FISHERY News

Hello everyone,

We have uploaded our 80th game update to steam and it comes with some nice new content and a nice new feature.

I can now reveal the identity of the mystery fish that was present in the last update post:

Dory.... I mean the Blue Tang, or Palette Surgeonfish or any of the other eight-ish names it has.
I suppose thanks to pixar if we do not have this fish in our game it is not worth playing. Much like making a dinosaur game that does not include a T.rex or a velociraptor. Anyway it has been on our list for some time and we try to add saltwater fish whenever possible to get a better balance of fresh and saltwater fish in the game.

Crystal Red Shrimp:

Another nice shrimp to add to everyone's collection and there are still more to come.

Giant Duckweed:

Another highly requested plant that we have had on our list for a long time.


We changed how algae works and in so doing also figured out a very nice way to solve another problem.
Players have asked for a way to paint algae in their aquariums. The problem is that the common method of doing this would affect performance quite a lot due all the data that has to be read, computed and then written. It would also quite drastically increase the size of the aquarium files that players save and load. So we came up with a way to do it that requires none of that but instead allows players to use simple spherical volumes to determine where algae is placed.



This gives players a lot of power to quickly experiment with where they place algae as well as how much is placed. You can have up to 32 of these volumes placed in the aquarium at one time which should be enough to make things very interesting and complex. Algae volumes can be found in the Utilities section of the shop/inventory. They can also be hidden via the overlay UI panel in the bottom right of the screen.


This does mean that algae is no longer a simulated thing in the game. It was another one of those features that was not very satisfying and more than a few players expressed a desire to control it in a more decorative sense. We do favour art direction over simulation in a lot of cases because it allows for more creativity and more things to do in the game.

Some of you may also be thinking that we could use the exact same technique for applying different substrate materials to the terrain and you would be correct. This pretty much solves a lot of the problems we have had with having more than one substrate material. We have been working on more advanced ways to sculpt and change the shape of the substrate but we encounter a lot of problems when we factor in substrate painting features on top of them. They just have different requirements and they clash which would require us to do some very complicated and ugly things that slow everything down in order to get it work.

So essentially the technique for having more than one substrate material painted onto the substrate model is solved and we hope to have that ready for the next update we do. This now allows us to get even more creative with our new substrate sculpting/generation tools because the systems are independent of each other and we can focus on making them good.

I did promise that we would have a new decoration this update but I woke up with the idea of how to do these algae volumes and therefore how to solve the substrate painting problem and I had to just code it and put it into the game because I was just too excited. But I promise the next update will include more decorations.

The next game update we do will probably be towards the middle-ish of June. We are adding another much requested feature into the game and we want to get it right. We also want to focus on adding more coral, decorations, substrate materials etc. into the next update. They always get pushed back when we are under time constraints so this time I want to make sure we don't delay them further.

We will of course show you all sneak peaks in the weeks to come ;)

And with that we wish you all a very happy Friday and a lovely weekend.

The Fishery Team.

Hellooo everyone,

We have uploaded a new build for you all to enjoy, build 79, and we have mostly focused on creating new art content as well as some touch up and tweaks to existing artwork. More details below.

Green Jade Cherry Shrimp


I could be wrong but there are not a lot of aquatic species, other than plants of course, that are completely green. It seems quite rare and when I saw this shrimp I had to put it into the game. The next shrimps we add will have more colour and pattern variations like stardust shrimp, crystal red shrimp etc.

A new animation for shrimp was added this week too. When shrimp swim up to floating food and start eating it they now perform a specific 'eating while not standing on the floor' animation.

Hifin Platy


I find platys to be very sweet. For that reason alone I made this one when I had some free time recently and I was still in 'fishery mode'. I also made the pintail variety but it is not painted yet.

Mystery Fish


This will be fully painted and added to the game in the next update. Can any of you tell what species of fish it is? Put your guesses in the comments.

Other changes we made.

• Fixed some weird errors that occur when the game closes.
  
  
• Slowed the speed of the caustic reflection animation so it is less distracting and sort of messes with the relaxation vibe.
  
  
• Adjusted the overall brightness of some fish that become too bright when put into aquariums with medium to bright lighting.
  
  
• Touched some texture maps for fish that have been in the game a while and need updating.
  

We should have a new plant, new fish, new decoration and a new shrimp in the next update which should be on steam in around two weeks.

We wish you all a lovely weekend.

The Fishery Team.

Hello everybody,

It has been a busy week and we have uploaded a new build to steam that includes some nice new additions.

We have added two new colour varieties of cherry shrimp.


Blue Velvet:


Yellow:


Some other changes:

• Shrimp breeding has been enabled. All shrimp varieties currently in the game can breed together.
  
  
• The little ui that appears when players mouse over shrimp icons in the inventory now displays all important information.
  
  
• The maximum size that shrimps grow to has been slightly increased.
  
