Hello everyone,

It has been another week of painting once again.

Red Neon Dwarf Gouramis:
Female:


Male:


Players have been requesting this fish species for quite some time and finally we are putting it into the game. There is still some work to be done on it. The shiny scale map that reveals itself as the camera moves needs more variations in the colouring and it needs to be more intense on the fins and of course the usual list on endless tweaks needs to be done for the rest of the paint job. This is just the first variety we are going to paint. At some point in the near future we will paint the Neon Blue variety and so on.

Red Pigeon Discus Male (work in progress):


The most complex discus patterning we have painted so far. My colleague is able to paint the more complicated fish much faster than I paint the less complicated ones which is useful because goodness knows how long this would take me to paint this one. If all goes to plan this and the female version will be painted this week.

Freeze Dried Beef Heart:


Fresh Beef Heart:


I was fascinated to read that discus breeders highly recommend feeding beef heart to their fish. From what I have read online generally it is prepared at home and there are even recipes that include spinach and garlic. Naturally once I read this I knew we have to include it in the game. There are two varieties, "Freeze Dried" and "Fresh". I am also thinking that the freeze dried variety should float while the fresh variety should sink. Perhaps this is not realistically correct but I feel it is important us to make items that are similar to each other as distinct as possible where it makes sense.


It is in fact the end of the month and still no update to the build. As usual we have gotten too excited and cannot stop painting things when we are on a roll. This coming week while my colleague continues to paint I will spend time putting together and testing the new build for Friday the 7th of may. It will include as much of the finished content that I can jam into it. This will include all the discus fish, food items and the nudge feature. There will also be some tweaks to the maths behind the water chemistry because all too often it descends into chaos. Paradoxically this is somewhat correct or even desired because it is a non linear chaotic system but it makes the game more stressful and unwieldy so one must massage the numbers to be a bit more forgiving.
The new breeding features and other promised quality of life changes will most likely come in the week afterwards and so on if they can't be squeezed into this week.

Time for some relaxation coding. We wish you all a good Sunday.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

This week we have been consumed entirely with painting new fishy art content for the game so I'll just dive right into it by discussing some discus.

Based on a Yellow Marlboro Discus:
Female:


Male:


These are about 93% done. We still have to paint the texture map that hints at some scale detail that shimmers as the fish swims and catches the light just right as well as all the infinite small tweaks we always do before we call something "finished". One of them will also have some hints of pattern variation like a dark-ish stripe on the fringes of a fin and some variations in colour and/or some patterning on the body and/or face.


Based on a Blue Diamond Discus:
Female:


Male:


This was shown last week is a rougher state. More detail has been painted and things feel a bit more balanced as well as painting the male version. A finishing touch for one of these will include some faint patterning on the face and body.


Based on a Red Leopard Discus, work in progress:
Male:


The patterning of discus fish can be as complex as it is distinct. It is impossible to capture every permutation of discus patterning for our game but we will do our best. I dare say that we will end up with around 20 varieties of discus in the game when it is all done which will be a combination of all the well known and some lesser known patterns and colour configurations.


Mealworm:


The model we showed last week of this fellow has now been painted in all it's insect glory. The plan is to have this be alive and wriggling when players drop it into the aquarium but the first version of this animation will probably be a little rough but it will get better over time like everything else in the game.


This coming week will probably be mostly dedicated to painting fish as well. After some final touches are put on these discus fish we will move on to paint the Angelfish and Dwarf Gouramis. There will also be some work done on the coding side of things so we can get the next build out to you all soon.

As usual we are a little behind with everything we have planned for the next update. We still have to work on the new breeding features and a good amount of quality of life changes to certain ui panels and other things. As usual though if we cannot get everything into an update that we planned to we will just add it in the following week.

We shall now give our eyes a little rest for the remaining hours of Sunday. I'll spend a few hours early in the morning on Monday replying to forum posts. There has been some nice suggestions made to the lists we have in the forums. I do read every single suggestion soon after they appear but I don't always reply or add them to the list immediately because we need to research each suggestion and then discuss and decide if in fact we think we can add it to the game.

We wish you all a pleasant Sunday.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been a very busy week once again and no new build as of yet but it is coming closer. We made a lot of progress in a few different areas this week.


