Hello everyone

Finally build 58 has been uploaded. It has been around three months since we last updated the build and that is really way too long to go without doing a build update. However we have managed to improve a lot of things players have asked us to improve and we have added new features that have been on the todo list for quite some time. Let's get started with all the new fish.

Blue Betta female:


Blue Betta male:


We mentioned these in a post a while ago. They were taken out from the game when we improved the betta fish models and a player asked us if we could put them back in. We repainted the old blue betta design onto the new models and here we are.

Boeseman's Rainbowfish Male:


Boeseman's Rainbowfish Female:


These have been waiting around to be finished for quite some time. If I ever get back into keeping fish again in the real world I would really love to have some of these lovelies.

Freshwater Angelfish Female:


Freshwater Angelfish Male:


Highly requested among players and now in the game. There will be more colour variations to come in the future.

Dwarf Gourami Male:


Dwarf Gourami Female:


Initially we painted the female to look quite similar in colour to the male but someone pointed out the females are actually quite colourless. After some research it turns out that some breeders are able to breed females to look more colourful because they sell better. That is quite interesting and will be part of a storyline in career mode.

Oscar Fish:


Albino Oscar Fish:


There is almost no visual difference between Oscar fish genders so there are only minor differences in the paint jobs we made. We thought we would throw in an albino variation since they look quite interesting and we had no albino fish in the game yet. This means we have a grand total of four Oscar fish with this update.


All our fish:


There is quite a lot of fish in the game already and we have many many many more still to add. I think the next group of fish we add will probably be more "basic" fish. We are in desperate need of some fancy goldfish varieties which no fish game should be without. Also common fish associated with aquascaping like Harlequin Rasbora, ember tetras among others should be in the game.

What else have we done for fish since the last update?
We got a lot of players telling us how their fish get stuck or cannot reliably find their way to food so a lot of effort was concentrated on pathfinding. We made a more detailed post about the pathfinding system a few posts back so I would recommend looking back there for the technical details. Now fish should not get stuck or lost when seeking food or a mate. Unless of course there is literally no way for them to swim to their target's location.

Fish getting stuck:


You may see this happen from time to time. Not every behaviour uses the pathfinding system for navigation. For instance wandering and shoaling behaviours use algorithms that have a similar but better version of the previous approach to navigation. They shoot out laser beams trying to find empty space and move away from close detected obstacles. This can of course go wrong if the fish get's itself into a tight area with small exit holes. In a funny way it is like a kitten climbing a tree but not knowing how to get down. This is something we are putting a lot of resources into solving but it is going to take time to get right and as long as you decorate your aquariums in such a way that there is space for them to swim based on their size then it should not happen too often. If it does happen then you can use the nudge tool to drag them out of their predicament.

Predation has been updated. All fish can eat fry as before but now larger more predatory fish can eat smaller fish so do be careful with what you house with the Oscar fish and Red terror cichlids.


Alerts:


We used to have a way of alerting players to trouble in their aquariums but it was not very good. We have revamped it to be better and configurable. In the above image you can see in the bottom left that there is a button for enabling/disabling the alerts overlay and there is a smaller button which enables the alert mask.

Alert Mask:


What the alert mask allows you to do is configure exactly what alerts you wish to see. For instance if you only want to see alerts for fish then you can turn off alerts for all other things making it easier to see what fish have problems.
At some point we may expand alerts to be similar to how Planet Zoo deals with alerts. By having a ui window with a list of all the alerts within. That system makes a lot of sense for planet zoo because the map is so big that players are not going to go around their zoo looking for alert icons. In fishery players have the advantage of seeing everything in their aquarium on screen at once most of the time. In this case it may not make sense to add a planet zoo style alert list. We will have to test and see if it feels right.

Hide UI:


The ability to hide the entirety of the user interface is something often requested by players and I kept saying we will add it in the near future and then rather embarrassingly got distracted by other more fancy features. Well now it is in the game. Players must enter photo mode in order to turn off the ui. If the whole point of hiding the ui is to immerse oneself into an uncluttered pretty world then it might help to adjust some camera settings like field of view or depth of field before doing so. It also now means that players can hide the ui before hitting F12 in order to make a screenshot to upload to steam. It is hugely embarrassing that I got that wrong.


Since we are speaking about ui, we adjusted about 70% of it again.


