Hello everyone,

As promised we have uploaded build 71 which is the lighting update we talked about in last week's post.



When players load up an old aquarium from a previous version of fishery or create a new aquarium the lighting will look almost exactly the same as previous versions. This is so things are not too confusing and if players have no interest in getting into lighting yet then there will not be any visual disruptions. For those of you who wish to dabble with lights it is very easy to get to grips with.



By enabling the "Show Lights" button found in the bottom left of the screen players will then be able to see the light icons that exist in the scene. By default in every new or old aquarium there exists two lights. An ambient light and a directional light. They are always positioned above the aquarium so they are easy to see.



Once they have been made visible they can then be selected and manipulated like any other object in the game. There is a news lights category found in the inventory where players can create new lights from. We have added a few new parameters since last week to the lights selection ui. Mostly to do with shadowing. Shadow options can now be set on a per light basis rather than having the shadow settings in the main game options. Not every light needs to have shadows enabled and if they are enabled players may wish to further adjust their resolution and how dark they are.



There is now only one setting in the main options to do with shadows which allows players to stop fish casting shadows. I personally find they way that fish cast shadows onto themselves rather ugly especially on their fins which are quite thin and in the case of their dorsal fins face upwards which causes them to just look darker most of the time and the shadows flicker horribly. The way realtime shadows look in games in general is still not fantastic especially since we essentially compute shadows as an image from the perspective of a light and project it onto every object that is being shadowed. Often we can see pixelation problems and flickering depending on the type of light used and it can be distracting. Anyhow the option to prevent fish casting shadows on themselves is there for those who don't like how it looks.

We have updated all example aquariums and added a few new ones to include lighting. Here is the example known as "Tree Trunk" which we have lit to look like the sun is setting... or rising.



We have added both day and night lighting to all examples:

Day with light icons:


Night with light icons:


We hope players can have a good time learning from all these examples there are close to twenty now in the game.

New Fish!

Shubunkin Female:


Shubunkin Male:


We are getting through our list of goldfish species. I think next we will add a pair of black moor goldfish which were my favourite when I was little.

Rename Aquariums:


Renaming an aquarium is much requested feature that kept getting deprioritised and is now in the game. It is little features like this which are quite often overlooked by us but actually quite important.

We also fixed a lot of bugs and made quality of life improvements here is a short list of some of the more interesting changes:

• (Bugfix) Problems with fish getting stuck while nibbling algae
  
• (Bugfix) Fry and juvenile fish needs don't match that of their parents
  
• (Bugfix) Betta fish should require warm water instead of cold
  
• (Tweak) Re-textured dissolvables and added a new algae spore dissolvable
  
• (Tweak) O2 and CO2 simulate in a way that is less annoying and requires less constant tweaking from players
  
• (Tweak) Water changes can happen much more frequently
  
• (Tweak) Breeding takes a little less time to happen
  
• (Tweak) Water chemical utilities are more affective in larger aquariums

There are a few new issues in need of fixing that were introduced in this version. Particles such as waste or algae particles do not respond to lights as do the algae and waste that gets splatted onto the glass. These transparent materials need a lot of extra care taken when it comes to lighting otherwise things can slow down a lot so we are going to take more time to get them working fast. We will be working on their shaders next week.

We wish you all a happy weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

It has been a little while since an update and there is no new build just yet but we thought it would be good to show you all what we have been working on these past few weeks. Aside from the usual bug fixes, quality of life tweaks and new art content we have been working on a quite important new feature. We will give you a sneak peak now but explain things in more detail when we actually release the update.

Interactive Lighting:



Players will be able to create lights and position them around their aquariums so their creations can be made that little more artistic and unique. In the above example we have tried to make things interesting by having the lighting be less uniform and contrasty. There are patches of light here and there as if small bits of light are getting through a forest canopy to the ground beneath. We are also having a little fun using the light to highlight the treasure and teapot.

Night Lighting:


Players can also decide when the lights are to be turned on. Once the time of day is turned to night the lights associated with the day time are turned off and lights associated with the night are turned on automatically. The above example shows the night lighting for this aquarium. The lighting here is designed to imitate the sort of lighting that you might see on a clear night with a full moon. It is a simple two light setup.

