Hello everyone,

We are back from our little break and the game build has just been updated. This post might be a little shorter than usual because we have mostly worked on painting new fish this week and the new selection features that have been put into this week's game update were detailed in last week's post.


Female Gold Platy:


Male Gold Platy:



We have added some Gold Platys. It was a good fish to help us ease back into painting after a little break. These were finished quite early in the week and some new fish are already in the process of being painted but not yet finished.

Male Hibuna Goldfish (Work in progress):


The Hibuna Goldfish is in the first stages of being painted. In our research we have found that there can be quite a bit of difference in the colours of these goldfish so to try and show that variation in the game we have made the male version which is shown above to have more red in it's colourings. The female will be more orangey. At least one, but hopefully both, will be in the game next week.

The other fish that is being painted is a very colourful guppy but we wont show it yet because we would rather it be a nice little surprise.


As was said before the other parts of this week's game update about new selection features were talked about in last week's post so we encourage you to look at that for a more in depth explanations.

Selection Mask UI


One small thing that is worth mentioning here though is about the UI for the selection mask. At the moment it is visible all the time when players are able to select things but this wont be the case for too long. A new selection ui is going to be put together that will also included the marquee selection toggle button and this ui can be hidden so there is less clutter on screen. This will be added towards the end of this month.

Next week is going to be quite busy indeed. Aside from painting fish there is a big pile of small changes that need to be made to parts of the fish ai, user interface, creation tools, bug hunting, bug fixing, career mode writing etc etc.

We wish you all a good weekend,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

A warm thank you for all birthday wishes that were written in the comments of last weeks post. I did in fact manage to take it easy this week and have a break. My colleague also felt the time was right to rest a bit so it was a much less intense week for both of us. There won't be an update to the game itself this week but there definitely will be one next week.

I did manage to add some small but interesting features to the game that have been on my mind for some time but it was done in a leisurely, stress free fashion.





Selecting objects at the moment can be quite tedious especially if there are many objects to be selected. A small feature was added to allow players to simply click and drag the mouse to select whole groups of objects without lots of tedious clicking. It is almost like a selection "brush" where players brush their mouse over the scene and it selects whatever it hits. It also solves the problem of selecting fish. Fish can sometimes move a bit fast and making a precise mouse click atop a fish can be tricky. Players can now just chase the fish with the mouse button held to select it and it is a lot easier. This feature can also be used when de-selecting objects.

The next step for easing selection tedium is to add marquee selection. Sometimes known as a selection rectangle. We have the main part of it working but it still needs some tweaks to performance before it can be added to the game. There is a good chance it will be in the game before the end of August.



This is quite a valuable feature to also reduce player annoyance when selecting objects. A selection mask. Essentially players can tell the game what type of object they wish to select in order to prevent them selecting something they have no desire to select but at the same time make it easier to select the things they do want to select. In the above example we are trying to quickly select all the rocks but because there are plants in the way they too get selected which is undesired.



This second example shows how simple it is to select the rocks when we tell the game to ignore the plants when calculating selections. It is much easier to select the rocks and there are no undesired selections.



More progress has been made with the Hibuna goldfish models. These were worked on more today and I think they are ready to go to the painting phase but I will sleep on it and have another look on Monday with fresh eyes to see if I there is anything that jumps out on them that needs tweaking. There is not really much difference in shape between male and female Hibuna's in real life, unless the female of pregnant, so I added some variation to the overall body shape and fins so both models are not identical. There will be similar small differences done to their painted textures that will allow players to see a difference between them more clearly without them look too dissimilar.


The forums have been a little busier than usual this week so more time was spent answering questions and researching fish suggestions. Before I officially add a fish to the fish list based on someone's suggestion I need to do a quick bit of research to make sure it is something we can actually do in terms of animation, model complexity etc. We made a list for food and for plants and already received some suggestions which have been added. There is a lot of Latin to be read on the plant list. More lists will be added soon so remember to check them out as well as the existing ones.

We are back to work on Monday so expect a nice game update next week with at least one new species of fish and a few small feature updates, bug fixes etc.

We wish you all a good weekend,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

The game build has been uploaded so feel free to check it out. It has been quite busy week with work being done on quite a few areas of the game and some of them are ready to show you all.



