Hello everyone,

We have uploaded a new build. Yes. we are surprised too. We had a bit of a shorter week this week. After finally uploading a build on Monday evening we took Tuesday off to recover then spent the remaining days fixing some minor bugs and making some nice changes.

Algae and Waste:




Algae and waste visualisations have been modified. Algae now grows on the glass. This will be very useful for when we add some suckermouth catfish and other algae eaters.

Waste:


The textures of for waste visualisation have been repainted. Getting the exact right shade of brown that works well on all objects is quite tricky. As is determining how much should be covered up by the waste.

We also added back the floating algae and waste particles into the water. These slowed down the game quite a lot when we tried it many months ago so we are taking baby steps and using very simple looking particles with very simple shaders and will keep updating them little by little until everything looks nice and is fast.

help:


The help system has been changed to utilise more screen space so things don't feel so cramped. I hate scrolling through menus in games just so i can find out why something is not working. We removed the old in-game help menu and replaced it with some panels for each subject. When players enter help mode via the bottom menu they can then choose from a selection of subjects in a manner similar to other menus in the game.

Hopefully this way of doing things will be clearer. We can use the whole screen if needed and there are no other UI panels visible to distract your eyes. The subjects are displayed in alphabetical order and we will be expanding them more every week. We would have liked to add some new ones this week but it was a shorter week and we just did not have time.

The next subjects that we will add to the help will talk about the changes to the simulation system that were made in the last week. I saw on the forums someone was having trouble understanding what is going on in the new version which just tells us we have to hurry up with putting useful information into the help system.

There were a few other nice tweaks that were made this week. All the fish have now been scaled to match their approximate real world size. Their swimming speeds are also related to their size so not all fish swim at approximately the same speed. Their size is also taken into account when they shoal together so they don't all bunch up into a small space.

Some upcoming changes that will be made to fish will also included slightly more stricter rules about population. The rule of "One inch of fish equals one gallon of water" is going to be put into the game. That means if players want to have a 60 litre/16 gallon aquarium they can't fill it with 50 neon tetras and expect them all to be happy. At most you would expect to fit around 13 of them. Or at least that is what the person at the aquarium store might advise you.

This may seem to some that we are artificially trying to add more obstacles or just trying to make player's lives more difficult. Fishery is missing a lot of structure in many areas and how aquariums are stocked is an important part of keeping fish in real life. To be clear, the game will not prevent players from over stocking their aquariums but the fish may become stressed. At least that is the plan. We will probably tweak the the numbers to be more forgiving if it takes too much fun out of the game. These changes will probably enter the game in early December.

Next week will be a full week and there is much to do so we shall have a rest tonight and make lots of notes. We also expect to be uploading a new build next Friday so keep an eye out for that.

We wish you all a great weekend.

The Fishery Team.

Hello everyone,

The game build has been updated!

There is a lot to talk about so I will get right to it.


- The entire UI has been reorganised again to reduce clutter and make things less busy. We are also preparing to add UI for more features that are upcoming.


- settings for selections and manipulation have been tucked away more neatly.


- Water chemistry data is now placed at the top of the screen which is where most people expect to see it and it is visible while in plumbing mode
- Data showing the number of fish, plants, medicines etc have also been placed at the top of the screen. Their lists have been disabled for the time being because they are in the process of being redesigned to actually show useful information.


- The escape menu has been expanded to hold more functionality than before and buttons like the options, load, save buttons have been placed in their menu and not cluttering the screen anymore.
- In the next update the game will actually pause when this menu is shown.


- first version of the breeding system has been added. All fish breed in the same way for now. They all lay eggs. We have tweaked the numbers so they hopefully wont breed out of control.



- The selection uis of all objects have been modified to look nicer and show better information in a more clear manner.
- plants and fish now have a stress parameter. This is preparing for a "Stress response" feature where a fish or plant's behaviour might change when under a lot of stress.