Light Setup:


Here is a look at all the lights that we have used for this example. All of those lines that you see are there to help visualize light attributes like how much distance falloff there is or the light angle of a spot light for example. These visualisations are only visible when a light is selected and in this image all lights are selected so it looks rather chaotic. All light visualisation can be turned off too so as in the first example image you can see only the result of the lighting and not the light objects themselves.

Light Attributes:


Here is an example of the attributes for a spot light. It is pretty standard as far as computer graphic lighting goes. The 'Time of day activation' sub-heading is where players can choose at what time their lights are turned on.

Hopefully that is enough of a sneaky peak to get you excited. We are certainly very happy with all the creative possibilities that this will add to the game. I personally am very excited because it means when we eventually add the angler fish it will have a little glowing lure that actually emits light and illuminates it's surroundings.

If all goes well we should be able to release this update a week from now. There are a few more tweaks we want to do and just make sure everything is robust and working without issues. We also have to go through every one of the example aquariums that come with the game and create interesting lighting for players to learn from.. Not to mention in the coming weeks we will need to redo all of our steam screenshots and trailer because suddenly our whole steam page will be very out of date.

As usual we wish you all a fantastic weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello there

Build 69 has been uploaded and we have added a very much requested feature this week.



Some of you might remember when we added a feature that prevented decorations from poking out through the bottom of the aquarium. We have now taken that further and made it so decorations cannot poke out of the side of the aquarium either. We also added this feature to plants. In terms of how selecting these squished objects works. It behaves the same as the previous version. If you select any object that is pushed up against the glass it will snap back to it's original shape when it is highlighted by the mouse. If you have the alerts overlay activated and a plant is alerting for whatever reason that will disable the squishing so it is more visible if squashed to a small size. This is only to make these objects more visible when there is a problem with it and you wish to interact with it. Not all objects will be squished when pushed up against the glass. Sponge filters and air stones (including the treasure chest) will still poke out of the glass. It does not work for fungi yet either but in the next update it will.



Here you can see it in action. One thing that this now makes possible is for players to create their own "3d backdrops". A aquarium 3d backdrop is something you can buy or create in the real world which fits across the entirety of one side of your aquarium. Usually it is a complex cliff like rocky surface and can look quite interesting.

Here is a list of some smaller tweaks, bug fixes and quality of life changes:

• We also added some new coconut decoration variations and the new toy dinosaur decoration in three poses.
  
• Water ripples on the water's surface also don't poke out of the sides of the aquarium.
  
• When an aquarium is loaded there is a second or two where everything shows an alert when it does not need to. This has been more or less fixed it still happens occasionally and I am not exactly sure why but I will find out and stop it.
  
• Fish should now not get stuck when in the 'algae nibble' behaviour state. It happened sometimes due to how we detect a place for them to nibble which sometimes returned us a target position inside an object.
  
• The UI that pops up when you mouse over an object would flicker and jump around when the screen's resolution does not have an aspect ratio of 16:9. quite horrible but now fixed.
  
• Fish regain energy based on how much sleep they get. The more sleep they get the less quickly their energy is regained. We will probably tweak it further if players and ourselves feel like fish could regain even less energy while sleeping.

Thank you to everyone who posted kind words in the last update post that was made. We have in fact decided to add some decorations which serve as little pet memorials to the game. We will make some nice little sculptures of cats, dogs and other pets including fish. I cannot say exactly when but we will try to make some in the coming months. We are also going to write some career mode storylines where players will be asked to create aquariums that memorialize deceased pets and loved ones.

We wish you all a happy and safe weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello there,

There is no new build this week as things did not go as planned at all. Unfortunately a beloved pet died and as often happens around such circumstances any hope of productivity evaporates. Not a great start to the year at all.

My illustrious colleague made some very nice progress with her work. I managed to finish the paint job and poses of the toy dinosaur decorations as well as work on an amphora decoration.



There were quite a few things more that I had planned to work on which will instead be worked on next week as normal.

We wish you all a good weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello there,

Build 68 has been uploaded for you all play. It comes with a nice new shiny feature, UI tweaks and bug fixes.

Some of you may be wondering what the creature on this update's thumbnail is all about. It is a new decoration that will be finished soon but we thought it would be nice to give you all a sneaky peak of the model.