This is the fish selection ui. It is very important that when the alert icon displays on top of a fish that players can select that fish to get a deeper understanding of what is causing the alert. The problems are highlighted in red in this ui as is the same for plants, powered items, plumbing items etc. You may also notice there is a new 'Minimum Aquarium Volume' field which should give players and idea about which fish to put in their aquariums. We also keep track and now display the age of each fish. We do not have a lifespan for them just yet but we will do in the future. The amount of time it takes for fry to grow into a juvenile and a juvenile into an adult is much longer and more correct than it was before.


This information is also available in the info ui for fish found in the 'shop inventory' so players can know if the conditions are right for that fish or plant before it is placed in the aquarium.

The Delete Button:


A delete button has been added. The usual keyboard shortcuts of the delete and backspace keys still work but we had a lot of requests for a button so it has been added. Though in the near-ish future the way that things are removed from the aquarium will be slightly more complicated. Things will be sold, put into storage or deleted.

Sculpting UI:


The sculpting UI desperately needed improvement. There are also areas that you can hover your mouse over to get further info.


A lot of the water chemistry UIs have been modified to look nicer and be more clear. The one above that shows temperature has better colours and it is clearer what region the temperature is in.


This change also comes to the heater ui. Players can adjust the blue slider and it shows the region of temperature that the water will be heated too and it will not go beyond it.


Fish selection is now very easy. Until now just selecting a fish was tricky. Why? you ask. because the hitbox was a sphere placed near the front of the body:


Players would need to click their mouse over this invisible sphere in order to select it. This was done for a few reasons that are perhaps a little too technical and tedious to try to explain but it had to do with how the fish rotated and collided with obstacles.


Now we made some changes that made it make more sense to use a box. Thus as a side effect selection is much easier and less fiddly.


Time Manipulation:

Another highly requested feature that I kept insisting was not possible due to physics accuracy and other reasons is now in the game. The ability to speed up time allows us to hopefully fix a lot of problems with the game. We got a lot of feedback that things happen too slowly or too fast or too often or not often enough. We have now made the length of an in-game day longer and the speed at which things like hunger, breeding, suffocation etc happen are much slower. Even when things go very wrong in the real world it can take a while for their consequences to show. Anything short of a bath bomb falling into the aquarium usually allows for enough time to do something about it without panicking

When things get a little slow or tedious such as waiting for the night to be over players can increase game speed up to sixteen times.


Time can also be frozen so players can take their time to fix problems without too much pressure. It also gives players time to adjust their camera nicely for screenshots.

Those are all the biggest changes we made. We also did a lot of bug fixing and other small quality of life improvements. The clownfish were about half the size they should have been so expect them to be larger in your existing aquariums. Hopefully it won't cause too many problems. Water chemistry will also be different from when you last loaded a file because of changes we have made but in general it should not be too different. You may have to get used to the new speed that water chemistry changes. As was said before, in general things happen slower but in extreme circumstances like adding 20 airstones to a small aquarium things will happen quite fast.


There are some changes that we said we were aiming to put into this update which we were unable to finish. Live birth is almost ready but needs refining. As is the new debug settings for allowing fish and plants to ignore water chemistry so players can ignore the simulation aspects and just get on with being creative if they just want to chill out a bit. That will be coming very soon and we will return to our more regular schedule for build updates that come every one to two weeks.

Quite a lot of work went into this update but there are still quite a few rough edges in the game as whole and there is a tremendous amount of content missing. The next update will come next week and will probably include the usual assortment of small tweaks and bug fixes among other things.

It has been a while since we have added more decorations, plants and general creative content into the game. We often take a look at the screenshots uploaded by players and they are fantastic. It is quite surprising just how much can be made with the small assortment of decorations that we have provided but it really is time to add more so expect in the coming months more creative content.

As usual we wish you all a very pleasant rest of the week,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

This is not a proper full blown update post but it has been a while since we shared some progress so think of this a "pre-update" update post.

We did not meet our aim for releasing a build update by the end of august. This is not because things are going badly. Things are actually going very well indeed and we have been as busy as beavers getting it all together.

As usual we got a little too excited and have crammed a lot of work into this next build which results in a longer period of testing and tweaking of numbers. We said in a previous post that we have finally added the time manipulation feature into the game that quite a few players have asked for but it requires us to rethink all of the numbers associated with the simulation side of the game.
Everything can now take longer to happen which should remove a lot of the frustrations players have told us about with things happening way too fast. Now the time it takes for breeding, eating, dying, becoming stressed etc etc should feel more natural in length and hopefully players won't feel the constant pressure to manage things all the time but can instead take more time to focus on the creative aspects of aquariums.