- creation options for the shop/inventory have been better placed and simplified. They also have some quick help text that appears when players put their mouse of the name of each parameter.
- The creation placement brush has had it's best bits merged with the new and improved placement tool. A new brush tool that works way better will return to the game in the future.


- more particle fx have been added to plumbing objects help give them more life when they are turned on. Though it will be vastly improved.


- The way that algae is calculated has been modified to accommodate the new simulation system. There are still changes that need to be made the how it is visualised. Algae will grow on parts of the glass and we will bring back floating algae particles. Algae will also be a food source in the near future for some new fish we will add as well as some of the current ones.


- players can now add salt into the water. Alas there are not really any saltwater fish or corals in the game yet but they are coming very soon.


- when players choose aquariums they can now see the dimensions as cm or inches and volume as litres or gallons. however the button in the options to switch between them wont be added until later this week.


- Plumbing connectors have little arrows painted onto them. They are meant to look like someone drew them on with marker pen. We have been inspired by a lot of images and videos made by people on the internet who have made plumbing related systems out of household items. People breeding brine shrimp in old coke bottles, algae reactors in old kettles etc. We quite like the mad scientist vibe that we get when looking at their stuff and want to incorporate some of that in various plumbing items. It also makes things look a little more personal.


- pre selection UIs for plumbing objects show less information but it is more informative than just saying "connected".


- Selection UIs for plumbing objects have also been updated and all items that use electricity have the auto enable feature assigned to them.


There are a countless number of code tweaks which have reduced memory usage per item added to the aquarium. We have done our best to reduce how much code needs to execute in order to update everything.

All the new fish we have shown in previous posts have been added to the game. Along with a lot of the other features and tweaks that were talked about. New Co2 and oxygen regulators have been added to the plumbing system. The new versions of the nutrient injector and algae reactor have not been added. There are some more tweaks that need to be made before we are happy. There are a lot of plumbing items still to come. Different types of filters that come in different sizes. For larger aquariums it would not make sense to chain together lots of small filters but rather use a larger more fancy filter that gets the job done.

There are of course a few rough edges to this update. The breeding behaviour is still not quite right. The fish are meant to swim around each other in a sort of poetic way. This kind of works when there is a moderate size difference between the partners but if they are near the same size they sort of just face each other like they are kissing which is quite funny but not what we have intended.

I still need to add controls to the options menu that allows players to decide how they want their units displayed. cm, inches, gallons, litres, etc.

The data that displays for each fish in their info tab is not unique for each fish yet. I just need to update the data files with all the correct information about their size, care level, temperament etc. We also need to double check all the information to make sure that the sizes and water conditions are correct.

This update took so long because we decided to fix and implement an enormous chunk of our to-do list that has grown after the past year. As usually happens with programming fixing one problem requires fixing another and another and another.

This coming Friday there will be another post which talks about anything that I forgot to talk about in this post and more of the other things we are working on. Now that we can make saltwater aquariums we must add some things that actually require saltwater. That means soon we will add some coral and I promised someone on the forums that the first saltwater fish we add is a type of puffer fish so I better get started on that.

We should also be able to do another update to the build this Friday. There is still some work that needs to be done that I just could not squeeze into this update. Updating the in-game help with new images, fixing a few small ui bugs. They are not crash bugs. just things that don't always display the correct numbers and of course the usual tweaks to AI, shaders, etc

I'll spend some extra time on the forums this week replying to any posts that I have missed because we were too busy trying to get this update out. All questions shall be answered.

Thank you all for your patience and we shall update you with more progress very very soon.

The Fishery team.

Hello everyone,

There is something of a disaster about this week's post I am sorry to say. We have been burning the candle at both ends for a few weeks in preparation for getting this game update onto steam but it appears we have reached our limit.

The update is not cancelled at all. We are merely too tired to continue today. The plan is to sleep for the rest of today and wake up tomorrow refreshed and ready to continue.

