Hello Everyone,

This week a lot of work has been done on finalizing all of the aquariums that will be in the game for the rest of the early access period.



There are now 30 aquariums of various shapes and sizes that will be available in the next update. I spoke in a previous news post about adding the initial small cylindrical and spherical aquariums.



This week the remaining 10 aquariums were added. Time was also spent refining how "squishing" features work for the spherical and cylindrical aquariums. The code that actually performs the squishing should run faster than before. Though before it was not exactly slow but I like to squeeze as much performance as possible out of everything. The "Squishing" features are what makes plants, rocks, and other decorations squish up against the glass even when players move part of these objects outside of the glass, making it so none of these objects ever poke out of the glass.

Initially I was not too interested in adding this feature into the game but players kept asking for it and it is now one of the things I am most proud of solving because it is quite tricky to setup, it runs on the GPU, and it looks really really good. It allows players to feel less restricted when decorating their aquariums.






You can see here the fish are all bunching up in the centres of the aquariums. Most likely the fish are getting the incorrect radius of the aquarium and they believe they are in smaller surroundings. Added to the bug list ;)

The largest of the new aquariums hold roughly the same volume of water as the largest of the cuboid aquariums. We wont be adding any larger aquariums during the early access period. The reason is that large aquariums hold more stuff and thus more stuff needs to be computed every frame. Physics attributes need to be simulated, behavioural logic for the animals needs to be updated, metabolism logic needs to be updated for anything that lives from fish to fungi. That means potentially thousands of things in the largest aquariums need to have all of these attributes updated all the time. They also need to be rendered onto the screen and that can be slowed down depending on how many lights players have added, and how many of those lights emit shadows.

That does not mean we cannot add certain species of fish that are quite large. Pacific bluefin tuna are going to be added to the game as part of a campaign storyline/objective. They grow to be extremely big when fully grown but our compromise is that they will only grow to be juveniles that are around 30-40cm or so. That will happen with a lot larger species that will be added because it is better to have them in the game in some form instead of not having them in the game at all.

So now aquariums are off of the checklist of things that are on the roadmap to finishing the game.

There will be another news post soon showing more progress.

We hope you have a great weekend,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

This is just a quick news update showing off some of the newer art content that is being made as we move towards the new build update.

Sailfin Mollies Painted (they are not proportionally scaled in this image)


The Sailfin mollies models I showed in the last update have been painted. They are quite intricate little things but very pretty indeed.


Red Onion Nerite Snail



Olive / Tiger eye Nerite Snail - (Probably going to be tweaked some more)



Two more variations of Nerite snail have been painted to accompany the Zebra Nerite Snails currently in the game. The next snails that will be added to the game will be a completely different model. Something like a Ramshorn snail would be nice I think.


Camera Lens Settings


Some changes have been made to the camera lens settings. I found the old depth of field settings to be a bit frustrating to use and I was not happy with the result most of the time. There were also issues with applying depth of field to transparent objects like glass or particles. Due to how realtime renderers actually render transparent objects. Their depth in the scene is not properly calculated and thus appear incorrect when applying depth of field to them. Depth of field has been replaced with a simpler "Tile Shift" technique that I think also adds some of the same kind of visual interest to the image, even though it is a little bit of a visual cliche, but it gets nice feelings for screenshots.

Bloom/Glow has also been added. This is something I see often in photographs or at times looking through aquarium glass. There is a soft glow on the areas of the aquarium that are the most bright with light. To simulate this in Fishery we have given players controls over that. This is also a bit of a visual cliche but when used in a subtle fashion it can create a nice look I think. Both lens settings have been exaggerated in the above image.

We will be back soon with more juicy screenshots and progress.


