FISHERY News

Hello everyone,

It has been a very busy week. We have been making artwork for the content update at the end of the month, Researching and planning the completely new fish AI system, Redesigning how the simulation and visualisation of algae and waste will work and of course working on some nice shiny new features that are actually going to be in this update. Unfortunately there are some smaller quality of life tweaks that could not be added due to time but we will try to get them into next week's update.



yes we have added the capability for players to change the type of material that the substrate is made out of. We only have 1 new material at the moment but it was more important to just get the actual feature working then spend time making lots of textures. Now all we need to do is spend time painting textures and we can just drop them into a the new builds. We will try to add at least one new material every week depending on what else we are working on.



Some sort of brush creation tool is a feature we have been asked to put in on numerous occasions. Finally I have had enough time to properly implement it. It is still marked as "Experimental" which is a special way of saying that this is our first version of the tool and we need players to test it as well as ourselves so we can get a feel for what works, what doesn't and what can be made better about it. but it is of course stable and wont crash the game.

There were also some small changes made to the particle systems. there are less bubble particles being emitted and less waste particles when things get dirty. this should help improve performance and not be so annoying. This is just a place-holder for a proper set of game options where players can control with a slider the amount of particles that are present in the world. That and lots of other small tweaks will come very soon.



We have also made another iteration of the UI organisation. Whenever we add new features or tools we end up needing to add more and more UI. Which usually means that the existing user interface cannot fit the new settings very easily. Therefore things must move around. As a result things become more organised and it starts to feel like things are more solid and logical. It is a sort of reverse entropy.

For those of you with sharp eyes. yes it does indeed say "Shop Name" in the shop window. It should say something like "Plants". Time was a bit short this week and as usual our time is taken up with the big things and the small things of little consequence always slip by.

One day I shall write a post about user interfaces and why about 80% of all the game code is user interface code and why it drives me to madness.

On a happier note. The new algae and waste system is coming along. It is not present in this update but I hope it can be part of the game in the coming weeks. One thing that is irritating about the current systems are that they are more or less the same visually. If players get too much waste, things turn brown, if algae gets too high, things turn green. There is not a lot of difference and it feels a bit boring. So last weekend I did a bit of fiddling about with some code to generate polygon meshes that are stuck onto objects. The whole point being that when algae grows out of control players can actually see fluffy bits of algae grow on the surface of objects just like in real aquariums. After about two days of prototyping I found a very nice way to do this. The image below is not much to look at but it shows the essence of what is being done. These little algae tufts grow in stages, 5 in total, so players will see the growth gradually as the algae level increases. The actual algae models, shaders and textures will of course be made properly to look more algae like and put terror into your hearts as it does to anyone who owns an aquarium.



The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been a one busy week indeed. Firstly a big thank you to everyone who bought the game and a further thanks to those who gave us feedback. Based on that feedback we made all the following changes. We will probably add a lot of similar fixes to the next few updates so the game is less tedious, confusing or annoying. Then we can pile on more art content and larger features. The game has already changed quite a lot in the last week. We ripped the guts out of a lot of code and removed a lot of things that were not working and we hope to do the same every week.

Cameras:
- The camera controls were just not working. We have remade entirely how the orbital camera works. Hopefully now it is more intuitive and allows players to navigate and get the right position with ease. For instance zooming by scrolling the mouse wheel will zoom into or out of the place where the mouse is positioned. Similarly the camera will orbit around the point where the mouse is when the player initiates the orbit movement. It seems quite simple but it works and feels much nicer than before.

- We have also added more settings for the camera in the game options so you can have even more control over the speed of certain camera actions.

- when you double click an object or select it and press "F". the camera zooms in and frames itself to that object. This was present in the first release but now you can orbit around the object without quitting the "framing mode". This is especially useful if you are framed in on a fish and want to rotate the camera around it without stopping the camera following it.

- The arrow keys now have the same effect as W,A,S,D

- Q and E move the camera directly up or down relative to the camera's rotation.

Creativity:
- The old shop ui has been removed and replaced with a set of more specific creation panels for the different types of objects and they are more organised. Specifically the initial aquarium selection panel has the aquariums organised into size categories.