Among all the other changes we have talked about in update posts over the past months we have also been working on the usual batch of quality of life changes. We have reworked our old alert system which had been turned off for some time because it was so crap. It is now better and more clear so players can see very quickly which fish or plants have a problem.

All of the fish we have talked about over the past months are finished minus a few tweaks here and there. In total we are adding 5 new species of fish which actually amounts to 10 individually modelled and painted fish added because there are often differences between fish genders.



Above is a sneak peak of the male freshwater angelfish before we add the scales and yes we will of course be adding marine angelfish in the future too.

We will be ready with the next update fairly soon and I will write about it in a very very large update post that details all of the changes. I expect it will take me a whole day to write so the new build itself will probably be uploaded to steam a day before you see the news post announcing it.

We hope you all have a nice Tuesday and shall talk again soon.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

As you can imagine we have been working rather busily these past few weeks and there is much to talk about. There is still no new build update yet but we are getting closer.

Blue Betta Male:


Blue Betta Female:


These lovelies were in the game over a year ago but were removed after we updated the models for the betta fish. Someone on the forums asked us to bring them back because they liked them so much and we have done that. In the next build the blue betta fish will return.

We are still working on the other fish we have shown off in the previous few months like the Oscar Cichlid, Rainbowfish, Freshwater Angelfish etc so expect to see them very soon also. The Oscar fish can't be put into the game until we have updated the predation features. Specifically larger fish will have the ability to swallow whole fish that are small enough to be swallowed whole. This meant that we first needed to make changes to some of the behaviour code so that all fish know what other fish they can eat.
On top of that the behaviour code needed improving so more interesting and complex behaviour could be possible and we desperately needed to improve the pathfinding abilities of all fish so they don't get stuck or lost 70% of the time. This was shown in our previous update post. As usual to solve one problem we must solve a further six problems.

Some of the other behavioural changes we are working on have been requested by players. Such behaviour changes include all members of the same variety of a species being able to socialise and breed. For instance all guppy types can socialize with each other and potentially breeding with each other.
We have also vastly improved how we calculate swim level behaviour for fish. For example guppies like to hang out somewhat near the surface of the water whereas tiger barbs prefer to be around the middle level. These improvements to the code as combined with better collision avoidance methods allowed us to add the behaviour of bottom feeders like Corydoras. They swim about at substrate level and stick their noses into the substrate looking for things to nibble. Since this behaviour now works it means there is nothing stopping us from adding bottom feeders like Corydoras into the game which makes us very happy because they have been on our to-do list a long time and players really want them.

Pause Time Feature:


We are also about 95% done with adding the pause feature. It is somewhat trickier than you might at first think it is. Pause can mean different things in different games and depending on how you do it will create different outcomes. We want the ability to freeze everything in the aquarium so it does not move and does not update any sort of internal state like hunger or age. It would be very stupid if you pause the game and the fish stops moving but it starves to death while paralyzed. Very bad. We also need to freeze but keep the current velocity of fish and other physics objects so when players unpause the game things continue as normal on their physics trajectories.

The same must happen for fish behaviour. A fish might be hungry and swimming towards a nice piece of food only to have the player pause the game and then unpause after which the fish's brain is reset and it has decides to pursue a different piece of food or have a wander about. Care must be taken to preserve the "thoughts" of the fish as the game is paused and sub sequentially unpaused.

Not everything should be paused. The music should keep on playing and we must retain the ability to move the camera. Object selection must stay active and updated. If players move decorations whilst the game is paused the physics system must keep track of where everything is and if a moved decoration comes into contact with a fish then it must move the fish. This is important because if we unpause everything when physics objects are inside eachother then the physics system might freak out and move things around until they are not colliding which could mean things fly about at high speeds or appear to teleport which is undesirable.

Pausing a game like Fishery has to be very carefully controlled indeed. We are about 90% done with it. You may not be able to see it in the gif but the plant leaves are still swaying slightly. The Not all particle systems for plumbing objects pause. These are very simple fixes though.

New Shop Thumbnail Images:


Now that we can pause the game players can have an easier time in photo mode putting the camera in a nice position and adjusting depth of field settings without rushing. One thing that we find useful is that we can now make better images for the in game shop. If you buy fish from a website you usually can see nice images taken of fish while they are in an aquarium. Adding this to our re-designed in game shop will make things feel a little more true to life and more polished.

