FISHERY News

Hello hello hellloo

I did in fact survive my camping trip and have re-joined my colleague and am working on the next update. To get back into work after a while gone. I have been concentrating on hunting down some rare bugs and working on overall code robustness. This also includes simplifying and deleting a lot of code. The less code there is the less places bugs can hide. Especially weird ones which have crept into the game over time.

As was talked about in a previous post I finished the model for the black moor goldfish. I'll show it off here once it has been painted. A lot more other species have been modelled and are awaiting painting too. Three of them are below but only shown in silhouette. See if any of you can guess what they are.

Mystery Fish A


Mystery Fish B


Mystery Fish C


We are aiming to get the next update onto steam by the first week of August. It is quite a big update but it allows us to knock off quite a few long standing items from our to-do list. I know I am being somewhat mysterious but I don't want to hype things up too much until they are actually on steam.

Hopefully this is not too much of a disappointing post but we are hoping to jam a lot of things into the second half of the year which means less build updates but they are bigger. We will of course keep you updated in posts like this in between builds with a few sneaky peaks at what we are doing.

We wish you all a very good start to the week.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

This week's new build is mostly a bug fix extravaganza. A good number of non-critical bugs were pointed out to us on the forums and we found some others in the course of play-testing which we were able to fix as well.

The most interesting bug fixes and a few tweaks are as follows:

• Fry transforming into juveniles and juveniles transforming into adults did not consistently work properly.
  
• Strange aging problems of fry and juveniles.
  
• During breeding there were situations where the offspring of fish pairs would not properly choose at random which parent variant and gender to be.
  
• Fry were swimming around way too fast.
  
• Aggressive and semi-aggressive parents would eat their own fry after being only a little bit hungry.
  
• More tweaks to pathfinding, specifically figuring if there is an unobstructed straight line between a fish and target and deciding if the algorithm even needs to be run.
  
• Pausing the game would deselect everything.
  
• Fish can now breed even if they are very stressed.(in later updates this will affect the viability of any resulting eggs)
  
• Adjustments to the physics collider for the banana food item. It was too small before and caused it to jump around too much on the water's surface.
  
• The aquarium volume need in the fish selection UI was not updating properly.
  

We added a new reef rock:


This is the first of a few variations of reef rock that we will be adding. This is in preparation for adding more reef/marine species and decorations in the near future. This will of course include coral which we hope to start adding in summer if all goes well.

A new example aquarium has been added called "Angel Delight".


This has been a little bit of an "odds and ends" update. There are lots of other bigger things we are working on that need a bit more time but hopefully a lot of very cool and interesting things should be coming to the game during summer.

I am taking a little break for nineteen days starting from Wednesday the 1st of June. I am going on a little low budget camping expedition into the Scandinavian wilderness where the bears and wolves are apparently even more shy than I am. If any of you happen to be in the general Scandinavian area and come across someone wearing a Fishery t-shirt while painting watercolours of trees then do say hello. It will be good to have a little break and clear my brain before starting the next batch of updates.

My illustrious colleague will not be taking vacation at the same time and will be painting some new fish variations which will be put into a new build as soon as I am back.

As usual we wish you all a very good weekend and a splendid start to next week.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 72 was uploaded a few days ago on Saturday. It includes a lot of tweaks, fixes and enhancements.

Lighting Help Text:

We have added help text for the overall light control buttons. We also modified it's naming so it does not cause too much confusion with the new lights that we added in the previous build.







Instead of the light control buttons being called "turn on light" or "turn off light" they are named to be less confusing and the new help text should better explain what having each set of lights on or off will do in regards to the light exposure of your aquariums.



To make it even more clear we have modified the name of light exposure to be "Day light exposure" which should also make it more clear that it increases only when day lighting is enabled. We also slightly modified it's help text too.



To be consistent we also made sure to match the naming change for the requirements for fish and plants etc. So now every organism that had a light exposure need now has a "Day Light Exposure" need.

Hopefully this should clear up any confusion that we have created on the subject of lights and light exposure. If not then of course let us know and we will see about making further tweaks.

Lighting Gobos:






We added another small feature to the new lights. They are called "Gobos" or "Cookies". Think of them as shapes put in front of the light to cast a shadow. They can be applied to directional and spot lights. They are useful for spicing up the lighting a little bit and creating more interesting light patterns. We have added 12 simple-ish shapes to begin with but later on we will add some more interesting and complex ones. When Gobos are applied to direction lights they will start to behave more like a a spot light in the way that it's position is taken into account more than when a Gobo is not applied. We will add Gobos to point lights at some point in the future too.

We made further tweaks to how fish swim, their general behaviours and other enhancements:

• Fish overall motion should look a lot more pleasant when they are shoaling together.
  
• Fish more noticeably swim at their preferred depth.
  
• When larger fish take a bite of their food they are closer to the food and it looks more natural.
  
• The shape of fish physics colliders are now a much better fit than before so there is less chance of them getting caught or knocked around in tight situations.
  
• Pathfinding is a more efficient.
  
• At night once fish have slept enough they will swim slowly around so it is less boring.
  
• Algae and Waste visuals have been tweaked to be visible in the amount that matches their saturation better.
  
• Algae and waste that appears on the glass now interacts with lighting and shadows and is not 100% bright no matter the lighting conditions. It has also been tweaked to look better.
  
• Algae and waste particles have been turned off because we could not get them to interact properly with shadows and they stuck out and looked ugly. We will turn them back on in the future if we solve this.
  
• water fog has been tweaked to be less bright.
  