This is a work in progress model of a Hibuna goldfish. Which depending on where I look on the internet is also called the Common Goldfish or a Red Crucian Carp. You would be surprised how long we spend trying to find the correct names and descriptions to match the visual appearance of our fish. Surprisingly, information found on the internet is not always in accordance with the truth. We have instead ordered a few well respected books/encyclopaedias about fish, one specifically about goldfish which will clarify all in the near future.

As was said before the model is not done yet. Everything is more or less in the right place. The next step is to refine the shapes of the head and body and do another pass shaping the fins. Then small variations will be made to distinguish the genders. there is not a huge amount of difference between male and female Hibunas so we will rely on slightly changing some proportions and shapes a bit so the models are not identical to the naked eye. Furthermore they will be painted with variations. Male Hibunas, much like other goldfish, have these little white dots near they gills.



It is long overdue that we update the in-game help system so it actually provides help to players. In the previous two weeks we have seen some players express frustration about not knowing how to navigate the camera or are baffled by how the plumbing system works. We don't really have an excuse for not providing such simple features such as in-game help other than we have just been working on everything else in the game. Nevertheless every week from now on we will do our best to add new entries to the help system and update existing ones when we make a change. We have begun with help for the main controls and a more detailed explanation of the current state of the plumbing system. The button for quick help can be found in the top right corner of the screen.



Yes we have added cheese to the game. It is quite often used as bait by people looking to catch fish for sport or food because it's scent underwater is quite strong and curious fish cant resist a nibble. According to most online sources a good number of fish should not actually eat cheese long term because they do not have the ability to digest animal fat. This does tie into some features will be adding later to do with food.

The quality of food that players feed to their fish will affect their lifespan and behaviour over time. If players feed their fish the same fish pellets for a long time their happiness will decrease and their lifespan will shorten. Feeding them some of the more interesting foods we have been adding in previous weeks will have different outcomes such as increases happiness, longer lifespan, increased chance of breeding (ooh la la), reduction of stress etc etc etc. Not to mention in career mode the more interesting food will have a higher cost so players will need to balance their finances in order to feed their fish a really healthy diet. In the forums a food list will shortly be posted that will list all the food currently in the game as well as what we are planning to add so we encourage you to check it out and make suggestions once it is posted.

We are also adding cheese now for reasons explained below.



August 1st is National Swiss Day and our company is based in Switzerland, Furthermore some of you may have seen that Fishery has been on sale this week along with around 50 other Swiss games. So to commemorate these events we thought it would be fun to add the Swiss cheese and the floaty duck painted as the Swiss flag.


Next week we are taking a little bit of a break from normal work because it is my birthday and I have not really had a break yet this year. However knowing myself I will probably finish the goldfish model and add more entries to the in-game help. Also the FAQ on the forums needs updating along with the fish list. The suggestions made by people in the fish list thread has been fantastic and it is just growing and growing. I urge you you all to check it out and contribute.

More lists will certainly be added either tonight or over the weekend. As mentioned above there will be a food list. We are certainly going to add a plant list, coral list, decoration list etc. It really helps us to see what art content we can prioritise so we can reward you all for you patience.

There will of course be an update post like this one showing development progress next week so stay tuned for that. We wish you all a good weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

A new build should be uploaded some time tomorrow (Saturday) if all goes smoothly with testing. We did not get to finish as much as we wanted this week but we still managed to get a new fish in the game.

Female Green Grass Guppy (updated fin colours):


Male Green Grass Guppy:



Finally I have finished the male green grass guppy and updated the female guppy's fins to match the colourings. These are halfmoon guppies. We are also going to add as many of the other types of guppies as we can such as spear tail, flag tail, round tail etc and we will paint as many varieties of colourings as we can too. There seems to be an endless amount of colourings so feel free to check out the fish list on the forums and make suggestions for guppies that you would like us to prioritise. Also feel free to make suggestions for all other types of fish too. The list keeps growing and it gives us a clear picture of what fish are most important for us to include in the game.

Next week I will make the new models for the common goldfish. I also feel a bit of a tingle in the brain to model another variety of goldfish too, perhaps a Ranchu or a black moor.

Fungi:


Fungi has been added into the game. They are a new object type that we introduced in last week's post. The main purpose of fungi is to help remove waste from aquariums without the need for an artificial filter. There are going to be story lines in career mode that require players to gain knowledge about how to create 100% natural and self sustaining aquariums that don't use any plumbing and fungi are just another tool in the toolbox to help players achieve that.