- There are now creation settings attached to each object's creation panel. for instance when placing a decoration or plant you can choose to have the object align to the surface it is placed upon or not. it can have a random rotation or scale and you can adjust an initial scale option. this is useful if you want to create a set of small rocks and you don't want to place each rock and scale it manually. you just set it once and it will effect any object you create after that.

- when creating something that is dropped into the aquarium like a fish, fertilizer, food etc you can choose the number of items to be dropped at once time.

- new dark backdrop.

Quality of life changes.
- if you wanted to delete an object in the previous versions you needed to press a button to go into recycle mode, then select and object and then select a button that says sell. We have now come up with the radical idea to just use the delete key...

- you no longer need to press an extra ui button when you want to create something from a shop panel.

- money no longer exists. Money is something that will be part of the career system that will be released in the future but serves no purpose now. It caused a bit of confusion and made no sense to some people so that is gone. for now.

- item descriptions are also gone. most item descriptions have not been added to the game. there were a lot of "description coming soon.." which frankly looks unprofessional and makes the game look even more unfinished. so they are removed until a later date. Most likely there will be some sort of encyclopedia in the game that will hold all item descriptions and tips for players to browse when certain types of information will be useful when trying to uncover certain secrets and "hard to achieve" events.

- pressing p creates and saves the current screen to the desktop as a .png this is useful because you may want a screen-shot that has the ui visible and don't want to hit print-screen and then paste it into a paint app and save etc etc. now we have turned that feature off when the player is typing the name of their aquarium or renaming a fish that uses the letter "P". a real face palm bug from us that is fixed.

- the ui for renaming the aquarium after initial creation and naming is hidden for now and will be merged into the new and improved version of the aquarium manager ui that will be released at some point soon. which also means some more ui space is freed.

General:
- pressing escape brings up the quit menu.

- loading times should be a bit faster. There is less work being done during the loading routine which decreases load time and reduces memory use.

- we have added more graphics options that help improve performance. Players can now set the global texture resolution. this will improve performance for players with computers that have less graphics memory.

- players can turn off the water volume fog. This tends to slow things down a lot when an aquarium is very large and very dirty.

- hide the aquarium glass. the reflections of the glass were a bit distracting for some players. now they can be turned off.

- the ui has been completely changed around to make a bit more sense and increase overall space. less ui clutter is better.


It was a busy week indeed but the game is already much better than it was. Here are some things we wanted to add this week but couldn't get it into the game in time but will most likely be in the game during the next few weeks.

- creation brush tool.
- new substrate materials.
- more creation settings in the shop panel.
- tweaks and improvements to the manipulation tools - move, rotate and scale.
- few more tweaks to the camera.
- make the water chemistry simulation better and less confusing.
- fish behaviours and attributes: Idle/rest, fatigue/sleepiness

It is still a long road ahead but we are going to get there.

The Fishery Team.

Hello Everyone,

We just uploaded a small patch that fixes some issues urgent to some players.

Bug Fix - some players have found that the game does not render at the correct resolution especially when the resolution of their monitor is a higher than "normal" than most monitors. In an effort to fix this we have made visible more options for the type of window the game renders into. Setting the full screen option to "Exclusive Mode" allows the game to take control of the screen and render at any resolution the monitor can handle. On top of that we fixed a bug which prevented more display resolutions from being displayed. Hopefully these two fixes will solve the problems.

Bug Fix - flock group targets end up pointing above the water when the terrain is sculpted near to the water level. This makes the fish swim on the surface of the water too often and it looks weird. From now on these targets will not go above the water.

Feature adjustment - I think everyone agrees that it is not fun to have to feed their fish and plants every few minutes. The time it takes for their need's satisfactions to go to zero has been made much longer, this is only a temporary fix. In the coming weeks this whole system will be overhauled so it is not so annoying.

On Monday we will make a post in the forums telling you what we will be working on next week for the Friday update. We will try to keep our eyes on the forums as much as we can over the weekend but we also need to rest our brains and eyes a little bit. It has been a tough week and we want to be fresh and rested so we can get lots of work done next week for you all.

