Hello and happy new year to everyone,

This post will be a bit short but there are more pictures to look at than last week so hopefully that makes up for it. There is no update to the build this week but for sure there will be one next week.

Not everyone is back from holiday so it was just me sitting at the computer and typing for the past two days. I spent today and yesterday fixing lots of little things. Mostly code related. I am always looking for ways to simplify game logic. Every so often I leave myself little notes in the code when I see something that can be simplified or rewritten in the future. I fixed quite a few of these little tasks and it feels really good indeed.



One of these tasks was to add back water ripples to objects that are floating on the surface. This also works for fish now. When a fish swims up to the surface it will cause a ripple. If it pokes it's head out of the water entirely then there will be a little splash. Very small detail but it adds to the magic.



I have also added some more lists in the inspect mode ui. These show all the food and medicine that is present in the aquarium. There will be more lists added as time goes on so players can have full knowledge of all that is in their aquarium. This will help to select things that might be accidentally hidden inside another object or obscured behind thick vegetation.



Here is the latest from the work being done on the plumbing system. It wont be visible like this in the actual game but it serves as a visualiser for us so we can make sure all the numbers are correct. This system is grid based, objects will snap together cleanly so connecting up pipes and devices is simple and not tedious. If any of you have played the game "Besiege" it is similar to how their mechanisms are constructed. There will be lots of progress made with this system this month.

There is not much to show for the career system. Most of the work done for it has been on paper and we have played around with UI design ideas. There has been a little code written too. It is quite different that other parts of the game because it operates similar to some business software. In the way that the player accepts jobs via a sort of website and corresponds with clients and storyline characters. It feels work to work on but so exciting to see it coming together.

I have also been spending far too much time on youtube watching let's plays of games. Specifically the parts of games where it shows the in-game tutorial. I am not sure that there is even a fun way to teach players how to play a game in this fashion without becoming boring. Even when I play a game for the first time I always skip the tutorial and then after ten minutes I go back and do the tutorial because I understand nothing. I hope it is not just me that does this. Stealing Taking inspiration from other games in this fashion is incredibly helpful. It serves to help us figure out what does not work well. Fishery will be a game with a lot of things to learn and it is going to be a challenge to teach players all they need to know without becoming boring. Watching how other games do it is a good way to quickly figure out how things should not be done. Once we eliminate most of the bad ideas what is left should be quite good. It also allows us to try and innovate in this area if possible.

I also managed to break the fish flocking some time this afternoon so I must fix that asap. I am sure it is just one weird line of code that did it. Thank goodness we are not uploading a new build this evening.

Well I hope you are all feeling relaxed and optimistic for the year ahead. I better get back and fix the damage I did to the flocking system.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

We hope you have had a very nice and festive time so far. We have been planning lots and lots of work that we will be doing for all of January's updates and we have been enjoying a few mince pies.

As we have said in previous posts there is no game update this week but we will be talking about a very important feature which will serve as the backbone of the game. Also note that all the names and terminology used is just for illustration purposes and the diagrams are just to try and help explain things a bit more visually in some places because there is a lot of text.



Career mode:
It may not actually be called "Career Mode" in the game but using this term is the simplest way to explain this set of features.
In it's simplest form career mode is the "things to do" in fishery. Think of it as the system that deals with objectives/missions/jobs and allows players to make progress. Progress in this mode comes in the form of unlocking more items to use in your aquariums such as fish, plants, decorations and more aquariums etc. While at the same time levelling up your experience so you can take on more complex objectives and earn money.

"Aquarium School"
Players will start off career mode as if it is their first day in "aquarium school". After the annoying but necessary tutorials about how to move the camera and select objects, players will be given a set of assignments which introduce them to the fundamentals of the game's systems. What is Oxygen? How does it affect the aquarium? Can there be too much or too little of it? This information will be taught to the player through a set of assignments.

An example of one of these assignments would be that the player must raise the oxygen level in an aquarium so it can support a few fish. It will also explain how players can tell if fish are unhappy with the oxygen level and give tips to achieve a good balance of oxygen creation and consumption.

Once the player has a basic understanding of the core systems in the game they can then access the more complex assignments that teach them more complex and specific features of the game which will allow them to acquire"Qualifications".



"Qualifications"
In real life people cannot operate a vehicle, perform heart surgery or imprison someone without owning a piece of paper that says they are allowed to do so. It will be the same in Fishery. Players will unlock new fish, plants, decorations and more after they acquire qualifications specific to those items.