Discus fish painting work in progress:


This is the first female discus fish to be painted. Whenever we paint a new type of fish quite often we spend time trying out techniques so we have a better understanding of the visual language of a fish. For instance the clown fish requires different techniques in brush work and use of gradations of colour than would be used when painting a betta fish or a guppy. For this particular discus which is based on a Blue diamond variety it looks like we will have to paint two different colour maps. one with deeper more saturated blues and another with brighter slightly turquoise blues and they are blended based on the angle of fish's surface relative to the camera. Sort of like what you get with butterfly wings where if viewed from the right angle they have this sort of metallic brilliance to them.
Then of course we have to deal with adding some fish scale details. We knew these would be tricky customers indeed but actually the hardest part about painting this particular fish is finding the right blue colours. If you do an image search for "blue diamond discus" you will find that it is really hard to find exactly the same set of blue tones from image to image. This is important for us because we put together a colour palette for each fish and we want to try and get the true set of perfect blue tones for this variety but if all images show different blues then we have a hard time deciding what is the true blue colours of the blue diamond discus.

Mealworm:



The next food item we are working on is the mealworm. There is also a slightly sneaky agenda we have with adding this fellow. It allows us to prototype some of the kinds of animation techniques we hope to use for shrimps in the future. Specifically getting some interesting leg movement using only shader maths. We cannot use traditional skeleton based animation techniques because it takes a lot of processing per creature. We want players to have hundreds of shrimp or crabs scurrying about so we have to do things the hard way and the mealworm is the perfect vessel to try out these techniques over time.

Floaty plants:



Our first floating plants have been added to the game. The colours look a little radioactive at the moment and will be graded to look more natural this week. This is water lettuce and it is dropped into the aquarium where it floats about and makes the water's surface look more interesting. It's leaves are out of the water so it will not consume any Co2 from or add Oxygen to the water. All it consumes is Nutrients from the water. This is useful because players can reduce excess nutrients in the water so that algae levels can be controlled naturally.

The Nudge Tool:


Floating plants cannot be manipulated in the same way as other plants in the game because they rely on physics calculations to give them buoyancy to make it look like they are actually floating on the surface of water. Our solution which is quite well timed is to introduce the nudge tool. I say that it is a well timed solution because this tool was suggested by players who want to be able to move fish if they get stuck while navigating.

Fish Harassment:


You can see here that it is now possible to confuse the heck out of your fish by telekinetically moving them through the water. It is a short term fix for their navigation problems but It also has other uses.

Food Presentation:


Other physics objects like food sometimes fall into hard to reach places and fish cannot get to them. Well not anymore because players can now drag food into a neat little pile if they so wish.


Debug Menu Additions:


The next thing to be added to the debug menu is the ability to turn of the pre selection UI. When you move your mouse over any interactable object in your aquarium a little UI panel appears that says it's name and some other information. Now it can be turned off. It is especially nice to turn off when using the new nudge tool as you can see in the gifs.


Well that is it for this week. It has been quite busy with a few different areas of the game being worked on. This coming week we intend to focus on fish painting entirely so we should have some finished discus to show you all. Hopefully we will have two pairs of varieties to show you which will amount to four uniquely painted fish and the painted mealworm and perhaps even get started with an angelfish. We will do our best.

We wish you all a relaxed Sunday.

The Fishery Team.

Hello everyone,

As predicted there is no update to the build this week because we have been painting non stop and consequently this post will be somewhat shorter.

Oscar Fish Male, work in progress:


Oscar Fish Female, work in progress:


Good progress has been made with our pair of Oscars. They are not finished just yet. Some time this month before our update they will be revisited and finished with fresh eyes. At the moment the orange patterning looks a little like both fish were attacked by a jar of marmalade, their skin feels a little too smooth to my eyes and the black patterning on the male could be more widespread.

Fly:



This is one of the next food items that will be added. Insects are a plentiful source of nourishment to fish in the wild and much more interesting to look at. The fly will look a lot more dead when we add it to the game and It will come in 3 slightly comical death poses. This is probably the closest players will ever get to it because they are quite small but we added enough detail in the model and painting that from a distance it is recognisable as a fly. We painted it at a resolution of 1024x1024 but it will probably be scaled down to something like 256x256 or less when it is in the game.

More interesting foods are in the works and of course more fish will be painted in the coming week. I am still a little too intimidated to paint the boesemani rainbowfish so I will probably paint the discus fish instead. There are also more decorations being worked on. We are certainly bored of looking at the same rocks all the time and hopefully we will have something nice to show you in the coming weeks. We are also almost ready to show you all the first floating plants to be added to the game. If all goes to plan we can show that next week. Until then we wish you all a very good Saturday.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 53 has been uploaded. It includes some really nice quality of life improvements and fixes. But before we talk about that:

Dwarf Gourami Pair:



Our Dwarf Gourami pair has been modelled and is ready for painting. We are glad to be adding these into the game soon as they are another popular request from players.

