Hello everyone,

Just thought it would be nice to show you all the progress that we have been making over the past few weeks. We have been mostly spending time working on art content for the game. Creating new content as well as fixing up some old content that is not holding up that well due to it's age.

Some of you might remember a few posts ago I teased some of the new fish by showing the dark silhouettes of them and asking viewers for guesses as to what they might be. There were quite a few guesses that were correct.

I think pretty much everyone guessed the copperband butterflyfish.


There were a few who guessed one was the lemon tetra.


I think perhaps one person got correct the identity of the last fish but I have not painted it yet so I shall just keep you all guessing in suspense.

The paintjobs for the black moor goldfish have been finished. They come in two slightly subtle variations.


A bit of time has been spent improving some existing fish. For instance the neon tetras currently in the game are among the first fish we made and they look a little outdated so we repainted them to look nicer.


The same was done to the tiger barbs. We were about to paint a set of emerald barb textures on the tiger barb models but realized the models were a little too fat and had some other shape issues we did not like so we adjusted the models and repainted their textures. Now there is nothing stopping us painting emerald barbs, gold tiger barbs, albino tiger barbs etc.


We have not just been making fish. We have been making some new decorations too.

This first item which most people would certainly not consider to be a decoration is the sort of thing that I have seen all my life when I go for a hike near a stream or river. We are going to be adding more "trash" decorations into the game over time so expect to see things like bottle caps, pieces of circuit board, broken glass etc in the future. As I say it does not make things prettier but it does give players more options to tell more types of visual stories in their aquariums.

There are so many types of rock that we want to add to the game that we could spend half a year just making rocks but we of course cannot do that. We can however do our best to sneak them into the game every month if possible.

Hakkai rock/stone is an interesting style of rock that is looks like it has been smoothed by erosion but also has lots of weird holes and dimples in it which apparently have been caused by bugs eating them. These types of stones are used a lot in Japanese style aquascapes.


We are still aiming to get the new build on steam in early to mid December which means November will be very busy for us indeed. Lots of tweaks and fixes are still needed and there is still plenty of art content to work on but it will be worth the effort. The next update post we do will probably be around the first of December where I will show you more of the larger feature changes and quality of life improvements we are making.

We wish you all a good week and good beginning to November.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone

It has been quite a while since we have updated you all with the latest goings on with Fishery. We did say we had planned to release a new build the first week of August. That date came and went with no update.
We have both gotten a bit burnt out lately and we sat and evaluated the state of the game and we found that there are just some aspects of it that are not working well and we should really fix them sooner rather than later.

The biggest feature on this list of things that were not working is the plumbing system. That has been completely removed. It was fairly interesting and made our game different to the other aquarium games that have recently come onto steam but it became a bit of a monster. We had some bigger plans for it that included much more plumbing devices that did interesting things but from the start it confused players a lot and perhaps was a little too much of a mini-game within the main game. I was personally was quite proud of it because how it works is fairly complicated and the code was quite tricky to get to work. Ultimately it became too much of a distraction for players who just want to focus on what is inside the aquarium and not what is in this abstract parallel dimension of artificial life support that the plumbing system was. It also became a little too much of a distraction for us making the game because what we planned for it took up a fairly sizeable chunk of art content, programming and our attention. It is unfortunate that it has to go but when things are just not working despite our best efforts then it has to go.



The first thing we did after removing it was to replace the two main things that the plumbing system allowed for. Artificial filtration and temperature control.



All of these devices are to be placed within the aquarium itself now and they come in three sizes that fit nicely in all our various sizes of aquariums. These devices would have run on power produced by power generators in plumbing system but power is no longer part of the game either because that was getting tedious too. We could have players pay for power consumption but adding virtual energy bills into the game as an exciting new feature would not be a good idea right now.

Light exposure is also gone. Why? you ask. Because it was so utterly terrible. I think no player liked it at all. It just made things annoying and tedious. We also hate it. Since light exposure is gone there is no reason to have a day and night cycle. Therefore the day and night cycle is also gone. We have kept the fish sleeping behaviour and now they take little rests at the bottom of the aquarium when they feel like they need a rest rather than when players turn the lighting to night lighting. This allows players to just focus on what they want to create and not be interrupted by the need to turn the light off or have the lights automatically turn off and things become dark. Lighting is still in the game and players only have to focus on one set of lighting rather than two.