The Fishery Team

Hello everyone


Once again this a news only update because I was unable to get the new build of the game ready to play in time for the end of March. This has happened again for all of the usual reasons. Adding, modifying, refining, and remaking parts of the game ends up taking longer than I had hoped. They take longer to work on but the result is better than expected most of the time. Which then drives me to do the same to other features and I get onto a bit of a roll with things and before I know it I'm behind in the schedule but ahead in what I had expected the result would be. Things sort of snowball from there. I/we, (My colleague at Lilou studio and I) are really feeling good about how development is going now. Real progress was somewhat slow and with a fair bit of friction before now. For example when it comes to water chemistry in the game we made a lot of updates previously but we were going around in circles in terms of how actually good it was but now we have got it to a place that we are pretty happy with and can make a lot of tweaks without having to rewrite parts of the code again.

Note: keep in mind that not all the data in the screenshots is correct or final. especially when looking at item prices, statuses. A lot of data is still using test/debug values. but it will of course all be working correctly when the update is on steam.

water chemistry ui preview. showing saturation and demand/ supply of oxygen. mousing over the icons reveals a text label telling players what they are.


For instance the whole system for calculating how water chemistry changes over time has been rewritten in code from scratch again and for the final time. In other words the way that the numbers are crunched when it comes to calculating how oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients, algae, waste, interact with eachother and interact with items placed in the aquarium is working much better now. We are also happier with how the data is displayed to players, which for years I personally was very unhappy with.

Plant selection UI



It also ties in with the redesign of the graphical user interface which is more colourful and interesting than the old one that everyone is used to. I am particularly fond of the new icons which are everywhere now. I used a 15 year old version of a renderer called 'Mental Ray' to render the icons because it is difficult for modern renderers to get a somewhat retro look in terms of lighting and shading and I was not happy with the results of more modern renderers. Furthermore it helps Fishery to stand out among the growing crowd of aquarium games that seems to be arriving on steam every few months, but more on that later.

Various languages - (Not all data is translated or active but it will be when the update is released)
Japanese

Russian

Chinese


The use of icons in more places than before is especially important now because we have to account for the length of words changing due to all the different languages that we are supporting. We have to try and keep the user interfaces to be as concise as possible so they do not take up too much space. Some words or phrases might be short in english but longer in German or Russian. We have to find ways to accommodate that possibility without enlarging the size of UI panels or making everything look squashed together.

Shop Item Info UI


Sometimes it cannot be avoided because in the case above the UI that appears is a result of the player's mouse moving over a fish icon to reveal information about that particular fish. We cannot put icons that can be "Moused Over" on that popup UI because that popup only appears when the mouse is over a fish icon. So we have to break some of our own rules from time to time to make things work.

Powered Device Maintenance


Some features are being reintroduced. For instance all artificial devices will require maintenance after a certain time of operation. In other words when a mechanical filter is added to the aquarium it will work flawlessly for a period of time before it needs to be cleaned, unclogged, oiled, spit-shined etc. Players will have to click the maintenance button for that particular device and it will then take some time before it is ready for operation again, and depending on how a player's aquarium is setup, having a filter go down for maintenance for a short while may endanger parts of the aquarium, for instance in that time algae may start to grow because the water is not being cleaned adequately. Players will hopefully over time learn to plan and predict how the various maintenance cycles will affect the long term health of their aquariums.

You might notice in that picture that this filter has a power consumption icon. The electrical power feature is coming back because it is now useful. Each aquarium comes with a certain amount of base power but when player's want/need to add more powered devices to their aquariums they will need to generate electricity. We will be adding items like little electrical generators that bob up and down on the water's surface generating electricity and we will also add an electrical turbine that is very similar to the electrical turbine that used to exist in the plumbing system that was removed. This electrical turbine will be attached to the outside of the aquarium, either on the side of the bottom, and will pump water through a turbine to generate more power.


There will be a lot more of these "pseudo-plumbing system" devices that can be placed inside and outside of the aquarium that perform various tasks. One of which will be a kind of automatic "water changer" or "water cleaner". We will be removing the current way of doing water changes which is just some button in a UI panel that performs magic water changes. Water changes will instead be done by a device that requires power and maintenance, and will be constantly cleaning the water until it is turned off. But players who play the campaign wont have access to that immediately because it will need to be researched and unlocked with the right amount of money and experience. But I will come back to that a bit later too.

Black molly

Dalmation molly - texture will probably be tweaked. painting anything white is very tricky with lighting

sailfin molly models - will be fully textured for the release.