There are only a handful of things still left to do. These include tweaks to fish AI especially where breeding is concerned, a handful of small UI changes, a few hours of rigorous testing and fixing problems found and rewriting parts of the in-game help. Essentially it is the final cherry on top parts of the update.

It is always embarrassing to show our failings to the wider world but in the interest of transparency it is far better to keep you all informed about what is happening rather than staying quiet.

The update will go on steam within a very small number of days and then I'll spend most of this coming Friday writing a gigantic news post here that details every change we have made for this update. It is by far the most number of changes we have made in a single update thus far.

Apologies for any and all disappointment this will have caused. We shall make it right.


The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

This week we have managed to get the first version of the breeding features into the game. I dare not try to predict precisely when we will be updating the build but next week we will be in the phase of putting all our changes together and making final tweaks so hypothetically if we were to be successful then next weekend would be the time to upload it for you all to play.

Breeding Timelapse:



This is a timelapse that shows how fish breeding works. Some might say it works too well because we start off with only one male and one female and after a while there is close to one hundred fish in the aquarium. This will be tweaked before we release the next update and for many months afterwards. Each fish species will have their own set of needs that must be satisfied before they are comfortable enough to breed. It will be quite easy to breed guppies and zebra danios for instance but a bit harder to breed the betta fish.

The fish will be able to decide who they partner with. The exact parameters will be different from species to species. It might be quite common that fish may reject other fish based on their health, stress, age etc.

Breeding Timelapse 2:


Here is a slightly more closeup view of the breeding. You can see fry swimming about and the more larger juvenile fish. You might also notice some wacky behaviour from the adults. The mating behaviour is something that will be tweaked endlessly. At the moment they just travel towards each other and stare lovingly into each other's eyes which is very romantic.

There will of course be bubble nests and live births added in the near future but we have to start simple and get more complex over time.


Plumbing System:


Here is a quick look at the plumbing setup for this aquarium. Oxygen, Co2 and nutrients are all being pumped into the water when they detect that levels are too low. This is using the auto-enable feature that we showed last week. There is also only a single passive filter to keep things clean. We will also be adding all the updates to models and textures of plumbing objects in the next build too.


This post can't be too long tonight because there is lots of work to do and not enough hours to do it in.

Feel free to ask questions and I'll try to answer them in detail when I have a spare moment each day.

As usual we wish you all a great weekend,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been another fruitful week. Quite a few important problems have been solved and a few new-ish ideas implemented. We are edging ever closer to our big update to the build. I will stay away from the trap of trying to precisely predict the date of this update but I will say that it looks like the update will be on steam in less and two weeks and one day, probably.


Panda Platy Female:


Panda Platy Male:



These two lovelies are Panda Platies. Platies always seemed to me to be very relaxed and peaceful fish and after a week or two of intense work painting betta fish it feels good to add a fish to the game that is just happy to be there and hang out. Fortunately there are quite a few Platies still left to paint and we are still yet to add Mollies and Swordtails to the game but we hope to have at least two species of each added by the end of the year.


Auto Enabling Powered Devices:



This sped up gif shows a new feature that was added this week. Electrical devices now have the ability to turn themselves off and on again depending on the circumstances of the water chemistry (or if their operating system crashes hehe). In the above example there is a small aquarium with some plants inside that are consuming more Co2 than is coming into the aquarium. This causes Co2 levels to drop and eventually the Co2 will be completely gone and the plants will eventually suffocate.

New Airstone Settings UI:


However the new "Auto Enabling" feature is activated and the airstone checks to see if the current Co2 saturation is below the minimum Co2 saturation threshold. If so tt turns itself on and keeps adding Co2 into the water until it reaches the maximum Co2 saturation threshold at which time it turns itself off.