The white mushroom is called Psathyrella Aquatica. It was discovered in 2005 and is the only known gilled mushroom that lives completely submerged underwater and was found anchored in rivers that have quite strong currents. Naturally we had to include it in our game. You can expect to see some more species of fungi added in the future.


There have also been some tweaks to how shadows work. We are using a technique called "Cascaded shadow maps". To put it simply it allows us to calculate the shadows of objects close to the camera with more detail than objects further away. This not only makes things look better but reduces shadow rendering time for objects further away from camera. Objects further away from camera usually take up less screen space, therefore they are seen with less details and we can use a much lower resolution shadow map for their shadows.


Remember to check our progress next week to see some nice new fish models as well as some nice progress in other areas of the game. As usual we hope you all have a good weekend.

The Fishery Team.

Hello to all of you,

There will be a new build uploaded within the next 24 hours but if all goes well it will be tonight. We have added some nice new art content:

Rummy Nose Tetra Female:


Rummy Nose Tetra Male:


I'm sure some of you are asking, what about the male guppy from last week that was promised? I got a bit too tired of staring it and needed to reset my brain so instead I looked at the unfinished fish list in the forums and found the Rummy Nose Tetra. Quite lovely little fish and they were a lot of fun to paint. The male blue grass guppy should arrive in the game next week, hopefully it will not defeat me again.

Banana Slice:


More food has been added. It just felt so right to add into the game. It also has a dual purpose. Bananas are high in Potassium which is a valuable nutrient that plants require. Soon the code will be updated so that certain food items rich in nutrients can be used to feed fish and also provide nutrients for plants. That way players won't necessarily have to depend on the artificial fertilizer balls or the plumbing nutrient injector to help sustain their ecosystems.

Ruins:


We also added two more ruin pieces that we introduced last week. The new pieces added are the single pillar sections that are not attached to a base block. Next week we hope to finish painting some more brick like blocks of various dimensions so players can start building things with a bit more structure. You can also see a lovely array of banana slices elegantly scattered around the aquarium.

Fungi:


This is Mitrula Paludosa. It is not in the game yet but it will be next week if all goes to plan. It is a species of fungi that grows in the water. We have not found pictures of it actually submerged more than halfway underwater but that is good enough for us to put it into the game.

Fungi is new object type to the game and it will be very useful. Fungi is what is known as a "decomposer" which simply means they break down dead organic matter. Their main job in fishery will be to provide a way to manage waste levels. Players may wish to keep waste at acceptable levels using purely natural means without a plumbing filter. Fungi will get the job done and will help make things look interesting in your aquarium. We have not decided precisely what their needs will be but it will be similar to the other forms of life currently in the game. They will be sensitive to temperature, PH and saltiness and they might add nutrients and other chemicals into the water in exchange for removing waste.


Busy times indeed. When working on art content it often feels like we make more progress than when working purely on code features which is good for the morale of us and anyone who has been following us for a while. The game is really coming together nicely and if we keep going at this pace it means we could add at a minimum 4-5 new species of fish per month. On top of that we looking to add more decorations, plumbing objects, food items, plants, substrates and backgrounds. At some point we will also return to adding more features but our updates were quite feature heavy at the start of the year and we need to balance it out a little before we go deep into code again. Some of the features that have been planned and ready to be coded are the undo system, a much better help system, selection sets, marquee selection, selection filters, more complex fish behaviour and emotions, floating plants and many many many more. The to-do list is enormous but we shall prevail.


We wish you all a great weekend

The fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It is Friday once again and we are very glad to be able to say once again say that we have in point of fact actually succeeded in uploading a brand new build of the game on time and as planned.

We have been hard at work adding more new art content into the game.

Female Blue Grass Guppy


The is a female blue grass guppy. Unfortunately most female guppies look rather similar to each other. They have fleshy semi-transparent bodies and quite often mostly transparent fins. We used a bit of artistic licence with this one to keep it looking interesting and identifiable. As some of you may know the male guppies are more elaborately coloured. They are similar to peacocks in the way that they have larger tales with bright colourful patterns. He is still being worked on and we are aiming to have him done next week.