There will be a lot of qualifications and players can choose which qualifications they want to acquire. Some players may only be interested in breeding fish. Therefore they would need to start by acquiring the "Beginner fish breeding qualification" which could consist of a set of assignments such as:

- create a small freshwater aquarium and decorate it with rocks, bog-wood and small grassy plants.
- maintain an oxygen level of "medium high".
- feed your fish with high quality fish food until their diet status is "superb"
- create an nice area for where your fish will lay their eggs. (this depends on the species, some lay eggs on the floor, others create a bubble nest, other methods are...classified)
- increase the temperature to allow for better egg incubation.
- separate the baby fish from parents to prevent them being eaten. (some fish do this but not all)
- raise the hatched babies to be juveniles.

After all these tasks have been completed successfully the player then acquire the chosen qualification and they will unlock more items and receive money. There will also be scenarios where the aquarium is already set up and players need to modify it in order to pass their qualification exam.

Players can then choose to go onto the next level of qualification in that subject which might be "Intermediate fish breeding qualification" which can be accessed only if the previous qualifications of that subject have been acquired.

Some of the more advanced qualifications may require other qualifications not directly related to the one players are trying to access. For instance there might be an "advanced fish breeding qualification" that requires "Intermediate Botany" or "beginner fish care"
There will be lots of qualifications that cover a large range of subjects like fish health, plant care, decorating, habitat maintenance, plumbing, automation using machines, algae control, waste management, breeding, aquarium specialisation and many more.

All the qualifications will be displayed in a nice window so players can keep track of it all and it will be very clear what each qualification unlocks. There will also be a sort of encyclopedia that gets updated with all the important information about a qualification after it is acquired so players only need to do a bit of reading instead of re-doing the assignments if they have forgotten some of the knowledge.

"Job Portal"
Just like in real life when people complete a degree at university or an apprenticeship they are then able to find work based on that qualification. The same is true for Fishery. When players have qualifications they can then seek and accept jobs from the "Job Portal". The job portal is the in-game version of a freelance job website. Players can browse and accept jobs they are qualified for in exchange for unlocking new items and money to buy them.

For instance if a player has the "Intermediate Fish Health Care" qualification they would be able to accept a job that is titled something like:
"My fish has an illness and it needs medical help". If the player accepts it, they then receive a sick fish that they must nurture back to good health. Depending on the type of illness the fish has, the time taken to cure it will vary. This might require the player to build a specialised medical aquarium fit for curing a particular illness. If the fish gets better then the job is complete and they receive money and a positive review. If the fish cannot be cured or dies then no money is received and they get a negative review. But we don't want every outcome to be the same. It might be that the person the player is doing the job for realises that their fish would have died anyway and still gives the player money and positive review.

"Storylines"
We really want to avoid a situation where every job of a certain type is more or less the same with a few changes in text so a lot of work will go into making sure there is a lot of variety in everything. There will be storylines associated with some characters in the job portal. Perhaps players do a small job very well and the client comes back with more work that is more work interesting allows players to unlock more items that are rare.
For instance if you do a job for a high-end fish seller, at first you might be asked to breed some fish that are quite simple to breed and then after several successful job completions the fish seller comes back with a very rare species of fish that needs breeding. As part of the reward for successfully completing the assignment the player unlocks this rare fish, and this may be the only way to unlock this fish.

Just as an example of a few other example job titles. "Design a tropical aquarium for a hotel lobby" "I'm going on vacation please look after my fish" "my fish wont breed, help me make my aquarium more suitable for breeding" "I have too much algae, HELP!"

Each job will come with a description, success or fail conditions, reward/payment info etc.

Hopefully this gives you all a glimpse of what we have been cooking up behind the scenes. The entire system is much larger but this should give everyone an overview of the sort of thing that is planned. It is quite enormous and we will be adding it into the game piece by piece. The first release of this system will hopefully be sometime towards the end of January. It will have some basic assignments and qualifications and we will just keep adding to it from there.

Players will of course still be able to make sandbox aquariums.

There is a lot of text for everyone to digest. Hopefully it makes sense. If some parts are confusing then write a comment and we will try to explain it better. As was said before the exact naming of things has not been decided just yet so the naming may not make much sense or seem not well thought out.

Next week's development update will most likely not include an update to the game itself but we will post more information about upcoming features we are working on.

We wish you all a very happy new year!