These thresholds are set by the player for each device that they add into the aquarium that uses this feature so there is a lot of room for fine tuning and experimentation. Setting both thresholds to Zero will cause the device to turn on and stay on indefinitely. This now works with all electrical devices that are currently in the game. That also includes in the plumbing. All the devices that regulate temperature, Co2, oxygen etc all use this feature now. There are some devices that will not use it. Certain devices use a passive or chemical process to modify water chemistry and can't be turned off. Co2 and oxygen scrubbers use a chemical reaction to remove gas from water in the exact same way that Gas masks use activated charcoal to remove harmful chemicals from the air. The only way to turn these off is to remove them from the system.

One of the more striking aspects of the above gif is that it appears as if the aquarium is breathing. These devices are life support after all and we think this features adds another layer of interest and depth to the game that might be overlooked.


Some of you who read last week's post may have been slightly tickled to read that we are going to reveal an upcoming feature that we had previously decided not to add.

The new simulation system works in a slightly more realistic way than the previous iteration. For instance if we put a single filter in an aquarium that is full of waste it will eventually filter out all of that waste. The old system did not do that, it simply reduced the waste by a certain amount and that was that. It was highly deterministic but lacked a sort of intuitive chaos that is inherent in natural systems. the initial version of fishery that was released had a simulation system similar to what we have now but it was all chaos all the time. We have learned a lot in the last year and now we can solve these problems.

The auto enabling feature we just added will allow players to control their aquariums without lots of busy work all the time. It can be a system that is set up and left alone with only minor tweaks needed as new organisms are added. It also allows more experienced players to push the boundaries of what is possible.

The light bulb moment came to us when we were thinking about what the natural equivalent of this artificial life support is. This is because we want players to be able to try and set up an all natural aquariums without any artificial life support if they want to try it. It will also play a big part of a career mode storyline. But what natural mechanism can allow such a thing to occur???

A day and night cycle of course! (this is the teased feature)

Yes it was staring us in the face and was even mentioned by players on the forums many months ago to which I replied "nope". Though in my defense I felt I did not have enough reasons to add a day an night cycle into the game at that time because of game worked. I am also not a fan of just added features to the game just because most other simulation games have it or because it just helps things to be real for the sake of being real. Most of the important features on the game need to have at least a semi-good reason to be there and at this point in development having a day and night cycle solves a lot of problems.

Photosynthesis and respiration. during the day plants breathe Co2 and exhale oxygen while but at night they breathe oxygen and exhale Co2. The Co2 and oxygen levels fluctuate in opposite directions as these cycles progress. This ensures that if left alone and under the right circumstances the Co2 and Oxygen levels will exist in a state of balance over time and never spiral out of control unless there are large changes to the system. These changes in an aquarium could take the form of leaving the light on for too long or suddenly adding many more plants or fish.

Algae can now be simulated in a more interesting and natural way because algae growth is often attributed to having too much light in an aquarium that also has an abundance nutrients.

Fish like to rest at night so that allows us to add more behavioral variety to our fish. Most fish also like to spawn early in the morning at first light. This ties in nicely with the breeding features we are about to add.

Now that we are adding breeding features suddenly the concept of age has some importance and has a use. Fish will have lifespans and grow over time from fry to juvenile to an adult and hopefully die at an old age happy and contented with lots of babies. This also means that players will also be able to track the age of their entire aquarium.

Some fish are nocturnal and are more active at night. Some live so deep in the ocean that there is no sunlight. Yes we are going to add angler fish and other deep sea beasties but players will need an aquarium with very low light in order to keep them happy.


There are a lot of smaller features and interesting game tweaks that will happen as a result of adding a day and night cycle. It is not a particularly difficult feature to add but like every other feature it will start off pretty basic and we will build upon it over the months. The first version will most likely just be a bit of UI that shows the time of day, players have the option to turn the light off and on and there will be changes to fish and plant behaviour. The speed of each day will not be realtime of course. Our initial thoughts is that each day might be around 12 minutes. No doubt there will be lots of discussion and testing until we get it right.