We jammed a lot of fixes and tweaks into this build and we still have a lot of similar items on the to-do list for the next build which hopefully will be uploaded some time within the next one or two weeks. Very busy time indeed but it is great to make things work better.

We wish you all a very good week.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

As promised we have uploaded build 71 which is the lighting update we talked about in last week's post.



When players load up an old aquarium from a previous version of fishery or create a new aquarium the lighting will look almost exactly the same as previous versions. This is so things are not too confusing and if players have no interest in getting into lighting yet then there will not be any visual disruptions. For those of you who wish to dabble with lights it is very easy to get to grips with.



By enabling the "Show Lights" button found in the bottom left of the screen players will then be able to see the light icons that exist in the scene. By default in every new or old aquarium there exists two lights. An ambient light and a directional light. They are always positioned above the aquarium so they are easy to see.



Once they have been made visible they can then be selected and manipulated like any other object in the game. There is a news lights category found in the inventory where players can create new lights from. We have added a few new parameters since last week to the lights selection ui. Mostly to do with shadowing. Shadow options can now be set on a per light basis rather than having the shadow settings in the main game options. Not every light needs to have shadows enabled and if they are enabled players may wish to further adjust their resolution and how dark they are.



There is now only one setting in the main options to do with shadows which allows players to stop fish casting shadows. I personally find they way that fish cast shadows onto themselves rather ugly especially on their fins which are quite thin and in the case of their dorsal fins face upwards which causes them to just look darker most of the time and the shadows flicker horribly. The way realtime shadows look in games in general is still not fantastic especially since we essentially compute shadows as an image from the perspective of a light and project it onto every object that is being shadowed. Often we can see pixelation problems and flickering depending on the type of light used and it can be distracting. Anyhow the option to prevent fish casting shadows on themselves is there for those who don't like how it looks.

We have updated all example aquariums and added a few new ones to include lighting. Here is the example known as "Tree Trunk" which we have lit to look like the sun is setting... or rising.



We have added both day and night lighting to all examples:

Day with light icons:


Night with light icons:


We hope players can have a good time learning from all these examples there are close to twenty now in the game.

New Fish!

Shubunkin Female:


Shubunkin Male:


We are getting through our list of goldfish species. I think next we will add a pair of black moor goldfish which were my favourite when I was little.

Rename Aquariums:


Renaming an aquarium is much requested feature that kept getting deprioritised and is now in the game. It is little features like this which are quite often overlooked by us but actually quite important.

We also fixed a lot of bugs and made quality of life improvements here is a short list of some of the more interesting changes:

• (Bugfix) Problems with fish getting stuck while nibbling algae
  
• (Bugfix) Fry and juvenile fish needs don't match that of their parents
  
• (Bugfix) Betta fish should require warm water instead of cold
  
• (Tweak) Re-textured dissolvables and added a new algae spore dissolvable
  
• (Tweak) O2 and CO2 simulate in a way that is less annoying and requires less constant tweaking from players
  
• (Tweak) Water changes can happen much more frequently
  
• (Tweak) Breeding takes a little less time to happen
  
• (Tweak) Water chemical utilities are more affective in larger aquariums
  

There are a few new issues in need of fixing that were introduced in this version. Particles such as waste or algae particles do not respond to lights as do the algae and waste that gets splatted onto the glass. These transparent materials need a lot of extra care taken when it comes to lighting otherwise things can slow down a lot so we are going to take more time to get them working fast. We will be working on their shaders next week.

We wish you all a happy weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been a little while since an update and there is no new build just yet but we thought it would be good to show you all what we have been working on these past few weeks. Aside from the usual bug fixes, quality of life tweaks and new art content we have been working on a quite important new feature. We will give you a sneak peak now but explain things in more detail when we actually release the update.

Interactive Lighting:



Players will be able to create lights and position them around their aquariums so their creations can be made that little more artistic and unique. In the above example we have tried to make things interesting by having the lighting be less uniform and contrasty. There are patches of light here and there as if small bits of light are getting through a forest canopy to the ground beneath. We are also having a little fun using the light to highlight the treasure and teapot.

Night Lighting:


Players can also decide when the lights are to be turned on. Once the time of day is turned to night the lights associated with the day time are turned off and lights associated with the night are turned on automatically. The above example shows the night lighting for this aquarium. The lighting here is designed to imitate the sort of lighting that you might see on a clear night with a full moon. It is a simple two light setup.

Light Setup:


Here is a look at all the lights that we have used for this example. All of those lines that you see are there to help visualize light attributes like how much distance falloff there is or the light angle of a spot light for example. These visualisations are only visible when a light is selected and in this image all lights are selected so it looks rather chaotic. All light visualisation can be turned off too so as in the first example image you can see only the result of the lighting and not the light objects themselves.

Light Attributes:


Here is an example of the attributes for a spot light. It is pretty standard as far as computer graphic lighting goes. The 'Time of day activation' sub-heading is where players can choose at what time their lights are turned on.

Hopefully that is enough of a sneaky peak to get you excited. We are certainly very happy with all the creative possibilities that this will add to the game. I personally am very excited because it means when we eventually add the angler fish it will have a little glowing lure that actually emits light and illuminates it's surroundings.

If all goes well we should be able to release this update a week from now. There are a few more tweaks we want to do and just make sure everything is robust and working without issues. We also have to go through every one of the example aquariums that come with the game and create interesting lighting for players to learn from.. Not to mention in the coming weeks we will need to redo all of our steam screenshots and trailer because suddenly our whole steam page will be very out of date.

As usual we wish you all a fantastic weekend.

The Fishery Team