  
• Fish breeding takes less time to happen.
  

I have not yet begun to work on getting the fish storage system to work with shrimp, It will also need to be renamed, that work will probably start fairly soon but I don't think it will be in the next update. The next update will be in two weeks. It will mostly consist of new art content with the usual bug fixes, quality of life changes, optimisations. There are also one or two additional shrimp animations that will be added and we may add yet another colour variation of shrimp if we can squeeze it in.

Much work to be done!

We wish you all a very nice weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

As promised, shrimps have finally come to Fishery.



It has been a long time coming. We have been promising to add shrimps, among many other things, into the game for years and I think we have cruised along on a lot of good will and trust from players who really want us to keep our word. I hope this really does help prove that we are not all talk when it comes to these promises. It may take us a while but we really are going to see this whole thing though to the end.

In this build we only have the male and female red cherry shrimp. They wander about and do shrimpy things like find food and nibble it as well as stop and rest and take it easy for a bit. They start off quite small but as time goes on they grow bigger like the fish do.

There are a few rough edges because we could not fit everything we wanted to into this update without delaying it another week. I think they are pretty minor and easily fixed. Fun can still be had with the shrimps as they are at the moment.

Some of these "rough edges" are:

• breeding is turned off. It is actually all coded and working but I really think we need another day or two of testing and fiddling to get it ready for player consumption.
  
  
• Shrimps cannot be stored in the fish storage inventory yet but they will.
  
  
• The info ui in the inventory does not display shrimp gender as well as other details yet.
  
  
• When shrimp eat they do so in a variety of positions, like swimming up to the water's surface to nibble something. We need to add another type of eating animation for when shrimps eat whilst swimming/floating in the water.
  
  
• Shrimps dont climb all over food when eating it yet. they instead eat it from the edges but our aim is to have them climbing all over it.
  

We are going to do another update a week from now that smooths out a lot of these rough edges and we are going to add some more shrimp colours too. We are aiming to add Yellow cherry shrimp and of course the Dream blue velvet shrimp.


We really hope you all enjoy this update. Some of you have been asking for shrimps for around four years. This is still only the beginning for them, we are going to add more animations, more behaviours, more varieties as time goes on.

As usual we wish you all a very lovely weekend and we shall see you back here next Friday with a new update.

The Fishery Team

Hello everybody,

Everything is going well with the shrimp update. All we have left to do is the usual endless tweaking of animations, code and a some very easy but very boring and tedious UI modifications. For instance we need to modify the overlay UI to allow for activating visual overlays for shrimps now and we have to reorganise it so it does not take up too much space etc etc. It is sort of the game making equivalent of doing tax returns. I think we have a good chance of getting it onto steam by the end of next week if there are no major problems and it does not look like there will be any at this time.


I also need to mention that when we publish this update to steam the price of fishery is going to increase significantly. We have said before that we only intend to increase the price once the game is out of early access but even after all this time the game is still not ready for a full release and we still have a lot of promises that we intend to keep. We also don't want to spend a lot of time earning money doing non-fishery things. It keeps us alive and keeps things going but it takes time away from working on fishery which then means fishery takes even longer to complete and over time things become more difficult. Aquarium games sit in quite a small niche and every year that niche is getting more crowded with games that are not too dissimilar to each other in appearance, general gameplay and price. That is not necessarily a bad thing for potential players who want more choice in the market but it does dilute sales for us and we have to make sure each sale has a larger impact.


Anyway to get back to this upcoming build, everything is actually going very well. Getting the shrimp navigation to work pretty well was easier than I thought it would be. What I am very happy with is that the shrimp navigation manages to allow the shrimps to crawl over things and swim around without things getting too complicated. It still needs a few tweaks here and there especially when it comes to adjusting timings of all the animations.

Animation is being done the good old fashioned way through hand key framed skeletal animation which takes longer to setup, create and modify but it is really the only way to animate them properly.

Here is a look at the eating animation.


and with all the controls.


It is probably going to be tweaked some more but the sad thing is that shrimps are so small that players won't see much of the animation details unless they are zoomed in quite close to the shrimps. We exaggerate the movements so players can actually see it from a distance. We can also adjust the speed that the animation plays during gameplay so smaller shrimps move faster than some of the larger ones. This helps just sell the feeling of scale a little better and it creates some variety in movement when looking at a lot of shrimp at once.

Here is the latest version of the 'run' animation but the gif is a little jittery:


The movements are exaggerated so they can be seen at a distance. There are a lot of uneven surfaces in aquariums so we animate them as if they are walking over bumpy surfaces like gravel or some lumpy wood otherwise their motions may look unnaturally smooth and perfect.

It is all coming together quite nicely and we hope this will satisfy everyone who has been asking for shrimps for a long time.

We wish you all a great weekend.

The Fishery Team