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

This is the last update for this year (2019). The eleventh update we have done so far since the release in late September. The game has changed quite a lot since the initial version and we have ironed out a lot of the problems the game had in those versions, especially with the UI.
The biggest thing the game is missing at the moment are objectives. This will come in the form of a "career mode". Players will start with a small amount of items and money and over time objectives will need to be completed so that the player gains more knowledge of Fishery's game mechanics and systems and unlocks more things. You know, like an actual game.

This will be the highest priority feature that we will be working on next and we are aiming to release the first version of this in January 2020. At the same time we will be working on the new plumbing system which we also are aiming to add to the game in January 2020.

Over the Christmas break we will be doing a lot of planning and probably a bit of programming to get ready for it. Fishery is going to change a lot in 2020 and we thank everyone so far who is supporting our efforts. Especially those of you who have given the game a positive reviews. We know the game is missing a lot and it means a lot to us that you have a lot of faith in us to get the job done. We intend to prove that faith is not misplaced.



This week we have added a new fish. A Siamese fighting fish, also called a Betta fish, which is also our first properly gendered fish. It is a female. This is significant because we are preparing for when we have the breeding features. Quite often male and female fish are quite different in size, proportion and colour. All new fish we add will take this into account.

There are a huge variety of Betta fish. Lots of different shapes and colours. We intend to put lots of variations into the game. This particular type of Betta is meant to resemble a halfmoon Betta. We decided to make this one mostly blue because most of the fish we have at the moment are warm colours like red and orange and we do not really have much others so for the sake of colour variety we painted it blue.

The somewhat aggressive/anti-social behaviour of this fish has not been added just yet but there will be some work done on the fish AI over the holidays because it needs a few tweaks.

The in-game help has been updated with more informative text. We are working on a much better and more detailed version of the in-game help. It will fully explain the ins and outs of all the features. There will also be a detailed in-game Encyclopedia added which players will need to use to research things about fish and plants in order to complete objectives but more info on that will come soon.

Quick Release Notes:
- Added a female Betta fish
- Fixed a UI bug in the shop where the sub-category menu would stay visible after changing the game mode via a hotkey
- Update to the help text
- Update to the inspect mode rollover panel's text. More detailed data will be coming soon.
- A delete button has been added next to the manipulation buttons
- Text labels for certain buttons have been turned on again
- Added new eye textures for all the smallish fish
- The way that shadows are calculated and rendered has been changed to prevent flickering and increase quality

Remember next week there will no be a game update but there will be a news post like this one. It will serve as a sort of feature/roadmap post which will talk about what we have planned for the upcoming career mode, so be sure to remember that if you are interested.

We would like to thank you all again for the support. It has been an exhausting few months. Many more hard working months are ahead but as the game improves we feel better and better about working all the long hours. We will be checking the forums and reading messages daily over the next 2 weeks so keep asking questions and making suggestions.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

We are in fact early with week's development update. Quite a lot is being worked on but a good portion of it wont be ready until next week's update. That will include the new fish we are adding and more realistic eye textures for all fish. We wanted to get the fish eye textures into this week's update but we need to spend a bit of time modifying the models of each fish to accommodate the new eye shapes.

We have also been making significant progress in the planning stages for the career system. The career system will be the answer to the question that people rightfully ask, "what the heck do you do in Fishery?". The main thing that is missing at the moment is some sort of progression coupled with tasks and other things to do. This will be one of the first things added to the game when we come back in January and it will significantly change the game for the better.

A quick reminder that next week will be the last update we do this year that will accompany a new build of the game. There probably will be a development update post like this one every Friday over the Christmas season. It will probably talk more about certain ideas and plans we have for the first weeks of 2020 and later on in the year.

But more of about all of that next week. What have we been working on that has made it into this week's update I hear you ask.



The treasure chest item now looks and behaves much nicer than before. This has been something that has bugged us for a while. We built this lovely little treasure chest but the treasure inside looked like it was from a game made in 2002.



The treasure has been made with more polygons and made the shader has been modified to look shiny. We have also animated the lid to open and close every 10 seconds and when it opens it emits bubbles. Players can have the same amount of control over it's gas balance and rate as they do with the air stone. From a computer code point of view the treasure chest is a type of air stone.



Changes have been made to the scale manipulator so it's visual appearance is more consistent with the translate and rotate manipulators. Changes have also been made to the rate in which objects scale when the manipulator is manipulated. It was quite sensitive and hard to make precise changes to an object's scale. This has now been reduced so things scale at a rate that hopefully does not frustrate players.