There will be some new fish. I promised someone in the forums that the next update will include these Mollies. Black and Dalmatian mollies, and still left to paint are the sailfin mollies. I also have to program in the Seahorse that was shown in the last news update. A large amount of effort has been spent making it easier and faster to program new object types into the game. For instance when the shrimp and snail were added to the game there was a lot of duplicated code needed to get them to work even though they share certain characteristics and interact with a lot of the same systems.

In fact there was a lot of duplicated code throughout all of the different object types. This is not unusual because often a lot of progress can be made quickly by not striving to make a perfect system that connects everything together without the programming equivalent of duct tape. But as time goes on and things get bigger and more complex it becomes cumbersome and inefficient. The last three months have been spent going through almost all of the game code and removing the "duct tape" in favor or making something that requires much less code to do exactly the same functionality. As a result thousands of lines of code have been deleted and making changes to how things work takes much less time and is much less error prone.

Campaign Mode And Research Trees

To return to what I spoke about earlier on the subject of in-game experience and research. There will be a quite large research tree in the game that will be the core of campaign mode. Players will start campaign mode with only a few things unlocked. 1 fish species, 1 aquarium, 1 plant species, 1 food item, etc. From there on wards the gameplay will be taught to players and as their experience allows them to level up they will have access to more objectives that reward them with more experience and money which can then be used to unlock new items in the research tree. Almost everything in the game will need to be unlocked. Not just animal species, decorations, backgrounds, and devices, but important game features like the time controls, substrate sculpting and painting, the number of slots in animal storage, etc.

Steam Achievements

This will also tie in with steam achievements which a fair number of players have asked for. I don't really know how many achievements there will be eventually but I think it will be a good amount. I have found that some players on steam use achievements as a way of tracking progress in a game. Once they have unlocked all the achievements for a game then they know that more or less everything the game has to offer has been played. which is an interesting way to see it. There will be achievements that track the player's experience levels as they unlock them. For example when players become a `level 2 aqua-botanist` there will be an accompanying steam achievement. There will also be other normal achievements that one might expect in games similar to this like "Breed 100 fish", or "Earn ₣1000". etc. There will also be a lot of hidden achievements that get added over time and we will not talk about much.

Steam Sync, changes to the save system, and old file incompatibility.

The next update will include support for steam sync which is the steam feature that uploads and downloads game progress so players can play their games on multiple computers and have all saved progress copy over to every machine. This meant that I have had to change how the saved game files are named and organized on player's computers so steam sync finds and saves the correct files with ease. There are additional changes made to the folder and file structures to account for the addition of campaign mode. Aquariums files, animal storage files, campaign progress files all need to be stored and organized according to each campaign profile and separated from all sandbox aquarium files.

All previous saved games in sandbox mode will NOT work from the next version of fishery. The game will simply ignore them. It is not the fault of Steam sync that this is happening. It is my fault entirely. I had to make structural changes to how data is stored inside the files themselves because it was getting a bit messy and inefficient. This should be the only time this has to happen during the early access period and it certainly will not happen after the game is out of early access but unfortunately it has to happen now. It also means I have to spend a bit of time making all new example aquariums for people to learn from.

a selection of sound files that we have made. The teleport sounds are for when a fish or other physics object glitches through the substrate or outside of the glass. The system detects it and re-drops them into the aquarium from above. and it's more interesting to add a sound and there will also be a nice particle effect.


There are a lot more sounds now. The game is very quiet in the current version and everything feels very empty. We have added sounds for most interactions. For example when players place an item into the aquarium it makes a nice soft impact noise. This week I will also add some nice particle effects to that so it looks like there is some "underwater dust displacement" occurring when the item is summoned into existence that accompanies the sound. There are also sounds for other interactions like sculpting and painting the substrate, and we will continue adding new sounds in every update.

Fish selection ui. again mousing over the icons will reveal the parameter name.