Time in general causes no end of troubles for us. A lot of the feedback and suggestions that we receive from players talks about time. Specifically that some things happen too quickly or too slowly. Fish breed way too often and become hungry too quickly. The time it takes to filter out waste can seem slow. The time it takes to increase nutrients levels can be slow or too fast depending on the size of aquarium and so on.

In the real world generally it takes two weeks or more depending on the specifics to prepare the water of a small to medium size aquarium for fish. It just takes time for the water chemistry to become ready to handle fish and decompose waste, etc. We could of cause adjust the values in the game to reflect that of the real world much closer but we would have to make players wait longer for things.
Furthermore it seems that speed that time passes is relative to what players want to happen. For instance it is desired that waste is filtered fairly soon after adding a filter and the speed at which waste is produced by fish or food should not be so fast that the aquarium gets dirty too soon. We all would like oxygen or nutrients levels to adjust to what we want quickly but if things are imbalanced then it should go wrong slowly so we can have time to react.

We have attempted to change how all the maths works for water chemistry several times and added a few magic numbers and tricks to account for all of the biases as mentioned above but it seems that we just cannot get it right and there are not many solutions left except to make the numbers work in a more realistic manner and allow players to speed up time where needed.

Fast Forward Time Feature at 16x: (sorry for bad compression steam only allows 3mb file limit)


A lot of players have requested it but I have said many times that we were not planning on making time manipulation features because it could cause problems around physics stability and for various other reasons it was not something we whole heartidly wanted.

However after a lot of thinking we both decided that it actually does help us solve quite a few problems. We don't have to worry too much about sneaky maths and magic numbers when it comes to water chemistry. We can use more real world numbers when it comes to breeding, age, metabolism, algae growth etc and players can speed things up where necessary. One popular reason for why players want to speed up time is so they can reduce the amount of time they have to wait while the light is off so plants and fish can avoid too much light exposure and the chances of growing algae is diminished. Hopefully now we can ease those player's annoyances.

I could probably go through many many examples of why this is useful but I imagine those of you who have played the game will have your own useful reasons for speeding up time.

More will be explained about the time manipulation features in another update post. I managed to work on it a lot over the weekend and there are only a few small slightly fiddly bits of it left to fix and test before it can be put into the game. The next step after that is to adjust more of the numbers in the game so a lot of things do not happen so often or so fast. The first of these numbers to be fixed will be about the frequency that fish can breed and how quickly fry grow into adults. At the moment this happens way too fast and there are a lot of players with over population problems cause by out of control breeding.

The feedback and discussions you are all participating in on the forums does make a huge difference and every week we are solving important problems based on these discussions. A lot of the changes we have talked about in this post were based on feedback and suggestions from the forums and the game is a lot better for it.

We are fairly confident that the next build will be released some time in this month (August) and it will include everything we have talked about in this post.

We wish you all a very good start to the week,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

This update will be slightly different than previous ones because it delves into some of the more technical aspects of the game. One of the problems I am tasked with solving is the always fun problem of obstacle avoidance and path finding of fish and other creatures.

Anyone who has played the game before has no doubt noticed that there are times when fish get a bit stuck and can't seem to figure out their surroundings. This is especially noticeable in aquariums where there are a lot of decorations creatively positioned about the place. In such aquariums when a fish wishes to seek out and eat some food that has sunk to the bottom of the aquarium it is especially difficult to navigate around these decorations in order to reach their meal.

Our fish have the ability to sense what is in front of them in a very basic way. It shoots out a laser beam from it's nose in the direction of it's food target. If that laser beam does not hit anything then it assumes there is nothing in it's way and it will swim towards the food. If it does detect something then it shoots out more laser beams at a wider angle and tries to find a space within it's vision where there is not obstacle. If it finds open space then it's swim direction is changed to this new avoidance direction and after a small period of time it attempts to swim in the direction of the food again and the process repeats itself.

When this process works well what you see is the fish swim around obstacles in order to get to their food target. When it does not work what you see is the fish going nowhere in particular or move towards then away then towards the target again but not actually making any progress.

This "laser beam" detection technique works in most cases when the fish is just going about it's business and going nowhere in particular. As soon as we give the fish a destination that has obstacles in between then things can go wrong.

