FISHERY News

Hello there

Build 69 has been uploaded and we have added a very much requested feature this week.



Some of you might remember when we added a feature that prevented decorations from poking out through the bottom of the aquarium. We have now taken that further and made it so decorations cannot poke out of the side of the aquarium either. We also added this feature to plants. In terms of how selecting these squished objects works. It behaves the same as the previous version. If you select any object that is pushed up against the glass it will snap back to it's original shape when it is highlighted by the mouse. If you have the alerts overlay activated and a plant is alerting for whatever reason that will disable the squishing so it is more visible if squashed to a small size. This is only to make these objects more visible when there is a problem with it and you wish to interact with it. Not all objects will be squished when pushed up against the glass. Sponge filters and air stones (including the treasure chest) will still poke out of the glass. It does not work for fungi yet either but in the next update it will.



Here you can see it in action. One thing that this now makes possible is for players to create their own "3d backdrops". A aquarium 3d backdrop is something you can buy or create in the real world which fits across the entirety of one side of your aquarium. Usually it is a complex cliff like rocky surface and can look quite interesting.

Here is a list of some smaller tweaks, bug fixes and quality of life changes:

• We also added some new coconut decoration variations and the new toy dinosaur decoration in three poses.
  
• Water ripples on the water's surface also don't poke out of the sides of the aquarium.
  
• When an aquarium is loaded there is a second or two where everything shows an alert when it does not need to. This has been more or less fixed it still happens occasionally and I am not exactly sure why but I will find out and stop it.
  
• Fish should now not get stuck when in the 'algae nibble' behaviour state. It happened sometimes due to how we detect a place for them to nibble which sometimes returned us a target position inside an object.
  
• The UI that pops up when you mouse over an object would flicker and jump around when the screen's resolution does not have an aspect ratio of 16:9. quite horrible but now fixed.
  
• Fish regain energy based on how much sleep they get. The more sleep they get the less quickly their energy is regained. We will probably tweak it further if players and ourselves feel like fish could regain even less energy while sleeping.
  

Thank you to everyone who posted kind words in the last update post that was made. We have in fact decided to add some decorations which serve as little pet memorials to the game. We will make some nice little sculptures of cats, dogs and other pets including fish. I cannot say exactly when but we will try to make some in the coming months. We are also going to write some career mode storylines where players will be asked to create aquariums that memorialize deceased pets and loved ones.

We wish you all a happy and safe weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello there,

There is no new build this week as things did not go as planned at all. Unfortunately a beloved pet died and as often happens around such circumstances any hope of productivity evaporates. Not a great start to the year at all.

My illustrious colleague made some very nice progress with her work. I managed to finish the paint job and poses of the toy dinosaur decorations as well as work on an amphora decoration.



There were quite a few things more that I had planned to work on which will instead be worked on next week as normal.

We wish you all a good weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello there,

Build 68 has been uploaded for you all play. It comes with a nice new shiny feature, UI tweaks and bug fixes.

Some of you may be wondering what the creature on this update's thumbnail is all about. It is a new decoration that will be finished soon but we thought it would be nice to give you all a sneaky peak of the model.



It is a toy dinosaur, a Dilophosaurus specifically, that will come in 3 poses. It will be quite fun and interesting to put this among areas of thick plant growth or rocks to create little prehistoric themed aquarium scenes. We have already made some good progress painting it and soon it will be finished and in the game. We will most likely add some toy dinosaurs in the future.

This week's nice new feature is the "Fish Storage" feature:


What this allows players to do is to remove fish from an aquarium and store them indefinitely and unchanged until the player puts them back into any aquarium. This will be quite useful in a number of scenarios. For instance if players are breeding fish and wish to keep the new fry safe once they have hatched they can now remove the parents from that aquarium and place them in a separate aquarium so there is no chance of the parents eating the new fry. Players could also create a special aquarium that is made especially for breeding or nursing unwell fish back to good health that fish can be transferred in and out of as needed.

It may also be useful for general maintenance. If the water chemistry has taken a turn for the worst and time is needed to fix it then it would be a good idea to just remove the fish and keep them safe until all the water chemistry issues are fixed.



Storage preserves all the key information associated with each fish that is put into it such as their name, health, energy, stress, age etc. They can be kept in storage for as long as players like and they will remain unchanged.

For now this feature is limited to live fish only. We may at some point make it so plants and decorations etc can also be stored but for now this feature is most important for fish. You don't have to careful with selecting fish before you add them to storage. If you happen to select the fish you want plus some plants or decorations etc the code is smart enough to ignore all none fish items in your selection. The icon for fish storage is found at the bottom of the screen next to the 'shop / inventory' button.

Changes to selection and manipulator settings:


These UIs took up way too much space and did not really have much explanation as to their meaning. Understanding how pivots and coordinate systems work always requires some explanation. Here as with other UIs players can mouse over the label and a brief bit of text appears that helps to explain what it enables.