It is not visible yet but every animal in the game will have a "Fertility" bar in the well-being section that shows how successfully they will be able to breed. For example if a fish has a full fertility bar then they have a very good chance of producing offspring, but having a low "Fertility" bar will mean the opposite. The fertility bar changes based on how happy and healthy the animals are. You can also see that there is a Sell Price. Every item now has a sell price. Nothing is ever deleted anymore it is simply sold. The sell price for animals and plants will change based on the condition of the animal or plant. If for instance they are in poor health then it will sell for much lower than if they were fully healthy.


Casual Mode

Sandbox mode is changing to be "Casual Mode". At the moment full blown campaign mode is still not ready to play. I am concerned that there is not much for players to do in campaign mode other than unlock stuff that has existed already in the game for a few years now. The mechanisms for buying and selling fish and other items are in place and working but there are not enough story lines, contracts, research items, experience levels, etc for players to play yet. However the core mechanism of buying, breeding, and selling fish and the other animals is fun to play and also needs a lot of testing from players.

To repeat, Casual mode is what will be released in the next update. Campaign mode will not be playable yet, but casual mode will encompass a lot of the mechanisms used in campaign mode that give it a nice gameplay loop. Such as starting with a relatively small amount of money, buying an aquarium, some fish, plants etc. Then breeding fish, nurturing them into adulthood and selling them for a profit so more expensive fish, aquariums, plants, etc can be bought and that cycle can keep on going. As time goes on we will be working more on campaign mode features and they will come into casual mode for players to play and test.
Think of it like the default mode in cities skylines. It does not have a story or explicit tasks and objectives per say but it is something that has a challenge and players have something to actually do.

It is the next best way to let players play the latest features of the game without making them wait for another 6 months until campaign is much more complete and complex. And of course it is purely my fault. I am still just not able to deliver everything I want to do on time with this game. It is just monstrously difficult and I realise how disappointing I have been lately.


When we do upload the new build It will just go online on steam without a news post like this explaining that it is now live and all the features it has. This is because the next build will support 29 different languages and we have to spend quite a few hours, possibly days, updating all of the text and images for the steam store page and write a news post that that supports every language. And this is a lot of clicking and paranoia checking that we have to do. But the update will be there to play.


I will be happy to answer questions as usual, but I will pile up for a few days before answering them so I can answer as many of them in on shot as possible.

We wish you all a very nice Saturday evening,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

My goodness it has been a busy year, and I think a bit of a disappointing one in terms of progress with Fishery. I was really hoping to be able to get the next big update out before this year's end but a lot of real life things got in the way.

This year I moved apartment, moved country, and got married. Usually these kinds of things are straight forward but I am a British citizen moving from Switzerland to the a country in the European Union. Due to a change in relationship between Britain and Europe in the previous few years it means that a whole lot more paperwork is required to get these sorts of things done and it meant dealing with multiple bureaucracies in three separate countries. To put things in perspective I think I have dealt with more paperwork in this single year than of all of my previous years combined. And I'm 37 years old.

Not that I am really complaining. Everything has turned out well and I am now settled in my new home. It did mean that my work on Fishery has suffered massively as a result because I could not devote as much time as I wanted to getting things done and I spent a lot of time worrying about the potential outcomes of everything. But I have gotten a lot done. It is just not ready for all of you players yet.

But it will be ready soon, by soon I mean early March of 2025. Then after that the focus will be on releasing more regular updates for the rest of the year and then actually releasing the game out of early access in late December of 2025. This sounds ambitious but I am now in a position to devote myself fully to this endeavor and I think I can get it done.

This means that in the coming year players will start to see a lot of features and items in the game that we have promised over the years. Like for instance Seahorses.



This fellow is an almost final version of the first seahorse to go into the game and over the next year players can expect to see newts, crabs, frogs etc. As well as a many more fish, plants, and decorations etc.

I truly intend to make up for this years lack of Fishery updates and fulfill all of the promises I/we have made over the past few years to you all.

With that all said, We wish you all a very nice time during the Steam winter sale and look forward to posting updates in the very near future.

all the best,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

As mentioned at the end of the previous post we have been remaking the game's user interface. Here is a look at what we have so far.