Well this post is getting a little too wordy so more details on exactly how the day/night cycle will work will have to come at a later date and with more visual aids.


As usual we wish you all a very good weekend and thank you all for your continued support of our weird little aquarium game.


The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

This week has gone by very quickly indeed and we have some really nice progress to show and talk about. There is still no new build as of yet but we are making good progress with getting it ready.


Female Zebra Danio:


Male Zebra Danio:



These are Zebra Danios, often called "Zebrafish". They are the first of the Danios that will be added to the game. The longfin variant will be added at some point in the not so distance future. Other Danios will be added much sooner. The fish list on the forums has a nice selection of them to work on. I am quite looking forward to painting the leopard and panther danios. I kept some actual Zebra Danios around 13 years ago and they were quite lovely, friendly little fish. It will be great to add them into our game.



Female Black Neon Tetra:


Male Black Neon Tetra:


These were painted by myself last week. I was getting a bit burnt out with programming as sometimes happens and my brain was screaming for a more artistic task to do. I went through our library of fish photo reference files and picked out the Black Neon Tetra. It took just under a day to paint them both which is quite fast for me because I find painting quite hard, though the aim is not to be as fast as possible.. The day after painting these my brain was artistically satisfied enough that it could solve programming problems without complaining and good AI progress was made.


Female Lavender Plakat Betta:


Male Lavender Plakat Betta:


These Lavender Plakat Bettas are not quite finished yet. A few small paint tweaks are required but they are in a good enough state to give you all a sneaky peak at them.

Female Koi Plakat Betta:


We made the male koi plakat betta a few weeks ago but took a little longer with the female. We showed a rough painted version of her back then but now we can show her in a state of near completion.


This now takes the total count of fish species in the game to 16 but that number of individual fish is close to 30 because the male and female of each species are individually painted and modelled. This not only helps to give more variation to players when adding a lot of a particular species to their aquarium but it is also accurate to real life which helps satisfy those of you who know more about this subject. Judging from the fish list over on the forums there will be hundreds of individual fish added to the game over time. We certainly intend to add as many of them as possible and the goal is to be in a position where we can add two new fish species per week, which amounts to 4 new fish per week. That means over the course of a year we could be adding around 200 individual fish to the game. We are not quite in that position yet but that is certainly our aim.

Next week we should be able to show you all some of the mysterious progress that I keep saying we are making with the next build. Just to tease you all a little bit more, we are putting a feature into the game that we actually said we probably would never put into the game but after a lot of thinking about it I am happy to say we changed our minds and it will be in the game soonish. That is enough teasing for now though.

As usual we wish you all a great weekend and a good start to next week.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been another busy week and we have done much. There is no new build this week but we can give details on something special that will be in the next build.

Generic fry and juvenile:



Ahh yes, the first phase of the breeding features will be in the next update. In the above gif you can see a juvenile fish and a tiny fry. They are meant to look somewhat generic. This is because the first version of breeding that we put into the game will be relatively simple.

What we mean by simple is that all fish that exist in the game now and any new ones we add for a will all breed in the same way and their offspring will look the same until they grow into young adults. The "style" of breeding that all fish will adopt at first is based on how zebrafish breed. The female releases eggs and the male fertilises them soon after. The eggs then hatch around 3 days later and if all goes well these young fry will survive into adulthood so they can have babies too.

Certain requirements will need to be met before the fish are comfortable enough to breed. They must be healthy, not stressed, the population in the aquarium should not be too high etc. Each fish will have their own requirements specific to their species. These requirements will be shown to players in game. Quite often fish eat eggs that have just been released, often by the female who released them, this means that the eggs need to be protected. In the wild the eggs usually fall in between small rocks or into some dense vegetation where larger fish cannot follow. We of course plan to imitate this as best we can in our game so players will be encouraged to use specific types of substrate and have specific species of plants present in their breeding aquarium so when the eggs are released they have a higher chance of survival.

