Hello everyone,

It is finally the end of a very tricky week and a new build uploaded to steam. Build 43 has some new fish and a lot of modifications done to fish animation in general.

Amazon Puffer:


Hawaiian Whitestopped Toby:


The gif quality is not great but hopefully that will give you a sense of what they are like. Getting the game ready to add these fish has been the big challenge for the last few weeks. This is mostly because they required a few things to be done differently. They don't undulate their bodies like most other fish in order to propel themselves through the water but only use their smaller fins to do so. This is a problem for us because suddenly there are less interesting things happening with their animation and they look like odd little puppets floating through the water. For these fish we need to make their actual movement through the water from the point of view of position and rotation more interesting which is what we will work on next.

This is somewhat disappointing because I had hoped we would get their animation a little further along than it is right now but due to time and I dare say a bit of tiredness we were not able to do so. To add to that disappointment we were also not able to get the inflating behaviour into the game either so it is a double disappointment.

On the bright side though we have completely overhauled the fish animation and locomotion systems and improved all the current fish behaviours in the game. All fish should have more fluidity in their movements and there is now independent control over their pectoral and body swim motions. Breeding animations are now more interesting. The partners swim around each other in a more interesting way rather than just headbutt each other. It is not final but it is a good next step for it.

Once we have added the inflating behaviour for puffer fish it will be triggered as a result of the fish becoming too stressed. All fish species will have their own stress behaviours. Some fish will act aggressively and attack other nearby fish while other fish might simply stop eating. Other fish might start comfort eating and begin eating every piece of food that it can find in the aquarium.

There will also be "health behaviours" which will be triggered when conditions are such that their life could be in danger. For instance a lack of oxygen in aquariums will leave the fish gasping for air near the surface. Lack of energy as a result of not being fed enough will lead to slow, lumbering movement.

There are also further improvements that are going to be added to existing behaviours. One important aspect that is missing is the different levels of the aquarium that fish prefer to swim at. For instance guppies swim more towards the top level of the of the aquarium and fish like Platies, tiger barbs and neon tetras tend to swim around the middle. Other fish like Corydoras prefer to swim around the bottom because that is where they get a lot of their food. At the moment all fish just swim about anywhere and it makes them all look like they have the same brain but that will change soon.

Other behaviours that are being worked on are different types of shoaling behaviours, more interesting rest behaviours, territorial behaviours, playfulness, fear, loneliness and more.

We will have a little bit of a break next week. The work days won't be as long but there will still be a development update post on Friday and there may also be a new build uploaded so keep an eye out for that. We will still be working on some new art content as well as some new fish behaviours that have been mentioned above so we will certainly have something interesting to share.

We wish you all a relaxed and restful weekend.

The Fishery Team.

Hello everyone,

A new build has been uploaded. build 42 contains a nice chunk of new art content including our Christmas mystery fish. Which is not particularly Christmassy but its a fish that a lot of people always ask about even if they know nothing about aquariums. The Clownfish.

Clownfish Female:


Clownfish Male:


The Ocellaris Clownfish is a fish on the short list of fish that you must have in an aquarium game. Sort of like having a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a dinosaur game. The Tyrannosaurus Is in many ways synonymous with the word Dinosaur for a lot of people. The same seems to be true that the Clownfish is synonymous with pet fish or aquariums thanks in no small part to Pixar I am sure.

A quick update on the puffer fish. They will be in the game next week. They are about 80% painted and we are working on how their animation will work. Puffer fish do not use the motion of their spine and tail to propel themselves through the water but instead use two pairs of smaller fins to swim around. They are sort of like underwater humming birds. This means that there needs to be a rethink about how we animate our fish via code and make the appropriate changes.

We have also been making substantial changes to how non puffer fish are animated. You might notice some of these changes in this build. There is a lot more movement in the Pectoral fins (Arm fins). The body motion is a bit more fluid and based on fish skeletal mechanics. There is still much work to be done next week on fish animation so if it looks a little strange for some fish just know that hopefully most of that will be fixed in a week or so.

We added a whole load of sea shell decorations too.


Limpet, Turret, scallop, oyster, asian clam, Nautilus shells have been added. Most of which have more than one variation which all together total at 17 shells. We also added a coconut which is the first of 5 coconut model variations to be added and we added 5 new bogwoods. the above image is a little sneaky peak. We encourage you all to check them out in the game for real and get creative with them.

We were not able to get the sponge filters ready this week like we had aimed to do and next week we will be focused almost entirely on puffer fish and fish animation so sponge filters will have to come in very early January along with a new backdrop and a few other loose ends that we have promised.

It has been a good week indeed and we look forward to next week. We wish you all a good weekend.

The Fishery Team.

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