All items that can be scaled have had their maximum scale limit removed. This means players can scale things to be as big as they want. The minimum scale limit is still in place. This is to prevent the physics system soiling itself when physics colliders are scaled too small or even inverted.

A fair few quality of life fixes have been made to how manipulators and creation brushes react when players switch game modes. For example being in the shop mode whilst having an object selected and manipulated whilst switching to inspect mode and then back again would not see the translate manipulator re-appear but the translate button would still be turned on. That is a bit of a mouthful to say but it's goofy and annoying behaviour which does not create a pleasant creative experience. Similar fixes were also made for the brush creation tool.

Well that is it for this week. Next week's update post will probably be quite long because there will be much to talk about. As always feel free to ask questions, talk about features you want in the game, request new fish, plant species etc.

Have a great weekend,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been a monster of a week and there is so much to tell you all about. There is a new build of the game that should be uploaded to steam now-ish. It has quite a few tweaks and improvements, some of which shall be explained below.

The 19th of December will be the last upload of a new build this year. We will be going on Christmas break until some time in the first week of the January 2020. Which means there are 2 updates left this year and we want to make them special. We will focus on polishing some visuals and adding a very nice new fish. The species of fish will be kept a secret but it is one that is requested often and I think we can do a good job making it in the time we have left. So I hope you all look forward to that. On top of that there will be the usual tweaks and re-writes of code and features.



But now a little about this week's build. We have finally added the skeleton fish. It was planned that it would be added on October the 31st. As can be expected with software it was slightly delayed. The reasons for it's delay were that the fish AI system was not ready to expand and accommodate it's needs. Most fish in the game are social fish that can die and are more or less friendly. The skeleton fish is none of those. So a large amount of the code that deals with fish and fish AI had to be re-written to allow for more possibilities. We are pretty much there. The only thing missing is the correct skeleton fish AI behaviour. At the moment it just swims around and occasionally rests. The actual behaviour that will soon be added is a sort of scavenger behaviour. It looks for dead or dying fish and then eats them. Which could actually be quite useful. It also requires we create AI behaviours for the victims of the skeleton fish. Fish need to act fearful and panic when pursued by this beast and we simply ran out of time to write and test this sort of behaviour this week but rest assured it will be in the game soon.





We have made progress with changing the textures for the fish eyes. They are not in the game yet since these are version 1 tests but we think they are going in a much better direction for the art style in the future. The only slight problem is we have to change the models. Each fish's eyes stick out more than they should to accommodate the previous version of fish eyes. This will need to change before we put the new textures in the game but it is a very minor problem.




We have made quality of life changes to the sculpting brush and the placement brush. They can no longer scale to be bigger than the area of the floor. Sometimes they got a bit too big and things felt very clumsy. We have also made changes to how the scale of newly created objects work. When brushing or dragging a new item into the world they should never be so big that they are bigger than the aquarium itself. That sort of thing is horrible and we are slowly eliminating issues of that kind. This does mean though that the scale of objects in your saved scenes will be somewhat different. Sorry for that but this sort of thing will have to happen from time to time as we iron out these things.

We have made progress with the new plumbing system. It can hopefully be expected to be in the game by the end of January in it's early form. We dont have anything to show just yet but soon we will.




Here is an interesting bit of performance optimisation. The numbers in the two images are not quite accurate because the tool that measures the CPU performance does slow things down quite a lot in order to record detailed information about how long code takes to execute. They show how much CPU time it takes to update several hundred plants. They update once a second. The first images shows these very tall spikes. This shows that all plants update at the exact same time every second and it takes rather too long to do so. around 56 milliseconds. (Remember this number is higher due to the profiling tool itself). One way to simply try reducing how long it takes to update the plants is to stagger their updates. The second image shows smaller, more numerous spikes taking around 32 milliseconds. All I did here was to randomise the start time of the update timers, which means that the plants still update once a second but the exact time that each update timer reaches one second is different, which means we won't end up having hundreds of plants update at the exact same time. This is a very simple way of reducing performance spikes and much more complex things can be done. I can already here some people looking at this and screaming "multi-threading". Yes, I know but multi-threading is not a silver bullet.


Slightly more detailed release notes:

Fixes and improvements:
- Objects created from the shop should no longer be created too small or too large for the chosen tank.