We are moving away from the neutral mono-coloured UI design in favour of something much more colourful, friendly, inviting, and fun. The icon designs are going from flat/silhouette designs to more colourful literal depictions of the things they represent. This is a more classical approach to doing it and this visual style is intended to make things feel more like a fun game and less like a piece of software.

The other menu designs that are found throughout the game are still being worked on and they will be shown in a later update post. 46 icons have been made so far and there are perhaps another 18 more to still be made. The icons in the bottom left of the screen all have their own little sub-menus of icons that appear when they are clicked and they are the icons that are yet to be made along with a few others found through some of the other menus.

I personally think things are going in a really good direction and I have always remembered one of the earliest negative reviews of the game that mentioned that the UI was not very satisfying. Our work on remaking the UI represents another very serious attempt by us to fix parts of the game that players find to be quite unsatisfying. The next update post will show even more new UI elements.

We hope you are all having a very nice Tuesday,


The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

I thought I would give all of you an update on the game's progress since the last progress update.

Substrate painting:



The way that players apply different materials to their substrates has changed. The version currently in the game uses some spherical volumes to apply the second substrate material to the substrate. It was an interesting way to do it at the time but since then we have found that adding lots of these volumes can increase the amount of calculations needed for the overall effect quite a lot. It is also not great at creating slightly more detailed patterns quickly. Overall it is a bit fiddly and potentially slow if players have lots of these substrate volumes.

We have changed it to a simple brush based system where players just use their mouse to draw onto the substrate. It is nice and simple and requires a lot less gpu instructions to process during rendering and it wont ever slow down due to paint complexity.



I remember one player really wanted the ability to paint paths on the substrate and this tool will enable that.

You may have also noticed that there is a new material in these images. We are also working to add quite a few new substrate materials in the next update. Aside from adding as many coloured pebbles as possible we are adding other materials like the one that is shown above which is a riverbed material which is a mixure of mud and stones. We are also adding materials like clay, bone fragments, prehistoric reef fossils and more.

Here is some of the new pebble colours.





They are a little harsh on the eyes but generally when the overall lighting is adjusted to compliment the colours then it does not look so garish. On the other hand brightly coloured pebbles are part of fish keeping especially when children are making all the design choices so it is fun to have them in there if that is the look players might be going for. But to just reiterate we will have a whole range of materials which are not coloured pebbles aswell.


Sound:

I cannot really show any images of the next thing because it is about sound. There has been a serious lack of sound in the game but that will change in the next update. More or less everything that players interact with will have a sound. When a player places an object like a rock into the aquarium there is a satisfying thump sound the plays and gives it a more physical feeling of being placed into the substrate. The sound of fish and other objects splashing into the water has been changed and given more variety. There is also a nice underwater ambience track that plays when the player moves the camera inside an aquarium that makes it seem like the camera is actually underwater. And of course there is much more to come. There will be sounds made by fish as they bite food. Dissolving tablets will make better fizzing sounds, mechanical devices like filters or heaters will give off sounds too. Everything will be based on the camera's distance to them so in a very large and busy aquarium the sound will not be overwhelming.

Languages:

We decided it would be simpler to support all the languages that steam supports which is 29 in total. Which does create a bit more work for us but it is less tedious to support all languages at once instead of going back and editing all the language files as we add more languages over time. That task is still going very well and we are looking forward to pleasing all those people who have emailed us over the years asking for the game to support their language.

Code cleanup:

I am still deleting hundreds of lines of code every few days and replacing them with much less code that does the same thing except in a better way. I just keep finding things to improve. I have been keeping up with the whole controversy around the development of kerbal space program 2 and cities skylines 2. It is quite sobering and reinforces my belief that it is really very necessary to cleanup and fix problems in game code often. Otherwise it can only ever cause more problems later on down the line.


Antialiasing changes:

The way that anti aliasing works in the current version of the game uses a technique called "Temporal Anti Aliasing" which uses previously rendered frames to smooth out jagged lines in the image. This does blur the overall image somewhat and there is sometimes a little bit of a feeling of lag in the image. It is also not very intuitive to adjust for quality and performance. I was never really happy with it so in the next version anti aliasing will be done with good old fashioned multi-sampled anti aliasing or MSAA. I found it produces much nicer results and it is easily adjustable by players to optimize for performance or quality.