There will be another update in the next week or two as usual. Hopefully it will include the dinosaur toy decoration as well as a new feature and the usual batch of quality of life improvements and bug fixes. We wish you all a relaxing weekend,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Ah yes the first update of a new year. Build 67 should be uploaded either tonight or tomorrow morning. Rather than hit the gas too hard coming out of the Christmas season we decided to work on some smaller quality of life changes that have been annoying us and players for some time and of course fixed some bugs.

The scale tool has been rewritten to work a lot smoother than before and it's sensitivity has been increased so it should no longer take a lot of mouse movement to make things bigger or smaller.

smooth as butter.




I also managed to program non-uniform scaling but it is not enabled for players just yet. Non-uniform scaling if when you scale an object on only one or two of it's axis allowing you to squash or stretch the object. This sort of scaling is quite important for an application like this because it helps make things look less repetitive especially when populating an aquarium with a limited amount of items. Changing the shape and rotating many copies of the same rock does help a lot in making it seem like there are many different rocks scattered about the place.

In the Unity manual Non-uniform scaling is discouraged quite strongly especially for physics objects. The rocks, plants and wood etc are not being moved by physics but they are used by the physics system for collision detection and we ask a lot of questions of the physics system as to where objects are so we can help fish navigate. According to the unity documents having non-uniform scaled physics objects will cause things to be less accurate and also slower. I have not seen this so far in my tests and it is my hope that this rule only need apply to mobile platforms where performance problems are more easy to trigger. We will enable it in the game soon and see if players notice any performance problems.

Placement settings UI changes:


A small change was made to the placement settings ui that becomes visible when players are placing objects into the world from the inventory. The 'Align to surface' parameter is now something that can be faded in or out to give players a bit more control over the orientation of their objects relative to the surface they are being placed onto. By default it is now set to 50% which I found to be jolly good.



Another minor change was to where the placement help text is placed. Now that we dont have a chunky inventory UI taking up space towards the bottom of the screen we can put some useful information there.

A touch of polish to button labels:






It used to be the case that the interactive button labels would just appear at the position of the mouse when it hovered over a button or rollover control and move with the mouse until the mouse was no longer hovering over the ui that activated it. Very crude and upsetting it was but now the labels are positioned nice an neatly where they wont offend the eyes.

We also fixed a few annoying bugs. The most annoying was a bug where when players pressed enter or return it would take a screenshot and stick it on the desktop. This would be especially annoying if players like to rename all their fish as they are required to press enter to complete the name edit. Can't believe I didn't see that during testing. I must have been too eager to start eating mince pies before uploading.

It is going to be a very busy year and this rather odd and obscure little game is going to get a lot more interesting and complete. We wish you all a happy new year and lovely weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

We have a new build for you all which should be uploaded some time tonight, though when steam is busy on holidays such as today there can sometimes be problems when we try to upload. Build 66 will be the last build of the year 2021 and it comes with some nice goodies for you all to enjoy.

Female Ranchu Goldfish:


Male Ranchu Goldfish:


We have added a new species of goldfish, the lionhead ranchu goldfish. These are rather odd looking fish as they have no dorsal fin and quite often have a thick bubbly layer of skin on their heads which can sometimes grow to cover their eyes almost completely. Quite bizarre looking but friendly fish. We have also added a male red cap goldfish. We have a few more species of goldfish to add and then we can check goldfish off the list for a while.

Some new decorations:


We added some new colourful-ish smooth rocks/pebbles which can be seen in the image above and we have added a new plant called Hornwort which can be seen throughout the image too. It is quite a popular plant found in many aquariums. It is quite a tricky plant to make because it is hard to find two pictures of hornwort where they look alike and of course a lot of aquarists strategically prune their hornwort to look a certain way whereas some let it grow somewhat wild giving it a very furry/bushy appearance. No doubt we will keep tweaking it as time goes on to get the right visual balance for it. We have lots more hardscape items to add too.

Better shop/inventory ui:


We have updated the shop inventory to be more organised, less tedious and use less screen space. We have added tags associated with each category so players can narrow down the number of items on display at once allowing for much less scrolling to find the desired items. More items can be displayed at once and the whole ui can be moved about if needed.

Pathfinding improvements:

Old:


New:


Improvements have been made to how fish find their way out of cave like places. The old gif shows how troublesome it was for fish to do this. In most tricky cases the fish would need to be nudged by the player so they can get out of trouble. With the latest improvements the fish are much better at navigating through these tight spots when wandering about. You can see in the new gif that it takes not much time at all to figure things out. It is quite a nice improvement and more work will be done to make it even more robust.


It has been quite a busy year and the game has come a long way in that time. We did not get to finish and in some cases start working on certain features or get as much art content into the game as we liked. Though I suppose that is just all part of the chaos of working on complex projects. A lot of the most important things that we tweaked or added were inspired or prioritised by players giving us ideas and feedback. The game is much better as a result and the things that got deprioritised or delayed will just be worked on in the coming months.

Thanks to all who have supported the game and continue to give us valuable feedback. It really does help and we will continue the hard work into 2022. We wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

The Fishery Team