- Brushes for substrate and item creation have their maximum scale adjusted to never be larger than the floor are of the chosen tank.

- New Fish: Skeleton fish has been added. It's behaviour is simple and not final but that will come soon.

- Inheritance hierarchy for the fish code has been re-created to allow for a wider choice of fish types, social, unsocial, living, undead etc. this has reduced complexity and reduced code.

- The part of the fish aAI that allows a fish to decide which state it wants to transition into has been completely re-written. It is now far more simpler, robust and capable of supporting more complex behaviour. There is also a lot less duplicated code and it is faster than ever to put together the brain of a fish.

- Small optimisation for plant AI updates. All plants updated at the same time every second. This caused spikes in performance. Plants still update every second but the starting time for each update is a random float between 0 and 1 thus staggering the updates of plants across many frames.



Next week's roadmap:
- Start making a special new fish (details coming soon)
- Final tweaks to new fish eye textures
- Refactoring of selection code for all interactable objects to reduce redundant function calls
- More asset creation
- Make a better shader that represents shiny metallic objects. So we can create shiny treasure
- Add the new fricking algae system already


Next week's update should have some quite interesting things added to the game if all goes to plan. So keep an eye out. Thanks for all your continued support!


The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been another rather intense week. We were determined to get back to releasing on a Friday and we are very happy to say we have succeeded. A lot of changes have been made. Bug fixes, optimisations, improvements to code robustness. We have also added some new art content, changes to the manipulators, fish ai and more.



These are objects that have been requested by players and since we need to test out some new code for these sorts of objects it was the perfect time to add them. This is just the beginning for these sorts of devices. There will be more ornamental objects that add gas into the water like the typical treasure chest that has bubbles coming from inside it to mini volcanoes.



This is a glimpse of the type of controls players will have when we add the plumbing system. There will be lots of devices like gas regulators, filters, heaters etc. that will be controlled by sliders that change that devices operation. It will be possible for players to have very precise control of water chemistry. Just as long as the devices are well maintained and have enough power. Power is not present in this example because that is being remade completely for the new plumbing system.




Here is another player request. The ability to change the coordinate space of manipulators. In a nutshell this means players can have the manipulator orientated towards the world or towards the object in question.



Switching is very simple. Click the little arrow in the bottom corner of the manipulator buttons and then choose a coordinate system.


We have made updates to the fish AI and added a new AI behaviour. Fish can now idle. Yes, they stop and contemplate digital existence for a while and then move on to something else. This was a much requested AI behaviour from players and it is high time we added it. This comes after we made huge changes to how fish are programmed and how the AI is programmed. It is now easier to add behaviours than before and takes less time. There is still work to be done to get things perfect but it means in the near future we can add more fish behaviours on a more regular basis.

Below is a slightly more detailed set of release notes and a roadmap for next week.


Fixes and improvements:
- Changes to the way fish AI is coded. Making it easier to add new behaviours without doing too much boiler plate code.

- Added an a new fish AI behaviour idle.

- Removal of lots of duplicate code shared between delectable items. This is part of a large reorganisation of the code so more creative item types can easily be authored without duplicating code.

- Translate and rotate tools now have the possibility to switch coordinate spaces.

- The first set of air stones have been added. Players can choose the ratio of C02 and oxygen released as well as the overall amount of gas released.

- Fixed a bug where the selection UI would appear in game modes where it shouldn't.

- Fixed a bug where renaming a fish to a name with an "f" in it would to the camera going into frame mode.

- Optimised the code for computing wander positions.

- Flock group target positions are not calculated every frame for groups that have no fish in the flock AI state thus reducing calculations where they are not needed.

- Flock AI steering direction will be re-computed based on the number of fish in the flock state and not based on the overall number of fish in existence.

- Added more robustness to the code that creates objects via the brush or drag placement mode. Objects that cannot be scaled will have their scale set to 1.0

Known Issues:
- Food and medicine still may not save and load properly. This is due to changes being made to their core code. We could not finish all their changes and could not make them savable at this time. This does not cause program instability. The items will simply not appear when loaded but players can still create new ones.

- Info UI for some items still don't work, this is being fixed soon.



What are we working on in the upcoming week?
- Experimenting with painting more realistic fish eyes
- Starting to make the new plumbing system
- New algae and waste textures
- Additional tweaks to fish AI
- Start coding for more interesting types of fish food. Like chunks of broccoli
- Cleanup more of the core item code


It has been a very intense week but we cannot wait to continue working on this stuff next week. Very exciting times lay ahead.


