FISHERY News

Hello everyone,

Build 51 is ready and will be uploaded to steam in the next few hours.

Boeseman's Rainbowfish (model version 2):


Some very nice progress was made this week. Our Boeseman's Rainbowfish was modelled around a year ago but we became too intimidated to paint it because they have a very tricky scale pattern and subtle colour changes.

That turned out to be a good thing because upon opening the model file this week I saw that it was in need of a partial remodel. A year ago we were a lot more conservative with the polygon count but since then we have been able to squeeze more performance out of how the fish are animated and can now use more polygons per model. Now it is ready for painting (again) and we hope to get this lovely game into the game soon.

More modifications to UI:


Once again we spent a good deal of time tweaking a lot of UI panels to show more meaningful data to players. The fish population panel shown above now includes data that shows specifically how your population of fish impact the aquarium's water chemistry. Showing the total amounts of resources they consume or produce per second.

Plant Population panel:


We made a new panel which shows a similar breakdown for all your plants and allows you to see what the respiration requirements for plants are so you can be sure to have an idea of what will happen before you turn out the lights. We are probably also going to try and work out some sort of capacity utilization data for plants but we are still playing around with the optimal numbers to compute this.

Changes were also made to how food waste was calculated. It is now calculated based on the volume of food present in the aquarium much the same way that oxygen production is now computed based off of the volume of plant life. There will also be a new ui panel added next week that shows the food "population" which will detail the overall amount of waste produced by food.

More of these "population" panels will be added for every object type so that players can find the causes of imbalances in their ecosystems faster without feeling confused.

Inventory Info UI changes:


We also made even more tweaks the little panels that appear when you hover your mouse over inventory icons. Now certain fields will show up in red if your aquarium does not have the correct conditions for that item.



Several players expressed difficulties about not knowing whether they aquarium is in the right condition to add plants or fish. They instead had to add them to the aquarium and then see if the plant or fish is happy or not. This is clearly not good enough on our part so a lot of effort has gone into and will continue to go into showing all the data to players to they know ahead of time if they will have problems. The reddening of text is also present in the selection UI panels too.


It even works for items that require power such as air stones and sponge filters.


What we plan to work on next week:
There is a lot more plumbing related ui to be worked on so players are more clear about what each plumbing device does and how well it is functioning and of course show an overview of how much the water chemistry is modified by plumbing devices along with all the other population panels.

More fish models! I have a bit of an urge to model an angelfish so expect to see that next week. If any of you are wondering when we will paint all these new models the answer is fairly soon. We want to do large-ish content update soon which will include all these fish. Painting these fish is very hard and tires us out when we switch from painting to modelling, modelling to painting. So we are experimenting with batching similar tasks together to see if that helps prevent our brains getting tired.

There is also some new music tracks that will be added next week!



Medication has been temporarily turned off in the game. There is no mechanism in the game to make use of it just yet and we are in the process of re-thinking how fish health and healing and medication will work as part of the career mode features we are working on.

Lots to do and think about. We are happy to get this update out on time this week which means we can give our eyes a rest on the weekend. We hope you all have a good and restful weekend too.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Another slightly delayed post. It has been a very busy week as you all shall read. Nothing is going badly at all. Quite to the contrary things are going very well. We think we have solved a lot of quirks that the game has and are working to un-quirk them so the game feels right for more players. But more on that in a little bit. There is no new update to the build just yet. I want to do some more testing with my colleague before we upload it which will probably be some time tomorrow (Monday the 15th). It is certainly disappointing to anyone who has been waiting for an update this past week but hopefully once you have seen what we have done it will take the edge off of the disappointment.

Discus Fish:


These lovely beauties will be making their way into the game soon along with that Oscar fish we showed last week. Discus fish are highly requested and we made a promise to put them into the game in the first half of the year. We are going to paint around 3 colour variations at first and then put them all into the game in one update. To be clear that is actually 6 separate painted textures because we paint the males and females to be different from each other but be within that particular colour variation type so things are less repetitive in many dimensions. This should be great because then players will be able to make lovely discus only aquariums that are nice and colourful.

This next part will begin with questions:


In our game which group of plants produces more oxygen while consuming more Co2 and Nutrients?

If you had thought the ones on the left... you would be wrong. If you had thought the ones on the right... you would be wrong. They in fact produce the exact same amount of oxygen and consume the exact same amount of Co2 and Nutrients.



In our game which group of fish do you think consumes more oxygen and produces more waste?

You probably know where this is going but if you thought the single big fish on the right produces more waste and consumes more oxygen you would be very wrong. The small group of fish on the left consume 5 times more oxygen and produce 5 times more waste which it totally wrong.