A common technique used in games for decades is to partition 3d space into a grid structure that stores obstacle data and use that to compute a path from one position to another.

(to see larger image, right click and open image in new tab)


We make 5 grids at different resolutions. Starting from the left, the largest cell size knows only about the 8 cells within it's bounds that belong to the next grid resolution. Each of those 8 cells only know about the 8 cells from the next resolution that fit within their bounds and so on. The number of cells on the right most grid is 4096. Each of those cells needs to know whether or not an obstacle sits within it's bounds.



The simple way to do that is to run a piece of code that checks for collisions in every cell in every grid but that is wasteful. The optimised approach is to start by doing a collision check on the lowest resolution grid (left most). That will of course test positive for the substrate because its bounds is as big as the aquarium. We then step to the next resolution and run a check on 8 cells. The bottom 4 cells will test positive for the substrate but the top 4 cells will test negative. Logic tells us that if these top 4 cells cannot detect the substrate then none of the cells of the higher resolution grids that sit within the same space will detect substrate either. We can then skip doing collision checks on these cells and save some CPU performance.



Now that we have a reliable and fast way to get a good approximation of where all obstacles are we can then compute the path any between two positions.



The image above shows a path that have been computed from the position of a fish to the position of some food. A path is computed using what is essentially a type of sorting algorithm. The code starts at the cell nearest to the fish and then expands out to every surrounding cell that does not hold any collision data until it finds the cell closest to the target. Once it finds the target it then backtracks it's way to the fish position. It is this backtracked path that becomes the path that the fish will use.

We have implemented the basic well known version of the algorithm but the path it produces is a little weird looking sometimes. It correctly goes from fish to target but the route makes the fish look a little drunk. There are still improvements to be made.

Once our fish has a path they can then simply swim along it to get to where they want to go. They do not need to worry about encountering obstacles because the path already avoids obstacles. If a player moves an obstacle into the path it is then invalidated and recomputed to account for the change in obstacle position.

This technique will not be used with all fish behaviour. It will generally be used only when a fish absolutely needs to go to a specific location such as to eat food or locate a mate. We are only just scratching the surface of how useful these techniques will be in Fishery. This technique will allow us to have shrimps, snails and other creatures crawl around on things so we are another step closer to shrimps.

The grid structure will also be useful to help store other bits of information about the aquarium. It could be used to help Betta fish and Gouramis to figure out good places to build bubble nests or fish like plecos to find places to hide. It also allows us to fix old bugs like eggs dropping through decorations or substrate and fry being born inside objects.

This is just some of the progress we have been making in the previous few weeks. I am not entirely sure when the next build update will come but It should be relatively soon and it will include these new pathfinding features. As usual we wish you all a great weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 57 should be uploaded sometime in the next few hours. It has had some very much needed changes made to it. I came back from my little break about two weeks ago and we decided that it is about time that we addressed some parts of the game that make it look and feel rather shabby.

New aquarium Selection Screen:


The way that players used to choose an aquarium was bland, boring, uninspiring and extremely grey. That has now completely changed. We provided a better visualisation of each aquariums dimension's and volume and removed that tedious scroll list at the bottom of the screen. This should help new players to feel less baffled when choosing an aquarium for the first time. This mode will be added to and improved further over time. For instance some players have suggested that we add the possibility for players to add a premade plumbing setup and a few other utilities to their aquariums at this stage and we think that is a good idea among many others.

New Main Menu:


The main menu is perhaps the least exciting part of any game but it used to look totally rubbish. Flat grey colour and a tiny menu. New players were not very impressed as it is a very ugly way to start playing a newly purchased game.

Colour Editor:


The backdrop system has been re-worked to allow for better customisation. Specifically we have added a colour editor so players now have a choice between 3,600,000 colours to apply to the various attributes of their chosen backdrops. Yes we are working on more backdrops which will be added to the game. Feel free to check out the backdrop list on the forums and make suggestions.

The new colour editor is going to get a lot of use throughout the game. Over time we will make it possible for players to adjust the colours of various decorations, substrates and eventually plants and fish when we add some of the genetics features to the game.

We spent the whole week working on these changes. Last week was spent working on bug fixes, cleaning up simulation code, trying to balance how the water chemistry works. The algae code has been re-written so it grows in a manner that is not as frustrating as before but im sure we have not worked out all the nuances with it.