It is a toy dinosaur, a Dilophosaurus specifically, that will come in 3 poses. It will be quite fun and interesting to put this among areas of thick plant growth or rocks to create little prehistoric themed aquarium scenes. We have already made some good progress painting it and soon it will be finished and in the game. We will most likely add some toy dinosaurs in the future.

This week's nice new feature is the "Fish Storage" feature:


What this allows players to do is to remove fish from an aquarium and store them indefinitely and unchanged until the player puts them back into any aquarium. This will be quite useful in a number of scenarios. For instance if players are breeding fish and wish to keep the new fry safe once they have hatched they can now remove the parents from that aquarium and place them in a separate aquarium so there is no chance of the parents eating the new fry. Players could also create a special aquarium that is made especially for breeding or nursing unwell fish back to good health that fish can be transferred in and out of as needed.

It may also be useful for general maintenance. If the water chemistry has taken a turn for the worst and time is needed to fix it then it would be a good idea to just remove the fish and keep them safe until all the water chemistry issues are fixed.



Storage preserves all the key information associated with each fish that is put into it such as their name, health, energy, stress, age etc. They can be kept in storage for as long as players like and they will remain unchanged.

For now this feature is limited to live fish only. We may at some point make it so plants and decorations etc can also be stored but for now this feature is most important for fish. You don't have to careful with selecting fish before you add them to storage. If you happen to select the fish you want plus some plants or decorations etc the code is smart enough to ignore all none fish items in your selection. The icon for fish storage is found at the bottom of the screen next to the 'shop / inventory' button.

Changes to selection and manipulator settings:


These UIs took up way too much space and did not really have much explanation as to their meaning. Understanding how pivots and coordinate systems work always requires some explanation. Here as with other UIs players can mouse over the label and a brief bit of text appears that helps to explain what it enables.


There will be another update in the next week or two as usual. Hopefully it will include the dinosaur toy decoration as well as a new feature and the usual batch of quality of life improvements and bug fixes. We wish you all a relaxing weekend,

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Ah yes the first update of a new year. Build 67 should be uploaded either tonight or tomorrow morning. Rather than hit the gas too hard coming out of the Christmas season we decided to work on some smaller quality of life changes that have been annoying us and players for some time and of course fixed some bugs.

The scale tool has been rewritten to work a lot smoother than before and it's sensitivity has been increased so it should no longer take a lot of mouse movement to make things bigger or smaller.

smooth as butter.




I also managed to program non-uniform scaling but it is not enabled for players just yet. Non-uniform scaling if when you scale an object on only one or two of it's axis allowing you to squash or stretch the object. This sort of scaling is quite important for an application like this because it helps make things look less repetitive especially when populating an aquarium with a limited amount of items. Changing the shape and rotating many copies of the same rock does help a lot in making it seem like there are many different rocks scattered about the place.

In the Unity manual Non-uniform scaling is discouraged quite strongly especially for physics objects. The rocks, plants and wood etc are not being moved by physics but they are used by the physics system for collision detection and we ask a lot of questions of the physics system as to where objects are so we can help fish navigate. According to the unity documents having non-uniform scaled physics objects will cause things to be less accurate and also slower. I have not seen this so far in my tests and it is my hope that this rule only need apply to mobile platforms where performance problems are more easy to trigger. We will enable it in the game soon and see if players notice any performance problems.

Placement settings UI changes:


A small change was made to the placement settings ui that becomes visible when players are placing objects into the world from the inventory. The 'Align to surface' parameter is now something that can be faded in or out to give players a bit more control over the orientation of their objects relative to the surface they are being placed onto. By default it is now set to 50% which I found to be jolly good.



Another minor change was to where the placement help text is placed. Now that we dont have a chunky inventory UI taking up space towards the bottom of the screen we can put some useful information there.

A touch of polish to button labels:






It used to be the case that the interactive button labels would just appear at the position of the mouse when it hovered over a button or rollover control and move with the mouse until the mouse was no longer hovering over the ui that activated it. Very crude and upsetting it was but now the labels are positioned nice an neatly where they wont offend the eyes.