As we develop these features further we will implement more breeding behaviours such as bubble nests, giving birth to live fry etc. We will also be looking into ways that players can separate fry from adults without just deleting adults from the aquarium. Adult fish will only eat fry if they themselves are starving. There are species of fish that will eat fry as soon as they see them. That behaviour wont be added until we have ways to reliably separate them so we don't frustrate players. There are quite a few ways to do this in real life like adding a little box within the aquarium or having large separators that effectively split the aquarium in half. These are being looked into as well as a few more ideas that could be interesting.

So to briefly summarise. Breeding will be in the game a small number of weeks from now. It will be simple at first but all fish currently in the game as well as new ones we add will be able to breed. Over time we will upgrade all the breeding features to accommodate the various ways that fish breed as best we can. That will include updating the fry and juvenile models to look like young versions of the species they belong to but for a while all fry and juveniles will look as they do in the gif at the beginning of this post.

Feel free to ask any questions and I'll try and answer them asap but I will be working on fish AI intensely tonight and over the weekend so I may not reply to questions too often but I will reply to them.


We wish you all a great weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Unfortunately we were not able to get the new build ready this week yet again because the features we are working on are quite big and a lot needs to change to fit them into the game. So to prevent us looking foolish again by saying we will likely have a new build next week; I shall instead say that in a small number of weeks there will be a new build for sure.

Last week we talked mostly about water chemistry and how that is changing. This week we shall talk about how these changes are allowing us to make further progress with fish.

Fish Status Selection UI:


There are a lot more attributes that contribute to the overall status of a fish. the will also contribute to how the fish behaves.

Energy:
This replaces the old attribute of "Food". Calling it energy allows us to use it in different ways. For instance now it makes sense to couple it with what the fish is doing. If the fish is swimming around very frantically then it will use more energy and require food more often. However if it is chilled out and relaxed and taking life easy it will use less energy and requires less food over time.

Oxygen and Co2:
These are not handled that differently. Their sliders show the current saturations of Oxygen and Co2 in the water and shows the saturations of these gases as desired by the fish. If any of these saturations our outside of these ranges then the fish will slowly start to loose health due to suffocation of toxicity.

Disease:
This is an entirely new attribute. Disease will occur in aquariums that are quite unclean. The risk of disease spreading through an aquarium is increased when there are the corpses of dead fish floating about. We are still deciding exactly what diseases the fish can get and how exactly we can show it visually but we can still code disease into the game and get it working before we have decided all of that. Career mode will have entire career paths dedicated to treating diseases as well as understanding their causes.

Injury:
Fish might get attacked by other fish and this will cause injury. This could be the consequences of housing fish together that should not be together. Adding two male betta fish together can only end badly. Severely injured fish that are left untreated will eventually die of these injuries unless players take action to heal them.

There will be a few ways to treat diseases and injuries. They include using medicines that the fish must eat. Adding specific plants into the aquarium that release healing chemicals into the water under the right circumstances. There will also be a few secret ways to do this that we are not going to tell you about.


Stress:
This is a very important thing to consider when keeping fish in real life. It also allows us to trigger behaviour changes in our game fish that we could not do before. For instance each fish species will have a "Stress Response" that it does when it's stress levels are too high. It may hyperventilate, stop eating, over eat, act aggressive towards other fish and more. Fish that are stressed to the max will eventually die of stress but hopefully it wont come to that.

There are a lot of attributes that contribute to stress.

Temperature:
This one is fairly straightforward. If you put a fish used to cold waters into a tropical aquarium it will not like it.

Habitat:
This one is a bit more complicated and may not be turned on in the next update because it will take a bit longer to get right. Essentially some fish like to be surrounded by certain things. Long leaved plants, rocks, sandy substrate etc. If they do not have enough of these things in the aquarium they will get a bit stressed. We don't want to constrict player creativity too much so there will be a lot of careful balancing done by us to this feature. As you can see in the image there will be an entire tab devoted to habitat. Players will be able to see all the habitat requirements of a fish and see how well they are being fulfilled.