The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Big thank you to everyone who came to visit us at HeroFest in Bern over the weekend. We collected a lot of valuable feedback and had a lot of fun meeting you all. It was especially fun to see those of you who were inspired by the video from GrayStillPlays and decided to fill the aquarium with fish until the frame rate was around 2FPS. Amazingly the game did not crash.

The update schedule is a little bit out of rhythm at the moment. We seem to be updating the game on Mondays instead of Fridays for various reasons. This is mostly my fault. I (Undercover Cheese) get a little too ambitious at the beginning of the week with changes and then have more bugs to fix when it is time to upload it to steam. It is much better for players if we update on a Friday because nothing is more fun than to have the weekend to play with game improvements. I want to try to get back to our original schedule of Friday updates so this week the changes will be less large but nonetheless important.

Version 0.2.19 is uploaded and should be downloadable shortly.

Fixes/Improvements
- Majority of the water chemistry code has been modified to make things less confusing and less annoying for players. The amount of C02 and nutrients that plants consume is very low. This will enable players to have thousands of plants (like Glosso) in their aquariums and not have constant C02 and nutrients problems. More variation will be introduced to this system when the water plumbing system is added to the game. Then players will have better and more nuanced control over the whole ecosystem.

- The way that water chemistry is displayed via UI to players has been made much less complex with much less data on display. This is not the final way that the data will be displayed but this serves as an intermediate step towards showing only the meaningful information to players so things can be easily understood.

- Inanimate objects like rocks, wood etc. now contribute something to water chemistry. Organic objects like wood will add a bit of nutrients into the water whereas rock based objects will emit a very small amount of C02 or Oxygen into the water. This whole point of this is to add more variation to the water chemistry so every time players create a new aquarium the ecosystem will always behave differently based on it's contents. This core feature will also be expanded upon in the upcoming weeks/months.

- Minor changes have been made to some UIs. Descriptions are back for inanimate objects in the shop. In the next few versions item descriptions will make a complete return.

- Minor changes to item selection UIs. Removing the displayed number value of a status slider and a few more minor cases of redundant data.

Known Issues:
- Saved games loaded in this version which were saved in a previous version of the game may not load in exactly the same way. This will not result in a crash but some status values may largely differ. This is due to changes we have made in this new version which no longer read data from older files in the same way. This sort of thing will happen from time to time as we make changes to existing systems but we will try to make it an uncommon occurrence.

- Medicine and fish food may not be saved properly at the moment. This is because the changes we have made this week are only an intermediate version of the final state of this system and not all the pieces are in place. All it means is that food and medicine will be absent when loading game files but it can of course still be created during normal gameplay.

- The info tab for some item's selection UI displays incorrect data.


What we plan to work on this week:
- Configurable local and global coordinate systems for translation and rotation manipulators.
- Reduction in complexity of fish AI code to allow for easier modification and reduction of bugs. This will aid us to more easily and quickly add AI behaviors to fish on a weekly basis.
- More modifications to the water chemistry code allowing for more variation in plant needs and outputs.
- Preparing/designing new fish food content.
- Create the first set of air stones. (much requested content from players)
- Reduce more clunkiness associated with the creation and editing of objects in shop/creative mode.
- General cleanup of certain UI code to reduce memory allocation for strings during run time. (will result in less stuttering in frame rate in certain situations)
- Create new art content for algae.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

This week went by very fast indeed but we have made significant progress in the water chemistry code. We are also exhibiting Fishery at HeroFest in Bern, Switzerland starting today (Friday) until Sunday. Due to this we have not had enough time to properly test this week's build before we upload it so it looks like it will be uploaded over the weekend or at the very latest Monday. I can however detail what has been worked on this week.

As I said earlier the previous way water chemistry was calculated was not done in a way that makes things fun for players. This is due to me over engineering certain aspects of the code design and having too many numbers displayed to players which ended up being confusing and not very informative. Most of these numbers are now gone and we have simplified how the water data will be displayed and calculated. Most of this will be fully fleshed out when we add the "plumbing mode" where players will have precise control about all aspects of water chemistry in a way that is not overly complicated or confusing and very soon there will be proper algae in the game.



