate so players can maneuver the camera to exact right position. This works for both camera control styles.

Free camera mode's framing functionality:
Double clicking or pressing F on an object will attach the camera to that object and zoom into it at a nice distance from the object. If this is done in free camera mode it was a bit crap. That is now fixed and the framing mode for the free camera behaves just like the orbital camera's framing mode which works much better.

Free camera zoom functionality:
The style of zooming with the mouse wheel works very nice for the orbital camera mode. For the free camera mode's scroll wheel action is not very good at all. Now the free camera mode's mouse scroll wheel zoom works just like the orbital camera's.

Tweaks to other smaller ui panels:
The ui panels for the substrate editor, water level editor, photo mode panel and backdrop editor were all not properly placed. They have now been moved to a better position.



Flashing ui alert icons:
The alert icons for the aquarium stats ui now flash on and off over the course of a second. Some players have not noticed the alerts when playing so this is an attempt to make them more visible to your peripheral vision.

That is what we managed to finish for this week's update. As I said before there has been a lot of work done for next week's update and we have been planning and testing large changes that will be talked about and released in November.

November will be a very busy month. We are going to rip the guts out of a lot of the existing code that manages the main simulation of water chemistry as well as fish ai and replacing it with something that is more fun and requires less tedious clicking from the player to get the C02 levels correct etc. We are also going to make the next version of all the shaders which should require even less calculations on player's graphics hardware which will result in faster rendering of the game.

Thanks again for all the feedback and comments, they are really helping us to make meaningful improvements. Stay tuned for next week's update, no doubt you will find it a treat.


The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been another rather intense week with quite a few different things being worked on at the same time. Some of which shall be revealed fully at a later date but most of them can be talked about here and now.

A lot of the important cleanup has been done to some of the most important parts of the game logic code. Quite often when we are making big changes or fixing problems the code that is written to do the work is not especially neat and tidy. This can often take the form of "duplicated" code. Sometimes there are instances where we want similar things to happen under different circumstances with slightly different outcomes. For the sake of making progress and getting the correct outcomes copying and pasting code gets us to where we want to be much faster. However it is not a great idea to keep things that way for a long time. A lot of what was done this week was reducing instances of duplicate code and writing it properly. This often leads to less code overall. That has saved us many hundreds of lines of code and less code means less complexity and less potential for bugs in the future. It is not the most interesting or glamorous thing to have in an update but it is extremely important.



We have received good feedback from players about the brush creation tool that was added last week. More time has been spent refining how that tool works. Specifically we added a preview to the brush that shows the object that is currently assigned to the brush for creation as well as it's potential scale and rotations. We found that is was a big problem to predict exactly what the brush will create, how big it the objects will be and how they are oriented. This preview functionality should make these things more clear.

This has also made us re-prioritise the undo feature. Quite often the player might create objects with a brush or spend a while moving, rotating and scaling objects before deciding that actually those changes do not look good and they want to undo their actions. We have begun properly planning the undo system and we hope to get the first version of that in game very soon.

There have been a lot of quality of life changes made. For instance it is now possible to select fish, medicine, pills or fish food whilst in a manipulation mode like move, rotate or scale. You cannot actually move these items since they are pure simulation objects but you can at least select them.

The camera framing action for the orbital camera has been tweaked to not jump around to it's new position when players double click an object or select it and press "f". This was broken after we completely changed how the orbital camera worked but now its fixed.

Deleting objects whilst in a manipulation mode will now hide the manipulator after the object has disappeared.

Players have noticed that having other input devices plugged into their computers were making the camera behave very strange in it's movement. We have turned off the ability to receive some of those inputs. It is not possible to properly test 100% because there are so many types of input devices and not all of them communicate in a standard way. But this should help with some of the problems. Otherwise players will just have to unplug these devices as they play fishery until we can fix it all.

Each object that can be placed or brushed into creation has it's own defined values for random rotation and scale. This means that each object's random rotation and scale will make sense for that specific object, for instance creating a plant with random rotation turned on will only rotate in its upward facing axis and not be created upside down which would make no sense at all.

More art content has been created for the end of month update. There will be some nice new decorations as well as some new small-ish features which we have not talked about and a new background. It is quite a lot of fun making this update.

We have a big to-do list that we will be focusing on for the next two weeks so stayed tuned for more progress.

The Fishery Team