Big thank you to everyone who bought the game as well as everyone who posted comments, questions and reviews (good and bad). We really appreciate everyone's ideas and honesty about what we need to improve. Be in no doubt, we will improve the heck out of this game.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone!

Well we have finally made it. The first early access version of Fishery is released! it has been a very long and hard road just to get here and our work has still just begun.

The game is in early access which means it is quite unfinished. It is missing several large features and a lot of art content but the main feel of the game is there and we hope you can see the potential.

Please do not rush into buying our game. Take the time to look at the store page screenshots and watch the trailer. Visit the forums and ask us questions. We plan to update the game every Friday (not including tomorrow) and over time the game will become more and more complete.

We will be monitoring this thread and if you have questions we shall reply to them asap.

All the best from,

The Fishery Team



(and sorry for the small delay in hitting the release button, we were just paranoia checking everything)

Hello everyone. We are still on track to release Fishery on the 26th, (in 5 days. aaahhhhhh!). The game will unlock at approximately 10:00 PDT, or around 19:00 for most Europeans. I say "approximately" because even though we set the exact date and exact time of the release into the steam system we actually have to personally press the release button.

Today we will have a technical look at the fish of Fishery. Next week we will give you an exact list of all the species of fish in the game at the moment and a rough list of the fish we plan on adding as well as fish-related features of the game.

Animation:
As always there is more than one way to solve this problem. We have chosen to go for a hand animated/keyframed approach.



The above animation show a swim cycle for the "Tiger Barb" fish. This particular animation is a more intense and rapid swim (though it might look slower in the gif) which will be played when the fish is trying to get somewhere faster than usual. There are other animations like "slow/casual swim" and "hanging around/idle". As we develop the game further we will make these animations better and add more variations to them. for instance when a fish is sick or near death it's animations must reflect that state of being. that is a fun creative challenge because it means we have to come up with the fish equivalent of a limp. Each fish has it's own hand crafted set of animations. There is no copy and paste of keyframes. They all look similar because they are all fish but we animate based on their body shape and length and visual personality. It just makes it more fun and brings more value for the players.



Floppiness:
This is probably the most important thing to get right. When a fish is swimming and changing direction it's body bends. This gives a very nice smooth feel to their movement and without it everything feels wrong and rigid. This is not done with physics. We create different animation poses of "body bend" and then blend between them based on the difference in position and rotation of the fish over time.



Obstacle avoidance:
Our fish can detect when something is in their way and will try to change their direction in order not to crash into it. This is a simple concept that can be quite tricky to get right. The way we do it is to shoot a little laser beam from the nose of the fish and if it detects an object or the glass of the aquarium it then shoots more laser beams in multiple directions until it finds a direction that is not obstructed by an object. Once it finds this direction it then begins to move towards that direction and thus avoid smacking it's face into a rock. The above image shows this being done across multiple frames.



Flocking:
We cannot make a game about fish if we cannot have them flocking around. The techniques and algorithms for flocking have been around for a long time and more or less everyone in computer graphics programming has encountered or tested something to do with flocking. It is very simple and follows only a few rules.

1) Fish should try to move towards each other to form a group.
2) they should not get too close, personal space is important,
3) they should all be heading in the same general direction.

If you simulate that over time with a few tweaks then you can get some nice flock-like movement. In Fishery we have added a few more rules to increase CPU performance and to make things visually more interesting. For instance each species has a maximum flock size. In the above image the "Sunburst Platy" species has a maximum flock size of 6, which means if you have 24 fish of that species at once in your aquarium they will split off into 4 distinct groups rather than just one big lump of fish. Each group will swim in different directions and visually it will be more interesting. There will of course be some fish species that have much larger flock sizes and fish that are very anti-social that only swim by themselves.



The image above shows a visual representation of the flocking forces I talked about before. Red represents the force of that stops them being too close together. Dark blue shows the force that keeps them in a group, pink is showing general direction they are all facing and light blue shows the direction towards target for the whole flock to follow which is shown as a blue sphere.


And that is this week's update. As the release is next week we will be posting stuff here and in the forums a little more often so keep a look out.

Have a good weekend.

The Fishery Team