Population and Social:
Some fish like to live with lots of other fish and some do not. "Population" refers to the total number of fish in your aquarium while "Social" refers to total number of fish of the same species.

Algae and Waste:
Having a really dense amount of algae in the water will upset some species of fish. Other species that eat algae will have a higher tolerance to it. The same is true for waste. Some fish like really clean water and others can live in water that is a quite dirty.

Salinity:
We are getting close to adding saltwater features to the game we promise.


Fish Info Selection UI: (it is overlapping it's bounds just so we can show you the whole thing in one image)


The second tab of this ui shows the actual number values of what is required to fulfill their needs as well as a few more pieces of information. (but in this image they do not correlate to the values in the status sliders)

We are also going to add detailed information in the in-game help system that explains each need of the fish and how to satisfy it. The days of people being confused by almost everything in the game will hopefully be behind us after we do this update.

All of these new attributes will help us make more interesting AI for the fish and in general create a more interesting atmosphere inside each aquarium from the point of view of fish emotions.

A lot of these changes are a long time coming. A good amount of them are inspired by suggestions and feedback made by people on the forums so we encourage you to keep asking questions and suggesting changes. Even if some of the suggestions may clash with what we have in mind for the game we always read them fully and reflect on their implications.

Yes there is a breeding tab in the new UI that we have shown but we wont be talking about it just yet, stay tuned ;)

Female Koi Plakat Betta. (very rough painting stages)


We have also begun painting the female koi betta fish. This is in the very very early stages of painting but it is already starting to look interesting.

Plumbing Co2 regulator:


Plumbing Oxygen Regulator:


A few finishing touches to the gas regulators but knowing me there will probably be yet more finishing touches to add hehe.

Well it has been a very eventful week. I say this a lot but the game is really coming together the more we work on it. All the new possibilities that will arise out of these updates is very exciting. There will be some more interesting things to show you all next week.

We wish you all a good weekend.


The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,


Tis Friday once again and we have the week's progress to share with you all. There is no update to the build this week due to large changes being made to the code. But I will get to that in a little bit.

Tomorrow will be almost exactly a year since we released Fishery in Early Access and I think there is much to be said about the progress that has been made as well as the progress we hope to make in the next year. After the next build is uploaded (hopefully next week) we will write a about it. It might be a bit of a long post because it has been a busy year but it is important to reflect on such things and keep all of you informed about progress.


Back to this week's progress. First here is a little look at what some of those new pipe pieces can do.

Invalidly Positioned Pipes:


Here we have a situation where we want to overlap two pipes for whatever reason. Usually the reason is just that we are running out of space. This does not work as the pipes are intersecting through each other rather than neatly connecting at their connection points.


Mini S-Pipe:


So we created this small S shaped pipe that allows for players to overlap pipes without causing trouble. Very useful pipe piece indeed.


Tight U-Bend Pipe:


Here we have a situation where we have 3 pipes that are all not attempting to connect to one another but want to go their separate ways. This sort of thing will happen when the space is tight and the devices plugged into the pipes have irregular input and output pipe positions.

One of the more interesting aspects of the plumbing system is that is allows players to use their problem solving abilities in a creative way. The plumbing area is always going to be a little tight depending on the size of aquarium you have chosen and how complex you wish to make it's water chemistry. Hopefully this will encourage lots of experimentation.


Now that we are coming close to adding the functionality necessary for creating marine aquariums. Namely the ability to add salt but we must also take into account some of the more subtle changes that happen to water when it is heated and how this affects aquariums. The oxygen saturation limit of water becomes lower. Carbon Dioxide that is stored in the water is released. That is one reason why carbonated beverages are best served chilled.