Ruined Pillar:


We have not added a new decoration in a while. This ancient ruin of a pillar is the first of a "themed pack" of ancient ruins that will give players more creative options. That is after all one of the main points of the game, creativity. There are lots of things that will be added to the ancient ruins pack. Statues, ornamentations, pillars, bricks, mosaic pieces, pottery etc. Hopefully it will be enough for players to design their own crumbling temples, streets or even an amphitheatre.

Kiwi Slice:


Kiwi Invasion:


More food has been added. A delicious slice of Kiwi fruit. Perhaps it is not a good idea to put a slice of kiwi into a real aquarium because it's PH is close to 3 which might upset the PH balance in an aquarium considerably. We have not added PH to the game yet but we will and there will be numerous items that modify the PH such as the kiwi.

Duck:


Quack!...There will be some items added to the game that may at first seem bizarre but are all part of the fun and will affect other things in the simulation. For instance there will be some items that cause behavioural changes in fish and other animals that will not be revealed be us but will instead only be revealed by players experimenting and observing. I shall therefore reveal no more about the secret of the duck. It's secret has not yet been added into the game but it will be added at some indeterminate point in the future.


Next week we hope to have more decorations finished and the male blue grass guppy finished and in the game. We hope you all have a great weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello Everyone,

At long last we should have a new build uploaded Sunday (tomorrow). We are just fixing a few small bugs. The update will include all the fish we have shown in previous posts as well as more bug fixes, performance tweaks, changes to fish behaviour and fish needs.

Aside from making sure all the changes we have made recently are not messing with the game's stability we have added yet more things this week.

Female Guppy (Unfinished)


Male Guppy (Unfinished)



A lot of time was spent on making the new guppies. Quite a bit more re-modelling and the painting process is under way. But we are not done with the guppies just yet as you can see in the images above. Both are partially painted and I think the male guppy needs some shape adjustments to it's tale. There is usually a lot of back forth in this process. Going from modelling to painting, then perhaps painting could use a little help by having a better shape to the model, so back to modelling and then back to painting. Then repeat until we are happy with the result. This is a fantail guppy. We do plan to add more types of course.







This week we have added some new fish food. The fish food currently in the game is extremely boring and we are in the process of making it more interesting. The first more interesting items of food are the slices of carrot and cucumber. They stay around long enough so that fish can have quite a few nibbles before the food item disappears whilst providing excellent nourishment. This also means players wont need to feed their fish so much. Furthermore we have made it so fish get hungry less quickly. There are a lot more interesting food items that we have planned aside from vegetables. Players will be able to drop dead flies onto the surface of the water and drop live bloodworms into the water and we are looking at adding live mosquito larvae because it is summer and I hate mosquitoes.

These changes to food tie into future changes we will be making to the needs of fish. Feeding them these new food items instead of boring fish pellets will increase fish happiness, which is a parameter not yet added but will play an important part in the game, instead of just decreasing their hunger.

It is a very busy time indeed with a lot more art content being worked on. Expect more interesting things becoming part of the game in the coming weeks.

We wish you all a good weekend,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been another week and we have remade another fish! No update to the actual build this week as we had hoped which is very disappointing but we shall explain why further down.

The Sunburst Platy.
The model had been remade a few weeks ago but on closer inspection we felt it needed another day's work to get it's overall silhouette correct and clean up parts of it's wireframe topology. That is why we are a little late with this post. Perfectionism forced us to delay by 1 day. However we think it was worth it.

Female:


Male:


There is not too much difference between male and female platy fish in real life. The females tend to be a bit bigger and the fin next to their butt is a different shape. We did add some differences to their models and skin which hopefully you can see in these tiny compressed gifs.



This is what the inventory looks like at the moment. Players will be able to choose explicitly whether to add a male or female of a given species. We are also exploring the idea of having players be able to pick baby or juvenile fish from the inventory but their gender will be determined at random once added. We won't be adding any non-adult fish just yet though.

Hopefully in the coming week we can upload a new build. The reason it is taking so long is because we are also working on a serious update to fish behaviour. Specifically we needed to change the flocking behaviour in such a way that males and females of the same species would swim together. We have also worked on generally improving how flocking works in terms of creating something that looks pleasing to the eye. We have also improved the performance in some small areas which is also good. We are also working on adding the capability for fish of different species to flock together. That means for instance that guppies and neon tetras could swim together in flocks. Not sure when that will be in the game but it will come soon.