We have a nice pile of newly modelled fish that we have been making over the past few weeks and now the time has come to paint them all. Our aim is to have them all painted and added into the game by the end of the month. We will be showing our progress at the end of the week as always.

Debug Menu:



This is another requested feature. A menu for controlling sandbox parameters and other options. It only have 1 option at the moment but much more will be coming soon. The option that is included this week is a visualiser that we find useful when debugging fish movement. It creates a trail behind every fish so we can see where the fish have been swimming for the previous 16 seconds. We find it quite mesmerizing and even though it does not really have much use in terms of gameplay it perhaps brings an extra layer of interest for players.



It is especially useful for us when we debug fish movement through tricky or confined places. The shape of the lines help us to see if the fish navigates cleanly between obstacles or just whacks into them. Other options we will be adding will be the usual sort of sandbox options. For instance players will be able to turn off fish getting stressed or dying. Fish wont care about the oxygen levels, plants wont care about Co2 levels etc.

This should hopefully prevent some frustration felt by players who just want to create something nice but not have to worry about balancing all the water chemistry at the same time. It also should prevent some frustration caused by us not tweaking the numbers to their optimum values just yet. If fish get too hungry too fast then players will be able to turn off fish hunger so they can continue to play the game instead of turning it off in frustration. We will aim to add a few new options every time we make a new build.

Quality of life changes were made to some fish behaviour options. Semi-aggress and aggressive fish will not gobble up every fry in sight. They will only eat them when their hunger dips below 50% and there are no other food sources in the aquarium. This is a temporary change until we have ways for players to separate fry from the adults.

Tweaks were made to how fish navigate so they don't get stuck so often and then starve to death in confusion. Their obstacle avoidance abilities should also work better than before.

Pre-selection UIs have been made more clear and have been updated to match the selection UI style.


Some of the changes that we plan to do this month are quite large so we cannot guarantee that we can upload a new build every week but we will of course be posting our progress every week so everyone is kept up to date with what is coming. Some of the more interesting changes that we are aiming to add are:

- The ability for some fish to give birth to live fry.

- Fish predation V2, it wont just be fry that can be eaten whole but larger fish will be able to swallow smaller adult or juvenile fish in one gulp.

- Floating plants,

- More food choices for carnivorous and insectivorous fish.


As usual we wish you all a lovely weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 52 will be uploaded in a few hours. It has been a busy-ish week. Time has been spent all over different parts of the game. Making new models for fish, plants and hardscape items. 3 new music tracks have been added. A lot of tweaks to the underlying simulation numbers have been made and of course more UI changes.


Freshwater Angelfish (Pterophyllum Scalare):



Our first Angelfish pair has been modelled and is ready for painting. This is a much requested fish. We will of course be adding various varieties of marine angelfish in the not too distant future too. When we actually add these freshwater ones into the game we will try to have two colour variations per pair which means 4 distinct fish added all at once.

Food population UI:


A new UI panel has been added that shows information about the food that has been dropped into the aquarium and also gives some nice information about the perils of over feeding. This UI will be updated in the coming weeks to show all the different diet types of the food currently in your aquarium. Soon we will add some carnivorous and insectivorous food to the game and that is when we will update this UI.

A lot of time has been spent tweaking various numbers in the game:


This is a look at some of the values that govern the metabolism of plants. If we take a look at the variable called "s_co2_in". This is the number that governs how much Co2 is consumed by a plant per second. It is multiplied an approximation of the mass of the plant in question. e.g if the plant was made up of around a cubic inch of plant matter then you multiply s_co2_in by 1 during the update. Players can scale plants to whatever size they want and that will increase the Co2 consumption.

The actual value that the mass is multiplied by, which is the part to the right of the equals character, is a very small number that is computed by dividing the maximum co2 capacity of the smallest aquarium by the length of a day in seconds and then dividing that number by 1200. This gets us a very small number. Somewhere around 0.01. Which means every second every plant will consume 0.01 co2 multiplied by it's approximate mass. Then of course all the other values are doing their things as well.