We are also continuously working on the next iteration of the fish ai and painting the models of the new fish we showed you many weeks ago. All of that and more is going to be put into the game as soon as we are happy with them. Quite often we have to change the priority of certain things because a player finds an important bug that needs fixing or players let us know what is more important to them to see the in the game sooner. This was the case with the example aquariums and the game is much easier for new players to get to grips with when they have examples to look at and understand. It was well worth prioritising that over painting new fish in that instance.

Now that I am back and feeling refreshed I think we can make a lot of very meaningful progress in the coming weeks. I have not been as active in the forums these last weeks because I and my colleague mostly just had our heads down working on getting this update ready. I'll be able to answer forum posts over the weekend and more next week.

We wish you all a very good weekend and hope you find some nice bargains in the summer sale.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 56 has been uploaded.

We have done some quite important changes to the game but they are different to what we said we would be working on in our last update post. Essentially for quite a while we have overlooked the needs of new players. This has to led to a lot of confusion about how to setup an aquarium and keep it from going wrong. In recent weeks we have improved a lot of the help text found in various parts of the game that give explanations about various aspects of the water chemistry and information about fish and plant populations.

That was not enough and what players really wanted was a tutorial and some examples scenes. A full blown tutorial is not possible at this time for reasons I won't go into but we have put together a lot of example aquariums that players can learn from and experiment with.



The aquarium loading browser has been modified to have a separate selection of example scenes. They are separate from your scenes so there is no confusion with names or anything like that. There are eleven examples in total and they are all fairly different from each other. Each of them shows a different way that an aquarium can be set up. Each of them has a different maintenance routine as you might expect. Occasionally you might need to drop a fertilizer ball into the water to keep the nutrients level at a good level for the plants. Other aquariums will have the nutrients levels taken care of via the plumbing system. You will also be able to see various ways to filter waste. It can be done completely naturally using fungi or with a sponge filter in the aquarium or with a filter in the plumbing system. Some aquariums have problems which are immediately obvious when you load them up or they will manifest over time because there is a small imbalance somewhere that was overlooked. It might be an interesting challenge to try out ideas and fix some of these aquariums. Example aquariums cannot be saved over. They are designed purely as a learning feature and you can modify them as much as you like. If you manage to completely screw them up then fear not you can just reload them without fear of accidently saving it..

Heaters:


Heaters are now fixed for good. They operate with a thermostat and will not overshoot their target temperature. They are also more effective in large aquariums so it does not take 50 heaters to heat the largest aquarium in a reasonable time. They have also been re-textured to look better than before.


Similar changes have been made for other plumbing devices. For the nutrients injector players only need to set their desired nutrients level and the device will release enough nutrients over time to get it to that level. However if you have a lot of plants consuming nutrients at a rate that is more than rate that nutrients are being produced it will never reach the target level and players will need to add another nutrients injector or fertilizer ball to keep nutrients from running out.

Similar changes have been made to other plumbing devices and the devices placed in the aquarium like air stones and sponge filters.

There have also been the usual set of bug fixes and tweaks to the maths behind the water chemistry etc.


A lot of these changes were long overdue and obviously what the game has needed for quite a while but when taking into account that I cannot remember the last time I took a proper break it is not surprising that these mistakes have been made.
For the next two weeks I shall be away resting and relaxing my brain, I might even go outside. My colleague will be working on the ever growing list of art content so you can all be assured that work on the game will continue during my brief absence. I will be checking the forums and answering questions every one or two days.


We wish you all a good Monday evening

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 55 will be uploaded later this evening. It is first and foremost a bug fix update but it comes with a few nice tweaks in addition. A normal update should come towards the end of this week the details of it's contents will be talked about further down.

Bug Fixes:
There were problems with displaying the correct Fahrenheit temperature and switching between Celsius and Fahrenheit would only update the main UI after the temperature changes.

Not all data associated with water chemistry was properly reset when loading an aquarium after previously loading another which could cause some errors if the newly loaded aquarium has a smaller volume than the previous,

Tweaks:
Changes in water chemistry are happening a little too slow for larger aquariums. Steps have been taken to speed this up but more will be done this week to make the speed of increases and decreases feel correct and appropriate.

The small heater has been modified to be much stronger so less are needed to heat larger aquariums. Small aquariums will require players to turn the strength of the heater down so the temperature is not too high. Soonish we will add different sizes of heater which will be enable players to use the right heater for the right aquarium without too much fiddling about.