Now we shall have a slightly one sided discussion about assumptions and intuition. Most people (except for me apparently) have a mental model of how things should work. Most people seeing the images above without even playing the game would assume that a larger mass of plant matter produces more oxygen and a larger mass of fish matter produces more waste etc.

The silly programmer living inside my head sees every object as a single simple entity that consists of the same numbers but ignores the overall visual appearance especially when players can change the physical appearance in the case of the plants. Players can change plant scale and it felt wrong to change the plant metabolism based on an arbitrary modification to scale. It might in fact confuse players. I could not have been more wrong because I think most people have that intuition about nature. More plant matter equals more oxygen and so on.

Realising that my mistakes were many I moved swiftly to make things right. Plant metabolism is now calculated based on the volume of the plant. That is to say that the larger the plant is the more oxygen it produces and the more Co2 and Nutrients it consumes.



Changes of a similar nature are being done to the fish. Computing fish metabolism based on the volume of fish matter in the aquarium also allows us to compute what the correct population limits should be. If you were to search about how best to house fish from the point of view of aquarium size quite soon you will find the phrase "1 inch of fish should equal 1 gallon of water". We have taken that literally in regards to computing how well stocked an aquarium is.



In the spirit of making things even more clear for players we have reduced the amount of numbers on display throughout the game. Only the most meaningful data is on display and we have added small explanations and tips where it makes sense. This also means we can remove things from the help screen because it's information is on display next to the numbers that it is meant to explain.



This displays information that is universal to all things of a similar nature in the game. This should remove any worry from players who are not sure what the needs of plants are before they add them to an aquarium because most of the base needs are the same unless specified otherwise.



When it comes otherwise specified data like temperature and salinity they can differ quite a lot from species to species. We have made the ui that appears over inventory slots to be more readable and only show information that is not universal. There is no point showing the nutrients needs of plants in that place because it is displayed elsewhere and applies to all plants. We don't want things to feel too much like a jigsaw puzzle in that way.



Once players have added a plant into the aquarium and selected it, it is useful to see what needs are satisfied so here we show the universal data to be extra clear. It also gives us the opportunity to explain further about the difference between photosynthesis and respiration. Hovering you mouse over the subheading text for about 0.75 seconds will reveal the explanation. We certainly do not want players to go to a completely separate help screen to find this information. All information must be near to the point at which it is displayed.

To bring this back to mental models of nature and intuition. Most of the time in real life if you add a small group of fish to a reasonably sized aquarium you will not run into problems with the oxygen level. The same with plants. Unless you completely fill an aquarium with plants you probably won't run into problems with Co2. A lot of people have that problem in our game at the moment mostly because we have done the numbers wrong and not provided enough information but hopefully these changes put us onto the path to fixing that mess.

Ideally a player new to the game should be able to add a few plants and some fish to an aquarium and be totally fine. Only when they want to make things more complicated the game should become more complicated.

I really want to get the update out on steam tomorrow because it has some slightly important bug fixes inside but not all the fixes I talked about above will be inside and some of the user interface wont all be updated with new info. We will however fix that all this week and get another update out this coming Friday or sooner.

Now we will have a little rest and enjoy the remaining hours of Sunday. I have been terrible at responding to forum questions this week due to fixing all these mistakes. I'll spend a good chunk of early Monday morning responding to them.

We wish you all a good Sunday.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Unfortunately there is no update to the build this week. We have made some very good progress but as sometimes happens we just could not get everything done as we had hoped.

There have been some large scale changes done to how gameplay is saved and loaded. Reducing the use of slower procedures during these processes will be very useful for when players save and load aquariums with thousands of objects within. This also revealed areas in part of the code that were not needed at all anymore and could be deleted which is always good.

There have also been a lot of organisational changes made to the code that make it easier to eliminate a certain class of bugs and reduce the size of the code overall which I have been wanting to do for a while.

We made some really nice progress with getting plants to change their simulation behaviour depending on whether the light is turned on.

We also fixed some minor non-crash bugs that players reported.

The Oscar (Astronotus Ocellatus)


I felt a little deflated when it was time to do this post on Friday because even though much changes have been made to the code it is not something that can really be shown. Improving the speed of certain operations and reducing memory usage by maybe 8 bytes per object is not something that is easy to show or even noticeable to most players but believe me it matters. To make it feel like something of interested has been achieved this week I modelled a new fish yesterday and for part of today .

The Oscar fish has a bit of a notorious reputation but adding the Oscar allows us to begin to add various new features to the fish behaviour. You should never house an Oscar with some Neon Tetras for instance. It will not end well for the Neons. The next iteration of our fish predation behaviour will be to enable larger fish to eat smaller fish in one gulp.

We already have that working in regards to fry being eaten because every other fish is bigger than a single fry. However we need to put in place some logic that allows each fish to know what fish they can eat whole and which they cannot. Adding the Oscar gives us a reason to start working on this.