UI:
In the next update post there will be more pictures to show because the game will have a new colourful, and happy UI. I am sure that we are not the only people to be fed up of how the UI looks. It is a little too neutral and a little too boring and we have to give it a nice happy playful feeling instead. This will also be the final interation of the UI to made while the game is in early access.

In fact a lot of the changes that are being made now are being made with the view that they will not be changed again during the early access period.


We will keep you all updated with more progress soon. Everything is still going well and taking some time but we are still really happy with how the game is shaping up.

We wish you all a very good weekend

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Here is some more progress.



Spherical aquariums will be in the next update. There are a few small things still left to iron out (like the floaty water particles staying inside the glass) but most of these are fairly simple to fix. The only issue that will remain with spherical aquariums is sculpting on the substrate. When sculpting in a cylindrical or cuboid aquarium the sculpting algorithm only needs to worry about pushing the polygons of the substrate up or down; However when sculpting inside a sphere the polygons on the edge of the substrate that are touching the glass not only move upwards but also have to move outwards or inwards depending on how high on the sphere they are.
This is actually quite complicated and it means creating a whole new system for generating the substrate mesh. I must say that this is a little beyond my capabilities at this point in time especially when taking into account everything else that needs to be programmed. The solution is that players will have a selection of pre-sculpted substrates for all spherical aquariums to choose from. This is not ideal and is inconsistent with the other aquarium shapes but I think I as the programmer have to compromise here for the time being.

I'll quickly talk about the new-ish "Maintenance" system that we are getting ready to put into the game. There are a number of utility items in the game like filters and heaters that are mechanical and would in real life require cleaning and unclogging. In the very early versions of Fishery we had a version of the maintenance system that would stop utility items from functioning after some time has passed so simulate their becoming clogged with waste. Players would then have to press the maintenance button and after a short period of time the utility item would work again. Hopefully during that maintenance process the entire aquarium does not descend into chaos just because a filter was not working for 5 minutes.

This became very tedious in those early days and we ended up removing it because it was just wasting players' time by giving them buttons to press at certain time intervals with no real sense of progress. What is different this time is that we are combining it with the new "Research" system in the game where players would be able to decrease the amount of maintenance needed on items by unlocking and completing the maintenance research tree. Over time this means that players will be able to decrease how often maintenance needs to be performed and speed up maintenance but it will require that the player spends time unlocking the research by completing objectives and milestones and then spending in-game money performing the research. Eventually getting to a point where maintenance is done automatically after all the maintenance research is completed but it will take a while to progress that far.
By that time players will have really complicated aquarium setups that will require all this research in order for things to run smoothly. Especially when we add proper auto-feeders and more devices for modifying the water chemistry. Eventually fishery will indeed play like a proper management game.

Keep an eye out for more news soon.

We hope you are all keeping well and enjoying Sunday.

The Fishery Team.

Hello everyone,

We are still working hard on the next update. A lot of good progress has been made but things still feel a little too incomplete and lacking in a lot of areas. Some of which I have talked about in recent posts so I wont repeat them but I can show you all some of the more interesting changes that have been made recently.

New aquarium shapes


I have been talking about adding this change for years and finally players will be able to have aquariums shapes other than cuboids. We are also going to be adding spherical shaped aquariums in the next update too which are going to look really cool.

You may or may not be able to see in the image that some of the little water floaty particles are outside the glass. I still have to go in and tell the particles where their limits are. When something as simple as an aquarium shape is changed it usually means that every other feature could be impacted in some way and it is a matter of playtesting over and over again and seeing what is not correct.

Updated shop and storage ui:


The shop and storage ui has been given a small makeover. The icons are now bigger so you can actually see the items and they display the cost of each item. I'll explain a bit about in-game money in a little bit. I have also made it so the storage feature works with shrimp and snails now too.