Plant life is now more stable. In the above image you can see several hundred plants not dying. To anyone who has played previous versions of the game this is a rare occurrence indeed especially if I tell you that no pills have been added to the water to supplement C02 or nutrients. Lots of numbers are being adjusted and the way that data is calculated is quite different from before. When we have completed these changes we hope players can spend less time adding c02 pills into the water and more time being creative.

The next step is to propagate these changes to the fish related code so they don't die so much. Then we will re-work their ai so it can be modified and expanded with ease. The next few releases of the game should really change things around so players can have more fun and it hopefully starts to feel more like a game. We promise we will get there.

On Monday we hope to be posting a preview of some future art content. We are playing around with improving the art style whilst at the same time simplifying the maths inside the shaders. This reduction of complexity in some areas means we can add more complexity to other areas. This all sounds a bit cryptic but hopefully all will be explained in the next few updates. Exciting times are ahead.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

We have had another productive week and are ready to update the game but there are a few small things we could not fix in time for Friday but we will be able to have it ready and uploaded for this coming Monday instead. It is rather annoying delaying things again but this will be the last delay for this update.

We can however talk about what the heck we have been working on for the last two weeks. As I have said in earlier posts we have been ripping the guts out of most of the game. We have finished that process for the user interface and can move forward.

The biggest problem that we had with the old user interface was that it had everything in the same place with lots of lots of buttons. We struggled to not have so many windows overlapping with each other and the overall space the UI took up made things feel very cramped.

This also made us realize that as we add much more features to the game the UI clutter would get even worse. So we had to come up with a solution for making the UI expandable but smaller overall. The solution was to have various UI "modes".



There is a small drop-down menu where players can switch to a mode that specifies the sort of actions they wish to perform. These modes can also be switched to via keyboard shortcuts. And yes there will be a "screensaver" mode added to this menu in the future. There will be a lot of new features and modes added and it wont disrupt previous ways of doing things or encroach on the other tasks players might want to perform.

So lets have a look.



Inspect mode is the mode you switch to when you want to see how everything is doing and view the statistics of the aquarium. Oxygen, C02 and nutrients etc has been moved to the bottom of the screen and overall made smaller. This serves a few purposes. Showing these values as percentages confused some players because there was not indication of what 100% actually meant and how could water contain 100% oxygen at the same time as 100% c02. This is our failure to communicate how it works so it is simplified to merely show the levels graphically and reduce confusion.

At the moment this new UI takes up a small amount of space. This is on purpose because there will be a lot more water attributes added in the near future. Like PH, salt, disease, hormones for breeding and stress etc. and more. This new arrangement simply makes it easier to expand without needing to redesign the UI to make things fit. The little widgets on the left are also going to be added to. At the moment they only display the number of fish and plants in the aquarium and selecting them shows the lists of each. In the future there will be widgets showing the number of coral, crustaceans, newts, jellyfish, snails, food, etc.



The shop/build mode will be added to the most and it is possible that players will spend a lot of their time here so things need to be organised. There are two menus. Category and sub-category. This helps us organise items better for players so there is no need to spend long searching for items to add into the aquarium. When we can spend less time fixing the current problems we plant to spend a lot of time making new items so these inventories will fill up fast. And yes the mouse scroll wheel now scrolls the main inventory.

When players select an item there will be no pop-up information that displays their status. That only occurs in the inspect mode. Leaving players free to just be creative without being bothered by all this pop-up UI. All creative tools will appear at the top of the screen and we will be expanding on them in the future too.



Substrate will become more important in the future. Each substrate type will effect the simulation in some way. For instance each substrate could add some nutrients or C02 or even oxygen into the water depending on what it is made of or perhaps it might even add heat. We want to get very creative with all of the choices of substrate but will also be adding the realistic variations. This is why we have have the large inventory for it.

The choice of substrate will effect the happiness/comfort of the fish and other animals. For instance some tropical fish may not feel at home with a very earthy/muddy substrate but would rather have lovely sand. But we want to be careful with that kind of functionality though because we don't want to limit the creativity of player too much by making it difficult to keep fish happy. We do not want players to be forced to place fish only in their preferred habitat because it wont be as fun and I think it is more interesting for players to figure out how to bend the rules a little.

The sculpt tool UI has also been made smaller and more out of the way. At some point the sculpting tools will have a major upgrade and there will be more sculpting options.



Photo mode is another example of simplification with a view to expanding features in the future. There will be controls for changing the overall look of the images created as well as features for slowing down time so players can spend time properly framing a shot. I personally would love to add a feature for recording a little .gif because those are always fun too.