After so much programming in the last weeks I feel the need to make more art content so after some loose ends from this week's build are tied up I will model some more fish and other things. My colleague is currently working on making the first floating plants to be added to the game very soon.

If all goes to plan we shall have a new build uploaded in the coming week and some nice new art content to show.

We wish you all a relaxing Sunday.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

build 49 should be uploaded in a short number of hours. We are just doing some final checks and testing.

We have made progress that will allow us to add to some very interesting and needed changes to the game.



The barebones version of the day cycle has been added. You can see a little ui in the bottom left of the gameplay screen. What it shows is the age of your aquarium on the left and the current time of day on the right. There is a little progress slider in the middle that shows the progress through the day.



There are also two buttons for turning the light on and off. The player is in control of the light but there will be a small bit of ui that allows you to set the time of day that the lights turn on and off automatically but that will come a little bit later.

We now have these 3 key pieces of data that can be used throughout the game by anything that finds it useful but keep in mind that nothing in the game actually looks at this data yet. Lots of changes will come in the following weeks to make this a reality.

The first things that we will program to take advantage of the day and night data will be keeping track of the age of fish. We can have the growth cycle of fish make more sense and feel more natural. Algae can grow according to how long the aquarium is exposed to light.

Fish only need to eat once a day and at night they will be able to sleep to regain some energy. Certain breeding behaviours like breeding at first light in the morning can be achieved. Each species of fish and plants have their own requirements for hours of light per day that players will need to take into account when housing these species together.

Plants consume oxygen from the water when there is no light to generate energy which means the levels of co2 and oxygen will alternate cyclically making it possible to naturally balance out the water chemistry over time instead of levels going permanently up or down.

We can now also start to make steps towards making the lighting customizable. This will be a bit further down the line in development but there will be the ability to control the brightness, colour and depth that the light reaches and later on more advanced lighting setups will be possible.

It's a giant list of things that will be possible now which is very exciting.

Small tweaks to the sculpting ui.


We took away some of the on screen controls of the sculpting tools in favour of having keyboard shortcuts about 2 weeks ago but soon after we made the update we were informed that not every player is able to use the mouse and keyboard at the same time while playing the game. We have added back these on screen controls that now allow for the same functionality by using the mouse only.

Accessibility is something we probably should have been a bit more mindful of when making all these changes so in the near future there will be more of an effort to at the very least make sure that playing the game only with a mouse is possible and not cumbersome. We have also been researching more into what we can do for players with colour blindness.

We know almost nothing about the subject of accessibility so a lot of research is going to be done into this area so over time our game can be played by hopefully almost anyone.


Next week will be very busy indeed. There are some new fish models that need to be finished as well as some new types of plants that we hope to get into the game soon. There is also the matter of integrating all the new day and night cycle functionality into the game so hopefully next week's update will be very interesting indeed.

Luckily we can have a little rest over the weekend before this huge set of tasks and as usual we wish you all a very good weekend too.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone

As we mentioned last week there will be no new build this week. However much interesting work has been done but this post will be a little shorter than usual.

The usual batch of bug fixes, code cleanups and performance tweaks have been worked on but the really interesting thing we worked on is the water change feature. We were as busy as beavers this week getting this all working.

Water change: (gif playback is about 2x speed)


This feature will certainly help players keep their aquariums a lot cleaner and the water chemistry a bit more stable. In the example gif a 75% water change is being performed. 75% of the water is removed and replaced with an equal volume of clean water. This removes approximately the same volume of water chemistry contents. You can see there is a large reduction in algae and waste but co2, oxygen, nutrients and temperature are also reduced by this process.

This could temporarily upset some of the less hardy plants and/or fish that are present in your aquarium so players will need to get a feel for what each species can handle. There are 5 options for the percent of water changed. 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%. Performing a 25% water change will result in less stress to some of your more sensitive fish and plants but you may have to perform the water change more often.

This brings us to the next feature that we are in the process of adding. Day and night cycles. The answer to the question "how often should I do a water change?" only makes sense if there is a concept of time that is familiar to all of us. Doing a 25% water change every 3 to 5 days makes more sense than doing one every 250,000 to 430,000 seconds.

Water changes and water chemistry in general depends a lot on the concept of a day because we can better calculate how things work and how long things should take. How long should it take for algae to grow to a point where something drastic must be done? We can begin to answer those questions.

From my own experience it can be as short as three days before algae growth gets to a point where I needed to change the water, clean the glass, clean the rocks etc all because of a simple mistake. The numbers in our game will be tweaked to follow these sorts timespans and this will hopefully avoid confusion and frustration to players.

There is a lot to talk about when it comes to day and night cycles but I shall save all of that for next week. Anyway there is still much to be done so we better dive back into it.

We wish you all a very good weekend.

The Fishery Team