Light:

More progress has been made with Light. Players can now see the amount of light exposure in their aquarium. It changes depending on how long the light is turned on or off. It is recommended that players keep the exposure within the moderate range.

When the light is turned off it not only causes plants to inhale oxygen and exhale co2 but it also causes fish to go towards the bottom of the aquarium and sleep. When fish sleep their stress decreases, their health increases as does their energy.

Eventually we will have species of fish that are nocturnal and will only come out of hiding places at night and become very active. There will also been some fish species added that have evolved in isolated environments like caves where there is no light and it does not affect them.

Fish population ui tweaks:

A few more changes have been made to the fish population ui. It shows the total amount of fish mass as before but now there are two additional sliders that show the percentage of live and dead fish. This can be useful because in large aquariums full of plants and other objects it can be difficult to notice dead fish. It also helps give players an expectation of water chemistry changes. Having dead fish will increase waste dramatically over time. The same changes have been made for the plant population ui too.


Co2 Scrubber:

This can be used to remove excess Co2 from the water to help bring the balance of Co2 and O2 closer. It does not require any power.


As was said before this update was released mostly to fix the bugs mentioned at the top of the post. We can't have them staying in the game too long once they are noticed.

Towards the end of the week we are aiming to do an update that includes more water chemistry tweaks as well as some changes to fish behaviour in the area of breeding.

We are trying to get the live birth feature added this week as well as some changes to shoaling.

We are also trying to fix some problems with the larger fish in the game. They move a little too fast sometimes especially as they rotate and as a result their movement feels less believable.

We also still have fish to paint. Hopefully we can finish off the Oscar fish and then add more predation features. Hopefully we can squeeze most of that into this later week's update. If not then we will stick in the game the week afterwards.

We wish you all a pleasant Monday evening

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It is not May the 7th. Which was the date we were aiming to get the next build out for. From last Wednesday until now it has just been one long day. Lots of changes, tweaks, bug fixes and adding some of the new art content we have been showing over the past few weeks. We are doing final testing for the next build and we are quite certain that tomorrow lunchtime we will upload it for everyone to play.

The art content that will be included are all the discus fish, dead fly, mealworm, beef heart cubes, water lettuce. The nudge tool will also be included and the various tweaks and improvement to fish behaviour. We have shown a lot of these things in previous posts so I won't repeat images of them here.

There is also some other interesting things to show and talk about that are also going to be included that you have not seen yet. We have tweaked a lot of how the water chemistry works so it is less volatile and players can be more precise in modifying it. We have also changes how we show players that data in a way that is not overwhelming or confusing (hopefully).

Gas

The way that Carbon dioxide and oxygen are calculated has changed. This is because we are trying to base things a little more accurately on how the gas exchange mechanism works in real life. It is not totally accurate but it creates interesting ways to help players understand and exploit the mechanisms surrounding balance in the game. Essentially if you add something that consumes oxygen like fish then your oxygen level will go down and your carbon dioxide level will go up. Adding plants will change the gas levels in the exact opposite way and you could add plants to counter any imbalance created by having fish.

We still have air stones, gas regulators and dissolvable tablets to tip the balance in a certain direction when you want to get things to be more complex.

Nutrients:

The way that nutrients is calculated has not really changed but the way we show it's data is a little different. A few numbers have been removed and are replaced with sliders that show in a more meaningful way what the numbers failed to show. Players can better see the balance of production and consumption of nutrients in their aquariums. When things are not as balanced as they could be it is quite evident. Ideally players are encouraged to keep things in the moderate range and that will result in your water chemistry staying relatively stable going forward. When it is imbalanced the outcome could be nutrients running out too quickly or an excess of nutrients that leads to algae growth. Algae growth might be preferable to some players in which this serves as a useful guide to increasing nutrients to levels that which will lead to algae growth.

Waste:

Similar changes have been made to the waste panel. For most cases a balance is not necessary for waste. If you have adequate filtration then the consumption slider will be high and that will put your mind to ease knowing that you have more than enough filter capacity.