That is a quick look at the new user interface layout. UI is never very interesting but for this sort of game it is so important. As I have mentioned before most of game logic code that has been written is related to the user interface simply because so much of the game data has to be seen, accessed and modified by the player. But from this point onward we can handle it.

What is next?
Glad you asked. Next week the guts of the simulation system will be ripped out and replaced with something much better (we hope). The simulation system governs how things like, C02, oxygen, nutrients effect everything else and how those resources are used or released.

Everyone, including us agrees the current system it is crap and not fun in it's current form. It is overly complex where it should not be and in most cases only partially does what it should do. This is usually somewhat expected in an Early Access game but it should not be like this for very long and players have given great feedback on what they expect so we now have a better idea of what is important as well as where we can fit in some of our more creative ideas.

To avoid delaying a release again we may release the updates in stages. For instance we only update the algae and waste system one week and then update the C02, oxygen, nutrients system in the following week. It depends how crazy things get. Doing massive changes can often be like going down a rabbit hole and it is very important for us that we don't delay an update very often. Stay tuned and have a great weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone

It has been an exceptionally productive week with some quite exciting things to discuss about upcoming features but unfortunately for a second week in a row we cannot upload a new build.

This is because we have been rather too enthusiastic about making progress and have broken certain parts of the game. We did say this month we plan to completely rip the guts out of the game in order to make big changes. The problems always arise when we have to suddenly put all the guts back in and expect everything to work with no problems and the culprit is as always the user interface. Despite these minor setbacks we are extremely happy with the progress being made and it is really opening doors for more gameplay features that we are going to add in the future. Some of which we are going to talk about now.

A subject much talked about in the forums and reviews is the subject of water chemistry. Specifically controlling water chemistry through the use of machines. Like filters, C02 regulators, thermometers, PH regulators etc. Specifically people talk about the current lack of such items in our game.
The problem we as game designers are trying to capture the essence of that part of the aquarium experience so we can satisfy players who want to deal with the more technical side of things, but not have it overlap too harshly with the creativity part of gameplay.

In other words filters, regulators etc. can be a little bit big, bulky and ugly and may visually ruin an aquarium. However we think we have solved this conflict.
Quite often for medium to large and extremely large aquariums there is fairly large amount of plumbing involved just to keep the water nice for the plants and fish but the size of the filters and regulators are themselves so large that they could not fit inside the aquarium at all and must be placed either next to or beneath it. This is known as a "plumbed aquarium". This is how we will implement filters and regulators and all the wonderful machinery and piping associated with it.

These images are just a quick concept mock-up made in our 3D software and are made only to represent the possibilities of what things could look like.



There will be a menu button the quickly switches to a new mode where the aquarium becomes invisible and the area underneath the aquarium becomes visible and the focus point for the camera. Players can then work on constructing the plumbed filter system. There is an intake pipe and an output pipe represented in the images by those two arrows. Players will need to connect the water coming in from the input pipe to various devices such as filters, temperature regulators, PH regulators, C02 regulators and then connect to the output pipe which brings the modified water back into the aquarium.



Each aquarium is a different size and so is the size of it's "plumbing area" meaning larger tanks have more space for this than smaller ones. This means players will need to think creatively about how they connect up their systems to best make use of the space. The end result is that players will have full control over the water chemistry and it wont be annoying either visually or technically.

It also goes beyond having simple filtration and C02 regulations. For instance, there will be fish and other organisms added to the game that love eating algae so there must be a plentiful supply in the aquarium for them eat. Players will be able to tweak their systems so they can have a perfectly balanced, high algae content aquarium.
There will even be little devices that can be added to the system that put algae spores into the water to keep algae growth at a consistent level.

The possibilities are huge, we could have hormone injectors that add special breeding hormones to the water to increase fish fertility (when we have added the breeding system). Or players could harvest breeding hormones from the water and sell them in career mode (when we add career mode). Players might also want more electricity so they can have more powered decorations or air stones in the tank. Why not add a few mini electricity generators into the pipeline so the power output is higher, or even add a small nuclear reactor which increases power and water temperature so you can have tropical fish and plants. Certainly no downside or unforeseen consequences to surprise players with there.

It is such a fun and exciting set of features that I fear I am rambling so I shall wrap this up by saying this is being worked on and we are going to try and get the first version of this mode into the game before the end of the year and of course we shall keep you updated with it's progress.

The Fishery Team