Hello everyone,

It has been quite a good week indeed and we have uploaded a new build of the game. Build 41.

We have been focused quite heavily on art content this week as we were last week.

Updates to plant shaders:


The little programs that tell the graphics card how to draw plants have been updated. These plant shaders have been vastly simplified which should result in them rendering faster. They also use less GPU memory which is very nice as well. As you might be able to see from the above gif we have made changes to the underwater "wind" movement. This is going to be tweaked quite a lot in the near future because each plant requires slightly different settings to get the movement to look nice. The new algae and waste textures also appear on plants now.

Black Sand Substrate:


White Sand Substrate:


It has been a while since we have added some new substrate materials. These two have been on the to-do list for quite some time. We have also modified the "default" sand substrate to look a little nicer and the shader for sand substrate has been modified to have those tiny reflective glittery specs that you sometimes see in sand. This hopefully will make things just that little bit more charming.

Sponge filter progress:


The lovably ugly sponge filters have been painted. These will be in next weeks update once I have written the new code for how they work. The code for waste filters is being updated specifically for these items but more details shall be revealed next week. It will also affect how waste filters work in the plumbing area too. At some point we will also add different coloured sponges.

Triceratops Skull Model:



I have been working on this skull in the evenings for about half an hour at a time for a while now and this week I decided to finish it off and it is on the list of things to be painted. We already have a Tyrannosaurus skull in the game but I feel like it is getting a bit lonely. That Tyrannosaurus skull will need a bit of an artistic rework in the near future because it is starting to look a little dated. We will certainly be adding more fossilised bones to the game because they are so fun to make and to look at.

Auto Mode Help:


A new entry has been added to the in game help. It does it's best to simply explain what the auto mode for powered items is but I foresee changes to it's text over time.

There have also been a lot of tiny tweaks here and there to various different parts of the game. Small reduction in memory use for every dissolvable item that uses particles. Separating the gold used for the treasure chest into it's own gold shader rather than having a complex combined shader. Turning off shadow casting for small plants like glosso and flame moss to reduce rendering times. Really small or thin objects have no business casting shadows because shadow rendering really does slow things down and I feel like the performance cost is not worth it. They do of course still receive shadows and their shadow casting might be turned back on in the future once I am more happy with shadows in general.

Progress has been made with painting the new fish. Unfortunately I cannot show it here because we are painting the surprise fish first so we are sure it will actually be in the game when we said it would be. Otherwise we just look silly. But you can expect to see painting progress with both puffer fish next week if everything goes well.

Also for next week's update.... Sea shells! and more.

Busy times indeed. As usual we wish you all a very good weekend.

The Fishery Team.

Hello everyone,

A new build has been uploaded. There were not a lot of super fancy modifications done to it this week. The usual batch of non critical bug fixes and some small quality of life changes to powered items.



Part of this UI was reorganised to make things less confusing. Instead of the slider being attached to the power attribute it has been separated into it's own strength attribute and the power usage and in this case the Oxygen output update as they did before but now things are more neat.

Auto mode is now optional. There is a checkbox to toggle it. By default auto mode is turned off which means the device is turned on all the time as long as there is enough power. But when Auto mode is enabled the min and max thresholds are preset to something useful depending on the function of the item. For instance this air stone is outputting Oxygen so we have made the min and max thresholds correspond to what would be useful to keep fish happy. The same is done for Co2, in which case the thresholds are set to keep plants happy and not be toxic to fish. The same changes apply to all powered plumbing items too.

Additions to ingame help:


A larger batch of help subjects have been added. All the main water chemistry components now have some explanation. Algae, Co2, Oxygen, Nutrients, Power, Salinity, Temperature and Waste. The purpose of these texts is to give players some instruction as to what use each component has in an aquarium. They refer to some of the important quantities that players need to know about. For instance in this example it mentions that when nutrients levels get to around 85% there is a high chance that Algae will start to grow. It is not meant to be a tutorial but we want it to function as a reference guide that players can refer to when they need to know something. It will eventually cover pretty much everything in the game. We will keep adding to it every week.

The main reason why the changes to the build are a little light this week is because we have been hard at work on making lots of new content.

Red Terror Cichlid:



Finally we are replacing the googly eyed red terror cichlid with something that resembles the current version of the game's art style. This one is the male variant of the model. The females are not too different in terms of model shape except there are differences in the length of their dorsal and anal fins. Their sizes are quite different also. For sure there will be a lot of last minute tweaking to be done before it goes into painting.