Temperature:


We have had a lot of comments about how players control temperature. Specifically how bad it is. The worst that would happen is that players would add a heater which would mean the temperature keeps going up and over their desired temperature setting. They could enable the auto mode for the heater but quite often the temperature would go higher than it should and take a little time to come back down which upset all their fish and plants. This has all been thrown away and a smarter but simpler way of calculating temperature has been created. Now when players add a heater it will increase the temperature of the water by however many degrees it can for the current volume of water and it wont go above it. Players can still adjust the strength of the heater to have precise control. This does mean that in very large aquariums more than one of these small heaters will need to be used as before but you don't need to enable auto mode on them and once you get the right temperature it wont go above it unless the power goes off.

The display slider is split up into regions to make it easier for players to read and not be too consumed by numbers too much if they dont want to. We also added two more temperature states, Deep Cold and Hot. This will come be used more in the future of the game when we add some fish that live in extreme environments. For instance angler fish and other deep sea fish that live at the bottom of the Atlantic and Antarctic oceans live in much colder water than your average river or lake fish and players will need to replicate those temperatures in order to keep them happy. On the opposite end of the scale the Desert Pupfish (Cyprinodon Macularius) has been recorded living in water that gets to around 43 degrees Celsius or 110 degrees Fahrenheit. There will be a number of fish added that live in these extreme temperatures.

We have also tweaked the code to be more forgiving when the temperature is on the border between warm and cold temperatures. We have received requests that players would love to be able to have a mixture of coldwater and warmwater fish in the same aquarium. If you are able to get the temperature to be more or less on the border between both regions then both species will be happy. The same also applies to salinity which means you will be able to mix cold and warm, fresh and marine species together if you are cunning and patient enough to get the values right. It is not exactly realistic but it's a fun way of rewarding players who work hard to be precise.

Salinity:

Salinity has also been rewritten for similar reasons as temperature. It was also difficult to control. We also display salinity as PPT which means Parts Per Thousand. This is a more common way to talk about salinity and hopefully the more experienced aquarists who play the game are less baffled by it than before.


Fish population:

Again we reduce numbers and explain things in simple text as well as showing a better representation of the data. Essentially if your population size is moderate and no more than 100% stocked then you should not encounter problems. It is only when an aquarium is over stocked that there could be problems with oxygen, waste etc. Over stocking is not necessarily bad but experts advise that overstocking should be done with caution and by people with more experience. There will be career mode storylines about building and maintaining over stocked aquariums.

Plant population:

Plant population is show in a similar way. If plant coverage is below 101% then generally things should be fine so long as you have paid attention to nutrients. Keep in mind that coverage is based on the volume of plant matter in your aquarium and not the actual number of plants. The plant coverage value is going to be very important to a lot of features that will be added in the future. Certain fish like to live in an environment where there are lots of plants. Some fish Instinctively lay eggs in areas where there is more vegetation. There will be more needs related to habitat that players will need to take into account when making their aquariums but for the sake of fun it wont be unforgiving and there will always be cunning ways to bend the rules.

Food Population:

Again here we try to make things more clear and explain things without too many numbers. We may have more data that shows the type of food currently in the aquarium.


Water changes work the same way as before except for oxygen and co2 where It temporarily balances them out instead of just lowering both their values.

Algae is still being worked on. We are aiming to make it easier to predict and control but also have an element of difficult to it. Algae has such a legendary reputation when it comes to aquariums that we cannot just treat it the same way we treat nutrients or waste. It has to be properly done and there will also been algae filters coming soon.

A lot of these changes are in response to player feedback. We see a lot of similar questions or comments that make it clear that something is not explained properly by us in the game or that it is just confusing in it's current iteration. There is still a lot of that confusion in the game but we are going to make it better. Remember we are not even 20% finished with the game yet and there is a lot of things missing.

One thing that is not clear in the game is that the smaller aquariums are easier for new players to use than the larger ones. This happens automatically because the system is designed to take aquarium volume into account when calculating all the numbers so if you have the largest aquarium filled with plants then the nutrients requirements will be very much larger than that of a nano aquarium with 100% plant coverage. More information explaining some of these fundamental tips will be added soon so new players don't find the early parts of the game to be too hard and annoying.


It has been an absolute beast of a time to get this update ready. Our days started very early and ended very late and we are quite exhausted but finally we are getting rid of a whole class of annoyances and imperfections that should make the experience more enjoyable to players. After we do the final testing and upload the build I'll be able to respond to forum posts from the previous week.

The next build to be uploaded after this one will be probably the end of next week. It will include more of the fish that we have painted over the previous weeks and include more changes to fish behaviour. The new algae code will also be present and working properly.

We wish you all a very nice Monday evening.

The Fishery Team

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