We also fixed a few annoying bugs. The most annoying was a bug where when players pressed enter or return it would take a screenshot and stick it on the desktop. This would be especially annoying if players like to rename all their fish as they are required to press enter to complete the name edit. Can't believe I didn't see that during testing. I must have been too eager to start eating mince pies before uploading.

It is going to be a very busy year and this rather odd and obscure little game is going to get a lot more interesting and complete. We wish you all a happy new year and lovely weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

We have a new build for you all which should be uploaded some time tonight, though when steam is busy on holidays such as today there can sometimes be problems when we try to upload. Build 66 will be the last build of the year 2021 and it comes with some nice goodies for you all to enjoy.

Female Ranchu Goldfish:


Male Ranchu Goldfish:


We have added a new species of goldfish, the lionhead ranchu goldfish. These are rather odd looking fish as they have no dorsal fin and quite often have a thick bubbly layer of skin on their heads which can sometimes grow to cover their eyes almost completely. Quite bizarre looking but friendly fish. We have also added a male red cap goldfish. We have a few more species of goldfish to add and then we can check goldfish off the list for a while.

Some new decorations:


We added some new colourful-ish smooth rocks/pebbles which can be seen in the image above and we have added a new plant called Hornwort which can be seen throughout the image too. It is quite a popular plant found in many aquariums. It is quite a tricky plant to make because it is hard to find two pictures of hornwort where they look alike and of course a lot of aquarists strategically prune their hornwort to look a certain way whereas some let it grow somewhat wild giving it a very furry/bushy appearance. No doubt we will keep tweaking it as time goes on to get the right visual balance for it. We have lots more hardscape items to add too.

Better shop/inventory ui:


We have updated the shop inventory to be more organised, less tedious and use less screen space. We have added tags associated with each category so players can narrow down the number of items on display at once allowing for much less scrolling to find the desired items. More items can be displayed at once and the whole ui can be moved about if needed.

Pathfinding improvements:

Old:


New:


Improvements have been made to how fish find their way out of cave like places. The old gif shows how troublesome it was for fish to do this. In most tricky cases the fish would need to be nudged by the player so they can get out of trouble. With the latest improvements the fish are much better at navigating through these tight spots when wandering about. You can see in the new gif that it takes not much time at all to figure things out. It is quite a nice improvement and more work will be done to make it even more robust.


It has been quite a busy year and the game has come a long way in that time. We did not get to finish and in some cases start working on certain features or get as much art content into the game as we liked. Though I suppose that is just all part of the chaos of working on complex projects. A lot of the most important things that we tweaked or added were inspired or prioritised by players giving us ideas and feedback. The game is much better as a result and the things that got deprioritised or delayed will just be worked on in the coming months.

Thanks to all who have supported the game and continue to give us valuable feedback. It really does help and we will continue the hard work into 2022. We wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 65 should be uploaded tonight. This post will be slightly shorter than usual but we did indeed get the red cap oranda goldfish painted and into the game.



Only the female is in the game at the moment. Next week the male will be added. There is not much difference between the males and females of these fish aside from some differences in belly shape and we will add some small variations in the models just so there are some minor differences for players to see so not all these fish look exactly the same. The next fish we are going to work on will be a Ranchu goldfish which will probably be added in two weeks.

The red cap oranda was the main thing that was finished this week because we were absolutely determined to get it into the game without further delay. We have a few other things that are nearing completion that we hope will make it into next week's update. A sunken row boat, more coconut shapes, an assortment of riverbed rocks and pebbles with interesting colours. We also will be adding a new plant, hornwort, which is a very popular aquarium plant that has been missing from Fishery for too long.

We are also making good progress with fixing some of the long standing issues with fish getting stuck in closed off spaces. We are aiming to have that into the game before Christmas along with all the art content we are working on. Busy times indeed.

We wish you all a good weekend.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 64 should be uploaded some time tonight and we have made some nice changes indeed.

Red cap goldfish model:


Somewhat disappointingly we only managed to finish the model of our newest goldfish rather than have it finished, painted and in the game. It is quite a complex shape with a lot of overlapping forms which are very rounded and that means we have to use more polygons to describe the forms otherwise it looks very blocky. At the moment the model is close to 5000 polygons which is very small by today's standards but remember that it should be possible to have 50 to 100 or even more of these swimming around our largest aquariums which means that we have to take care to optimize the polygon count as much as possible. I'll probably spend a bit more time finalizing the model before it can be painted and yes most likely next week it will be finished and in the game finally.