It is slightly complicated to test because we have to test it with different numbers of plants in different sizes of aquariums. We ask ourselves questions like "How long should it take for an aquarium full plants to consume all the nutrients in the water?" We read lots of information about keeping planted aquariums and aquascapes that have a huge amount of plant life and sometimes the maintenance involves adding fertilizer every 4 days. Some even recommend adding a small amount every day. We have to take all that information and try to distil it into something that is interesting for players to do without being frustrating. Though I think at the moment it is mostly frustrating and it is hard to get right but we will get it right eventually.

Hopefully anyone playing this week's update should see a difference in how the numbers change in their aquarium. All the numbers except for the algae calculations have been modified. Algae is whole different beast that will be tackled in due course. These changes have been made to make things not happen so fast. Fish don't deplete their energy as quick and plants don't require as much resources to live. For sure this is not the last time we tweak these numbers at all.


Next week I will model the first pair of Gouramis, add more help text into the game as well as tweak many more numbers and add even more UI that will show more meaningful data to players.

Busy times ahead. April is going to be a content heavy month but more on that next week. As usual we wish everyone a happy Friday and lovely weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 51 is ready and will be uploaded to steam in the next few hours.

Boeseman's Rainbowfish (model version 2):



Some very nice progress was made this week. Our Boeseman's Rainbowfish was modelled around a year ago but we became too intimidated to paint it because they have a very tricky scale pattern and subtle colour changes.

That turned out to be a good thing because upon opening the model file this week I saw that it was in need of a partial remodel. A year ago we were a lot more conservative with the polygon count but since then we have been able to squeeze more performance out of how the fish are animated and can now use more polygons per model. Now it is ready for painting (again) and we hope to get this lovely game into the game soon.

More modifications to UI:


Once again we spent a good deal of time tweaking a lot of UI panels to show more meaningful data to players. The fish population panel shown above now includes data that shows specifically how your population of fish impact the aquarium's water chemistry. Showing the total amounts of resources they consume or produce per second.

Plant Population panel:


We made a new panel which shows a similar breakdown for all your plants and allows you to see what the respiration requirements for plants are so you can be sure to have an idea of what will happen before you turn out the lights. We are probably also going to try and work out some sort of capacity utilization data for plants but we are still playing around with the optimal numbers to compute this.

Changes were also made to how food waste was calculated. It is now calculated based on the volume of food present in the aquarium much the same way that oxygen production is now computed based off of the volume of plant life. There will also be a new ui panel added next week that shows the food "population" which will detail the overall amount of waste produced by food.

More of these "population" panels will be added for every object type so that players can find the causes of imbalances in their ecosystems faster without feeling confused.

Inventory Info UI changes:


We also made even more tweaks the little panels that appear when you hover your mouse over inventory icons. Now certain fields will show up in red if your aquarium does not have the correct conditions for that item.



Several players expressed difficulties about not knowing whether they aquarium is in the right condition to add plants or fish. They instead had to add them to the aquarium and then see if the plant or fish is happy or not. This is clearly not good enough on our part so a lot of effort has gone into and will continue to go into showing all the data to players to they know ahead of time if they will have problems. The reddening of text is also present in the selection UI panels too.


It even works for items that require power such as air stones and sponge filters.


What we plan to work on next week:
There is a lot more plumbing related ui to be worked on so players are more clear about what each plumbing device does and how well it is functioning and of course show an overview of how much the water chemistry is modified by plumbing devices along with all the other population panels.

More fish models! I have a bit of an urge to model an angelfish so expect to see that next week. If any of you are wondering when we will paint all these new models the answer is fairly soon. We want to do large-ish content update soon which will include all these fish. Painting these fish is very hard and tires us out when we switch from painting to modelling, modelling to painting. So we are experimenting with batching similar tasks together to see if that helps prevent our brains getting tired.

There is also some new music tracks that will be added next week!



Medication has been temporarily turned off in the game. There is no mechanism in the game to make use of it just yet and we are in the process of re-thinking how fish health and healing and medication will work as part of the career mode features we are working on.

Lots to do and think about. We are happy to get this update out on time this week which means we can give our eyes a rest on the weekend. We hope you all have a good and restful weekend too.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Another slightly delayed post. It has been a very busy week as you all shall read. Nothing is going badly at all. Quite to the contrary things are going very well. We think we have solved a lot of quirks that the game has and are working to un-quirk them so the game feels right for more players. But more on that in a little bit. There is no new update to the build just yet. I want to do some more testing with my colleague before we upload it which will probably be some time tomorrow (Monday the 15th). It is certainly disappointing to anyone who has been waiting for an update this past week but hopefully once you have seen what we have done it will take the edge off of the disappointment.