In doing research over the past weeks and months into this subject I have gone done several rabbit holes in pursuit of information that can be ever so gently massaged into a form that can fit within our slightly odd aquarium game. Naturally we have had to modify how the water chemistry simulates and completely change how information is shown to players.

New Rollover UIs for Inspect Mode:


These are not entirely different to what they are like in the current build of the game but the aim is to show simple numbers and use standard measurement symbols where it makes sense.

You might notice in the UIs for Oxygen and CO2 that there are sections for "surface agitation rate". This is a new feature we are adding into the game which mimics a real life process. Surface Agitation refers to the process of the water's surface being disturbed in some way causing movement and breaking it's surface tension. This allows for whats known as "gas exchange" to occur. Oxygen from the atmosphere is absorbed into the water and causes the release of carbon dioxide from the water. We are not sure entirely how much the player should be able to increase or decrease surface agitation via the use of airstones and other devices but it is something that will be worked on and tested.

You might notice some standard units of measurement. Watts for power and degrees Celsius for temperature, we shall be adding degrees Fahrenheit for those whose want it, There will also be units of measurements for the size of aquariums and their water volumes. CM, Inches, Litres and US Gallons. We were a bit hesitant to add them into the game thus far because they don't make sense in the context of the code for reasons I wont go into here but if it helps players get a sense of scale and intuition about things then we are happy to add them now.

All the code that deals with water chemistry is being looked at and modified to accommodate new features and changes to existing ones.

Changes To Other UI:


Since we are making changes to UI we finally did some much needed modification to the shop/inventory ui. It took too many clicks before the desired items would display in the scroll list and now that has drastically been reduced. Sub-categories will be added when there are more items to choose from and they will be displayed as icons on the right hand side of this menu and correspond to the selected category on the left.


There are even more changes being made to the simulation system then will also feed into the fish ai and plant systems. Not to mention even more general UI changes but a lot more of that can be shown next week when hopefully we can release a new build. I shall be working on it for a good 6 hours on Saturday to squeeze in a bit more progress. I'll also try and find more time over the weekend to update the lists on the forums.

As usual we wish you all a good weekend

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

There is no update to the build this week but we have some nice progress to show you.

A lot of time was spent working on things related to the plumbing system. We have started making new items as well as updating older ones. The models are finished but the texture maps are in the early stages of painting.


Oxygen Regulator:


Co2 Regulator:


These are the new gas regulators; Oxygen and CO2. Unlike the air-stones already in the game they do not require electricity to work and they are capable of adding much more gas into the water.


Algae Reactor:


This is a redesign of device already in the game. The algae reactor uses macro-algae to consume CO2 and nutrients from the water and produce oxygen. The design currently in the game is not that interesting to look at and has been on the plumbing to-do list for a while.


Nutrients Injector New Mode:


Paint Blocking In Stage:


Another item that was in need of a slight redesign was the nutrient injector. This allows for the precise release of nutrients into the water without the need for players to use fertilizer balls, although those will still be in the game.


New Pipe Parts:


Three new pipe parts will be in the next update too. These will enable players to make better use of space in the plumbing area. For really complex aquarium setups players will need to balance the natural and artificial parts of their ecosystems. In terms of plumbing this will put a greater need for players to efficiently use the space in the plumbing area and come up with ever more creative ways to connect their plumbing networks together. There will be more detailed examples in the upcoming weeks that show how these new parts can be used in-game.


There are still more plumbing items yet to be designed. For instance there is a whole range of filters not just for waste but for filtering out gases and algae. There are some redesigns due for the water heater and some completely new devices that regulate the salt content which will allow for new types of fish, plants, coral etc.

On top of all that there are still changes being made to the fish ai, overall simulation balancing, ui and much writing, planning and designing for career mode features. As always there is so much to do and not enough hours to do it in but we shall keep chipping away at this mountain of work.

We hope you all have a good weekend.

The Fishery Team