Money is usually a big part of most creation/management games and it will play a big part in Fishery. In the screenshot everything is the same price. This is just because we have not priced every item in the game yet but for now it is the underlying mechanism that is important. And yes we are stealing the old french franc money symbol purely because it is a fancy "F" for fish.

Money is the first of the campaign/career features. Players will start off with an amount of money which will be enough to buy an aquarium, some fish, maybe some plants and a few decorations. Players will then be able to breed the fish and raise their offspring so they can sell them and buy more expensive fish to breed and sell and so on.

That is the basic career loop that we are working on and it will expand into completing specific objectives and career contracts. We are also working on adding a "research tree". Not every feature will be available for players to use from the beginning. For instance water changes will be something that needs to researched by the player before being able to use it.

It will sort of function like it does in other management sim games like jurassic world evolution, surviving mars, or even tavern master. Players need to make a certain amount of progress or reach some sort of milestone before being able to research a particular item or feature. Researching that item will then open the door to new unlockable research and so on. It is also a good way to teach players about each feature one at a time so everything is not so overwhelming to new players and things can be properly explained and knowledge of the game is built upon piece by piece.

I am going to do another news update post in a week or so which is going to show how the new maintenance systems in the game are going to work and also some small changes to how substrates work and if I can squeeze it in, a nice picture of a spherical aquarium.

I will not fall into the trap of trying to predict when we might have this update ready and on steam again because I am so terrible at it. The good news is that nothing is going wrong, everything is going quite well but it is just taking time. One change leads to another change which leads to another change and so on. But the game is getting so much better as a result, so I think I will just end by saying I'll try to be more regular with news updates and show lots of nice pictures and share more information in the mean time.

I hope this is not too disappointing, if anything we are working hard on this update to offset any disappointment you have felt in the many months since the last build update we have uploaded. Our hope is that when we do this update it will keep you busy and happy for many hours exploring all the changes instead of maybe 15 minutes like it would have with previous updates. It is all about putting as much valuable gameplay into the experience as possible.

On that note we wish you all a very happy Sunday evening.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been a quite a while since our last post and we have been busier than ever in that time. The majority of freelance work and other projects are out of the way and as a result we are able to work more on our little aquarium game. We were not working on the game 100% in that time but we have still managed to get quite a lot done.

UI:
Firstly I managed to fix a lot of the issues that have been irritating me about the UI. Specifically how much code there is devoted to the UI and how often it gets executed. As a result we both notice a performance boost overall when playing the game which is good. It also means adding new UI is less painful and requires less code. There is still some UI related code that needs to be update, cleaned up, reduced or deleted but most of the time consuming work is done.

Language Support:
We have also made a lot of progress with adding support for languages other than English. We have decided on a good way of doing it after doing some quite time consuming and rigorous testing. Fairly soon the game will have this feature implemented. Ideally I would like us to support as many languages as possible but we will start with supporting 12.

General Code Cleanup:
There are parts of the code that were written years ago that are now simply obsolete both technically and philosophically. Think of it like rust on a car in the way that it only ever gets worse over time unless it is addressed. Much of that "code rust" was in the UI code but there are chunks of it in various other parts of the game which are in the process of being fixed.

Water Chemistry And Metabolisms:
We have come to call this part of the game "The Widow Maker", and for good reason. It is just so difficult to get right. It is hard to make it fun for players that are experienced in the real world with keeping fish and for players that know nothing about fish. It also has to be balanced in such a way that it allows for chaotic and non-chaotic outcomes without us specifically directing it to do so. The potential for players to manipulate the water chemistry in interesting ways is meant to be a big part of gameplay, but it is very hard to get the numbers to balance correctly.

On the one hand it can be fun and interesting to see everything go wrong in the aquarium for the first few times playing the game but it has to be something that experienced players can tame and understand without it feeling so difficult and chore like. It is also very uninteresting to have to wait a long time for things to happen. If fish take too long to breed then most players will be fast forwarding the game for most the of the time just to get breeding to happen more often.