Beach Shallows Backdrop:


A new backdrop has been added! If players are making a tropical themed aquarium it may help to have a backdrop that resembles their natural habitat. More of these types of backdrops are planned such as a riverbed, the bottom of a lake, large garden pond, under an ice shelf etc etc. This one is still not entirely complete. We want to populate parts of it with seagrass and coral rock and even have some crabs walking about. Coral rock and live corals are something we are working on little by little and hope to have it in the game relatively soon so players can populate their aquariums with it and we can finish off this backdrop.

Decoration Squishing:


One of the roughest of the rough edges that we currently have in Fishery is the way decorations and plants poke out of the aquarium. This is the first step to addressing that problem. In the above image you can see on the left side what this aquarium looked like before and on the right side how it looks after today's update.



For now we are only applying this to the floor for reasons I'll explain in a little bit. As the object is being rendered by the graphics processing unit it executes some code that prevents the polygons moving below the "floor" plane. It is very simple and because it runs on the GPU it is very fast but it does have some drawbacks that matter if we want to apply this technique to the sides of the glass too.



It would be nicer if the squished parts of the model disappeared when they came in contact with the plane instead of hanging around making the object look melted. But only disappear from the side of the glass facing inwards. From the outside of the glass it would look nice if the rock looked like it was cut to perfectly fit up against the glass.



One problem that this technique causes is something commonly called "Z fighting". When two or more polygons exist in precisely the same position the graphics card renders them both but wont render them both in the same order every frame. The result is that flickering which you can see. This is very undesirable and will require some fiddling with the maths to make it go away which may or may not be simple but I won't know until I get stuck into it.



Anyway for this particular problem, having ugly protrusions through the aquarium floor, the technique works very well. When players move their mouse over where the object would be if not squished it still highlights so there is no chance of it being undetectable if players move the entire object outside of the aquarium either by accident or design.

This technique is only applied to decorations for now. Plants will have a similar fix at some point we hope. For plants we have to do more than just have them squish up against the glass like this because it looks ugly. Ideally we would have the plant deform and sort of bend as it collides with the glass rather than just go flat. It is more mathematically complex but we will give it our best shot in time.


Look forward to the red cap goldfish next Friday and we may have a few more nice new decorations and or plants to add. Busy week indeed. We wish you all a lovely weekend.

The Fishery Team.

Hello everyone,

Build 63 will be uploaded some time tonight. Unfortunately not everything went to plan this week because I spent most of the time in bed feeling rather unwell. My colleague and I will be adding the new goldfish into the game next week instead. Fortunately I was able to spend some time fixing important bugs today and yesterday.

There was a particularly ugly bug pointed out to us by some players. When time is sped up and there is a lot of floating food in the aquarium there would be some fish that mysteriously find their way out of the aquarium and cannot get back in. Fixing a bug like this is quite difficult to solve unless I can recreate it on my computer and study it's causes.



This meant that I had to spend a lot of time watching aquariums with time sped up and lots of floating food until fish would get pushed out. Luckily I was able to reliably recreate the bug and I believe the cause has been found and fixed. There is some code in place that will teleport fish back into the aquarium if they are detected outside of it if it turns out the cause was not in fact fixed.

Floating items like food should no longer clump up in the corner like they do in the above gif. However if you load a scene that contains clumped together food then it will still be clumped. The fix prevents unclumped food becoming clumped. It also works for floating plants like water lettuce. The code that helps calculate the motion of buoyant objects has been made simpler, smaller and faster as a result.

There were a few bugs fixed that affected the nudge tool if used when time was sped up. That seems to now be working as desired too.

There was an adjustment made to how sensitive the sound and music volume sliders are. Lowering them to around 40% made them almost impossible to hear. This also depends on volume settings players have for their speakers and the overall volume settings that the windows operating system controls. It could be rather tedious for players to get that right because it could mean adjusting three sets of volume controls but this should make it a little easier.

Well it was a slightly smaller update this week than we had hoped but next week should be pretty good indeed. We wish you all a lovely weekend.

The Fishery Team