Here is just a quick example showing the latest version of the flocking. We are also working to improve the code for obstacle avoidance. Sometimes the fish swim into objects as if they did not see them which is undesirable and makes them look a little too stupid for our liking so obstacle avoidance has been worked on more and improved. It is still not perfect but each time we go back to try to improve it we do actually improve it which is good.


In the coming week we will work on replacing the current neon blue tux guppy with brand new versions and actually have a new build for you all to play with.

Thank you all for being patient and have a great weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Our quest to replace the oldest versions of our fish is going well. This week the old version of the Tiger Barb has been replaced with new male and female versions. We wont be releasing a new build with these fish in it just yet. There are still some tweaks yet to be made to the fish behaviour code and a few other things before we upload a new build. However we are aiming to release a new build next Friday on the 26th of June.

Female:


Male:


The next fish we are going to replace in the upcoming week is the Sunburst Platy and the Guppy. This actually amounts to 4 new fish. The colourings and body shapes can differ quite a lot between the genders. This should mean that once we have replaced all the current fish in the game there will automatically be more visual variety in player's aquariums even though there are the same number of species. After the current species have all been updated we will focus on adding entirely new species to the game.

Be sure to check out the fish list on the forums. Lots of people have been making suggestions for fish they want to see in the game and I have been doing my best to quickly research each suggestion and then add it to the list if I am fairly sure that we can actually put it into the game. Someone suggested adding a "Peacock Eel" and other similar animals but it has not been added to the list yet because eels and snakes require a lot more research before we can say with confidence that we can actually put them in the game and make them good. Certainly we can make them look good but the animation requirements for these types of animals are very tricky indeed. But do keep suggestion such animals.

Making progress with the fish art feels really good. If you can believe it we are just over three months away from the anniversary of the early access release of fishery. There have been an enormous amount of changes made to the game since that release but most of that is code related and not much of it is art related. We added some new art content here and there but overall it looks more or less the same than it did last September. So in preparation for the anniversary of the game's release we will be focusing mostly on the art aspect of the game for a while. I personally am mostly focused on fish, I will also spend some time work on plants as well. I have a colleague working on backgrounds and decorations.

There is much excitement and much work to do so we better get back to it hehe. As usual we bid you all a great weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been an eventful and tiring week indeed. A lot of work has been done to improve the behaviour of the fish. We had very much hoped to be able to to have a new build showing it off today but we sort of ran out of energy. The last few builds we managed to upload really took a lot of brain power and I am personally fairly exhausted when it comes to coding. Excellent progress has been made but I would really like to refine things further before showing it to players

Not that I am complaining and this is not some sort of crisis. I just need a change of task to rest my brain a bit. So next week and probably the week after I will focus purely on making fish art. My esteemed colleague is busy working on some lovely new backgrounds which we should be able to show soon.



Most of the fish in the game are fairly old. You should be able to easily figure out which ones are old because they have very cartoony eyes. Our latest fish designs are much more refined, the models are much more detailed and our ability to paint these fish has improved greatly. The changes we made to the animated fish shaders in the last few weeks actually require the models to be more detailed so the animation looks smooth and lovely.

We have already shown in previous posts the progress that has been made on the Tiger barb fish, platys and guppies. My first tasks next week will be finishing these off and adding them to the game. It is important to replace the old fish before we add any more entirely new species just so the art style stays consistent among the fish and does not cause any confusion to new players.

The fish list on the forums keeps growing and over the weekend I'll check out more suggestions made by people and add them to the list. Each species requires a little bit of research before adding it to the list. The main thing we look at is the size of the fish. Adding really large fish, for instance a fully grown bluefin tuna would be quite difficult because we don't currently have an aquarium big enough to put them in and we need to experiment with how the physics system deals with such large objects interacting with smaller ones. We don't want smaller fish being accidentally blasted into orbit because a tuna swims into it.

We are actually writing a set of career mode objectives where players will need to raise bluefin tuna until they are juveniles to help increase the numbers in the ocean.

Sorry again that we could not get a new build out but good things are coming very soon and there will always be a new post every Friday detailing our progress.

As usual we wish you all a good weekend,

The Fishery Team.