I don't think that is very fun or interesting. It would be much more interesting if players had the option to add fertility pills into the aquarium which speed up a fish breeding cycles instead. This way players are more engaged with what is going on with the water chemistry and are having fun experimenting with modifying it. We will also tweak breed times too. Needless to say the water chemistry is changing a lot and I am happy to be adding things to it that I have been talking about on the forums for a long time.

Steam Features:
The next version of the game released will include support for steam sync. That means you can play the game on different computers and still have access to all of your aquariums without having to manually copy aquarium files.

There will also be support for steam achievements. To start off with there will be a small amount of achievements and we will keep adding new ones as time goes on.


Tutorials And General Help:
A proper set of interactive tutorials are being added to the game that explain every feature.


When will the next release be?
We are really hoping to get the next release ready for the first half of April but it could change. We will keep you all updated with what is happening and once this next update is finally done we can go back to updating the game more regularly.


We hope you are all doing well and have a great weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone

It has been quite a few months since the last news/update post and I would like to quickly allay any worries you might have. We are alive and well and we have not stopped working on fishery. We have been taking things a little bit easier over the summer. The last updates that we made involved adding entirely new item types, shrimp and snails, and it really took it out of us. Then all of a sudden it was summer and was very hot indeed. It was so hot that we could only really be productive in the morning and early afternoon because after that time the temperatures became unbearable. We decided to just take things a lot easier and recharge our 'fishery' batteries so to speak.

As summer was coming to an end we got an amount of requests to do freelance work which was more than usual. We have always done freelance work in parallel to working on fishery to help keep things going. Though as I said it was more than usual and therefore has taken more time away from working on fishery that we would have otherwise liked.

This is not necessarily a bad thing because having some time away from fishery has allowed us to see it with fresh eyes. One of the things I realized is just how much fishery is beginning to creak under it's own weight and probably more disturbingly is creaking under the weight of things that are yet to be added.

User interface and code in general:
There is quite a substantial amount of code which is related to the user interface that must be reduced and simplified. This is especially important because there is still more UI to add and at this point adding more would just make things even more bloated from a code perspective. The code in general across the whole game needs a good cleanup because as our ideas have evolved over time the code has not always kept up with those ideas and as a result things are a little ugly and making changes becomes difficult or time consuming.

It is sort of like decorating a Christmas tree with new decorations while the old decorations are still attached to the tree. There is an extra amount of work needed that is not related to the decorating at all but it is for making sure things do not snag on other things or knock off other ornaments. It becomes like performing surgery which I must say is what programming the game feels like these days and that is not good.

Languages:
Another problem related to UI is about making fishery support other languages than English. Now is a good time to start coding in support for other languages because if we do it later when the game is more complete it will just take longer. It makes sense to do it at the same time we are fixing up the whole user interface. The number of non English speaking players contacting us asking for the game to be released in their language continues to go up every year and it makes a lot of sense from a sales point of view to put this in sooner rather than later.

Tutorials/Help:
After we did the snail update we started working on tutorials and found that we cannot really seriously start working on tutorials until the user interface and language support are in better shape because any help or tutorial system will require a lot of UI and language related work.

Campaign/Story mode:
Really soon we have to start adding campaign features. But it is a massive chunk of the game. It also cannot be added until we have the UI, language and tutorials in place and working really well.

Sound:
There is not a lot of sound effects throughout the game at the moment but there absolutely should be way more sound than there is. Sound has really been neglected and I think it really hurts the atmosphere of the gameplay to have it absent.

We have come to the conclusion that we have to prioritize these key areas before we add anything else to the game.

When will the next game update be?
I am not entirely sure but it won't be a very very long time. The next update will include all of these significant changes including campaign mode features. It will be the largest update we have ever done. We have put a lot of these changes off for a while because they would take a long time but now they cannot wait any longer. What we have realized in the past few months is that in order to enable a lot more progress to be made in all other parts of the game we have to fix these large issues first.

We still have the freelance work and other commitments that we have to fulfill in parallel to fishery which does not always improve our speed but it makes sure that we can actually continue to work on the game. We will show off any cool progress we make in a news post and I will be responding to comments and forum threads as usual.


We wish you all a very good Thursday

The Fishery Team