Discus Fish:



These lovely beauties will be making their way into the game soon along with that Oscar fish we showed last week. Discus fish are highly requested and we made a promise to put them into the game in the first half of the year. We are going to paint around 3 colour variations at first and then put them all into the game in one update. To be clear that is actually 6 separate painted textures because we paint the males and females to be different from each other but be within that particular colour variation type so things are less repetitive in many dimensions. This should be great because then players will be able to make lovely discus only aquariums that are nice and colourful.

This next part will begin with questions:


In our game which group of plants produces more oxygen while consuming more Co2 and Nutrients?

If you had thought the ones on the left... you would be wrong. If you had thought the ones on the right... you would be wrong. They in fact produce the exact same amount of oxygen and consume the exact same amount of Co2 and Nutrients.



In our game which group of fish do you think consumes more oxygen and produces more waste?

You probably know where this is going but if you thought the single big fish on the right produces more waste and consumes more oxygen you would be very wrong. The small group of fish on the left consume 5 times more oxygen and produce 5 times more waste which it totally wrong.

Now we shall have a slightly one sided discussion about assumptions and intuition. Most people (except for me apparently) have a mental model of how things should work. Most people seeing the images above without even playing the game would assume that a larger mass of plant matter produces more oxygen and a larger mass of fish matter produces more waste etc.

The silly programmer living inside my head sees every object as a single simple entity that consists of the same numbers but ignores the overall visual appearance especially when players can change the physical appearance in the case of the plants. Players can change plant scale and it felt wrong to change the plant metabolism based on an arbitrary modification to scale. It might in fact confuse players. I could not have been more wrong because I think most people have that intuition about nature. More plant matter equals more oxygen and so on.

Realising that my mistakes were many I moved swiftly to make things right. Plant metabolism is now calculated based on the volume of the plant. That is to say that the larger the plant is the more oxygen it produces and the more Co2 and Nutrients it consumes.



Changes of a similar nature are being done to the fish. Computing fish metabolism based on the volume of fish matter in the aquarium also allows us to compute what the correct population limits should be. If you were to search about how best to house fish from the point of view of aquarium size quite soon you will find the phrase "1 inch of fish should equal 1 gallon of water". We have taken that literally in regards to computing how well stocked an aquarium is.



In the spirit of making things even more clear for players we have reduced the amount of numbers on display throughout the game. Only the most meaningful data is on display and we have added small explanations and tips where it makes sense. This also means we can remove things from the help screen because it's information is on display next to the numbers that it is meant to explain.



This displays information that is universal to all things of a similar nature in the game. This should remove any worry from players who are not sure what the needs of plants are before they add them to an aquarium because most of the base needs are the same unless specified otherwise.



When it comes otherwise specified data like temperature and salinity they can differ quite a lot from species to species. We have made the ui that appears over inventory slots to be more readable and only show information that is not universal. There is no point showing the nutrients needs of plants in that place because it is displayed elsewhere and applies to all plants. We don't want things to feel too much like a jigsaw puzzle in that way.



Once players have added a plant into the aquarium and selected it, it is useful to see what needs are satisfied so here we show the universal data to be extra clear. It also gives us the opportunity to explain further about the difference between photosynthesis and respiration. Hovering you mouse over the subheading text for about 0.75 seconds will reveal the explanation. We certainly do not want players to go to a completely separate help screen to find this information. All information must be near to the point at which it is displayed.

To bring this back to mental models of nature and intuition. Most of the time in real life if you add a small group of fish to a reasonably sized aquarium you will not run into problems with the oxygen level. The same with plants. Unless you completely fill an aquarium with plants you probably won't run into problems with Co2. A lot of people have that problem in our game at the moment mostly because we have done the numbers wrong and not provided enough information but hopefully these changes put us onto the path to fixing that mess.

Ideally a player new to the game should be able to add a few plants and some fish to an aquarium and be totally fine. Only when they want to make things more complicated the game should become more complicated.

I really want to get the update out on steam tomorrow because it has some slightly important bug fixes inside but not all the fixes I talked about above will be inside and some of the user interface wont all be updated with new info. We will however fix that all this week and get another update out this coming Friday or sooner.

Now we will have a little rest and enjoy the remaining hours of Sunday. I have been terrible at responding to forum questions this week due to fixing all these mistakes. I'll spend a good chunk of early Monday morning responding to them.

We wish you all a good Sunday.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Unfortunately there is no update to the build this week. We have made some very good progress but as sometimes happens we just could not get everything done as we had hoped.