Red Terror Cichlid Silhouette:


The most important aspect for making 3d models or any kind of sculpture in general is the silhouette. Hopefully anyone who knows anything about cichlids would recognise this as some kind of cichlid after viewing it for half a second. In a game where there will be so many fish species added it is very important to make each type of fish distinctive in this way.

Amazon Puffer:



Ah yes the lovely little Colomesus Asellus otherwise known as the Amazon puffer. This was promised to someone on the forums and one must try to keep ones promises. Apparently it is quite difficult to determine the sex of these puffer fish so we will only add some subtle differences to the male and female models but most differences will be in the paint job.

Hawaiian Whitespotted Toby:



Another puffer fish. Canthigaster Jactator, commonly called the Hawaiian Whitespotted Toby, is a marine puffer fish. We don't really have any marine fish in the game yet and this gorgeous fish had to be modelled once I saw it.

You may have noticed there are no pictures of our puffers all puffed up. When we add them to the game they will most likely have that ability. You might have noticed in recent updates to the game that each fish has a stress response detailed in their info. The actual code for stress responses is still being worked on and the stress response for puffer fish is to inflate themselves. We will try our best to get that into the game this month with all the content we are working on but if we don't get it into the game this month then it will be added in January for sure.

The special fish I teased you all with last week has been modelled also but I cannot say anymore about it.

Sponge Filters:


Yes, Sponge filters. These were items that I said I did not want to put into the game because they are ugly but after more research and a lot of thinking about it I am warming to them. They will also play a important role in the game when we add story mode and players are concerned about the budget of their aquariums. Sponge filters are relatively cheap but useful and anyone who gets into keeping aquariums usually has some experience with them so I thought why not. Their size relative to each other will change somewhat. They will be scaled to better represent small, medium and large.

There are going to be some very interesting things revealed next week so be sure to come back and check that out.

We hope you all have a great weekend,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been a very productive week indeed and we have uploaded a new build!



A new fish behaviour has been added. "Algae Nibble". Someone on the forums earlier in the week spoke about the need to keep algae under control so we added a dissolvable tablet into the game that reduces algae chemically. But that is slightly boring and crude way to reduce algae so we also added the ability for all fish to eat algae off of the substrate and decorations. Not all fish in real life do eat algae of course but we will turn off this behaviour for the Betta fish and a few others when we add some more carnivore specific behaviours into the game. The gif is very brief but you should be able to see the little fellow take a little bite. This is still only the first version of this behaviour so expect any imperfections that you see to go away over time. A small entry has been made in the in-game help for algae also.



Finally we got around to re-organising the options screen. There are quite a few options we are going to be adding in the near future which required more space to be free in the UI to fit it all. You should be able to see in the above image that we have added the options to switch between centimetres and inches, litres and gallons, Celsius and fahrenheit. Yes I have just noticed that Celsius is spelt wrong in the ui. Well done us.




We have also added the dimensions and volumes of the current aquarium to the main stats ui. Some of you may have noticed in the recent updates that medicine, tablets and fish population requirements take into account the volume of the aquarium they are to be placed into. For instance the Rummy nose tetra likes a population of around 22 fish per 16 gallons. So if you have a 32 gallon aquarium then you can expect that these fish will like no more than 44 fish in that aquarium before they become socially uncomfortable. For players to make quick calculations about these sorts of things they need to see how big their aquarium is.

there have also been quite a few small bug fixes and tweaks. From a UI displaying an incorrect value to fish energy going beyond 100% after they eat. Small things that don't crash the game but make things feel even more early access that we would like it to. We also fixed an annoying UI bug that an eagle eyed player pointed out to us on the forums.



We got sick and tired of that old loading screen and replaced it with a nice new one. We also updated the whole steam page with a new images, text, trailer etc. It has been over a year since we actually updated the steam page. That means most people who see the steam page for the first time think all the fish have googly eyes and have no idea that there is a plumbing system and more than 5 fish in total. Updating this is not really important to anyone who has already purchased the game of course but it is good to freshen up everything every once in a while.

It also reminds us how much faith has been put into us by players who saw that old steam page and judged it was worthy of their time and money. That is certainly something we won't forget and the best thing we can do is keep working on the game until it is as perfect as we can make it.

December is going to be a busy month. We have those new puffer fish to add as well as replace the last of the googly eyed fish, the red terror cichlid. There is also a special fish that we want to add for Christmas time but I shall say no more about it until we add it. There are also some new backdrops finally coming into the game. New plants, new decorations. December is content month for sure.

We shall see you all next week with a nice shiny new build.

Have a great weekend,

The Fishery Team

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