There have been some large scale changes done to how gameplay is saved and loaded. Reducing the use of slower procedures during these processes will be very useful for when players save and load aquariums with thousands of objects within. This also revealed areas in part of the code that were not needed at all anymore and could be deleted which is always good.

There have also been a lot of organisational changes made to the code that make it easier to eliminate a certain class of bugs and reduce the size of the code overall which I have been wanting to do for a while.

We made some really nice progress with getting plants to change their simulation behaviour depending on whether the light is turned on.

We also fixed some minor non-crash bugs that players reported.

The Oscar (Astronotus Ocellatus)



I felt a little deflated when it was time to do this post on Friday because even though much changes have been made to the code it is not something that can really be shown. Improving the speed of certain operations and reducing memory usage by maybe 8 bytes per object is not something that is easy to show or even noticeable to most players but believe me it matters. To make it feel like something of interested has been achieved this week I modelled a new fish yesterday and for part of today .

The Oscar fish has a bit of a notorious reputation but adding the Oscar allows us to begin to add various new features to the fish behaviour. You should never house an Oscar with some Neon Tetras for instance. It will not end well for the Neons. The next iteration of our fish predation behaviour will be to enable larger fish to eat smaller fish in one gulp.

We already have that working in regards to fry being eaten because every other fish is bigger than a single fry. However we need to put in place some logic that allows each fish to know what fish they can eat whole and which they cannot. Adding the Oscar gives us a reason to start working on this.

After so much programming in the last weeks I feel the need to make more art content so after some loose ends from this week's build are tied up I will model some more fish and other things. My colleague is currently working on making the first floating plants to be added to the game very soon.

If all goes to plan we shall have a new build uploaded in the coming week and some nice new art content to show.

We wish you all a relaxing Sunday.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

build 49 should be uploaded in a short number of hours. We are just doing some final checks and testing.

We have made progress that will allow us to add to some very interesting and needed changes to the game.



The barebones version of the day cycle has been added. You can see a little ui in the bottom left of the gameplay screen. What it shows is the age of your aquarium on the left and the current time of day on the right. There is a little progress slider in the middle that shows the progress through the day.



There are also two buttons for turning the light on and off. The player is in control of the light but there will be a small bit of ui that allows you to set the time of day that the lights turn on and off automatically but that will come a little bit later.

We now have these 3 key pieces of data that can be used throughout the game by anything that finds it useful but keep in mind that nothing in the game actually looks at this data yet. Lots of changes will come in the following weeks to make this a reality.

The first things that we will program to take advantage of the day and night data will be keeping track of the age of fish. We can have the growth cycle of fish make more sense and feel more natural. Algae can grow according to how long the aquarium is exposed to light.

Fish only need to eat once a day and at night they will be able to sleep to regain some energy. Certain breeding behaviours like breeding at first light in the morning can be achieved. Each species of fish and plants have their own requirements for hours of light per day that players will need to take into account when housing these species together.

Plants consume oxygen from the water when there is no light to generate energy which means the levels of co2 and oxygen will alternate cyclically making it possible to naturally balance out the water chemistry over time instead of levels going permanently up or down.

We can now also start to make steps towards making the lighting customizable. This will be a bit further down the line in development but there will be the ability to control the brightness, colour and depth that the light reaches and later on more advanced lighting setups will be possible.

It's a giant list of things that will be possible now which is very exciting.

Small tweaks to the sculpting ui.


We took away some of the on screen controls of the sculpting tools in favour of having keyboard shortcuts about 2 weeks ago but soon after we made the update we were informed that not every player is able to use the mouse and keyboard at the same time while playing the game. We have added back these on screen controls that now allow for the same functionality by using the mouse only.

Accessibility is something we probably should have been a bit more mindful of when making all these changes so in the near future there will be more of an effort to at the very least make sure that playing the game only with a mouse is possible and not cumbersome. We have also been researching more into what we can do for players with colour blindness.

We know almost nothing about the subject of accessibility so a lot of research is going to be done into this area so over time our game can be played by hopefully almost anyone.


Next week will be very busy indeed. There are some new fish models that need to be finished as well as some new types of plants that we hope to get into the game soon. There is also the matter of integrating all the new day and night cycle functionality into the game so hopefully next week's update will be very interesting indeed.

Luckily we can have a little rest over the weekend before this huge set of tasks and as usual we wish you all a very good weekend too.

The Fishery Team