Well enough about what is deleted. You are probably more interested in what we have added:



We added more visual overlays allowing players to see all the plants, food, dissolvables without looking at boring numbers. We will continue to add more visualisations like this.



Food the replenishes itself. Herbivorous fish will come and nibble at this special plant and so long as the water chemistry is what this plant wants it will regrow and provide more food in an endless cycle. We are going to have a carnivorous equivalent too.

One other change we have made for plants is that they cannot actually die the way they do now. Their health will go down to zero, they will turn brown etc but once the water chemistry is habitable for them they can fully recover. This means players who kill their plants do not have to delete the dead ones and replace them all which is not fun or interesting at all especially if you have hundreds of plants.



Tube sponges! This is Aplysina Fistularis and it acts as a natural filter for marine aquariums. The natrual filters for freshwater aquariums are the fungi which are already in the game but we are making them work more affectively in the next version.



Some of the old decorations in the game need replacing. The above image is the new versions of the stick decorations. The old stick decorations look like they are made for a playstation one game. They were made at a time when we had not much confidence in unity's ability to render large amounts of objects without slowing down. As time has gone on we have increased the quality of our art content because Unity was in fact able to handle it with all the other things we are doing in the game to degrade performance like navigation and collision detection. We will be doing this with more of our older decorations.



We are also adding some new stuff like this stone age head carving. We imagined that this is the sort of thing archaeologists might find at the bottom of a riverbed near to an old crossing point.

We are also adding more fish of course. We have been modelling a lot more fish and are making progress painting them. These fish are unfinished but they are looking nice enough to show nonetheless.

Harlequin rasbora wip:


Black moor goldfish wip:


I cannot say with too much accuracy when the next update will be available on steam but it will be before the end of the year. It is rather big and has a lot of changes including bug fixes and many of tweaks to animation, physics, particles, new object types (including coral). There is a lot more than what we have shown here. Things have changed so much that we have to redo the trailer and a good number of screenshots as well as parts of the steam page description. We don't like doing that too often because it takes some time to complete. Therefore we are doing as many changes as we can now that would require such changes to the steam store page so we don't have to do it again in another month or so.

In the meantime we will keep you posted on our progress and we hope you have an enjoyable Sunday.

The Fishery Team

Hello hello hellloo

I did in fact survive my camping trip and have re-joined my colleague and am working on the next update. To get back into work after a while gone. I have been concentrating on hunting down some rare bugs and working on overall code robustness. This also includes simplifying and deleting a lot of code. The less code there is the less places bugs can hide. Especially weird ones which have crept into the game over time.

As was talked about in a previous post I finished the model for the black moor goldfish. I'll show it off here once it has been painted. A lot more other species have been modelled and are awaiting painting too. Three of them are below but only shown in silhouette. See if any of you can guess what they are.

Mystery Fish A


Mystery Fish B


Mystery Fish C


We are aiming to get the next update onto steam by the first week of August. It is quite a big update but it allows us to knock off quite a few long standing items from our to-do list. I know I am being somewhat mysterious but I don't want to hype things up too much until they are actually on steam.

Hopefully this is not too much of a disappointing post but we are hoping to jam a lot of things into the second half of the year which means less build updates but they are bigger. We will of course keep you updated in posts like this in between builds with a few sneaky peaks at what we are doing.

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

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

This week's new build is mostly a bug fix extravaganza. A good number of non-critical bugs were pointed out to us on the forums and we found some others in the course of play-testing which we were able to fix as well.

The most interesting bug fixes and a few tweaks are as follows:

• Fry transforming into juveniles and juveniles transforming into adults did not consistently work properly.
  
• Strange aging problems of fry and juveniles.
  
• During breeding there were situations where the offspring of fish pairs would not properly choose at random which parent variant and gender to be.
  
• Fry were swimming around way too fast.
  
• Aggressive and semi-aggressive parents would eat their own fry after being only a little bit hungry.
  
• More tweaks to pathfinding, specifically figuring if there is an unobstructed straight line between a fish and target and deciding if the algorithm even needs to be run.
  
• Pausing the game would deselect everything.
  
• Fish can now breed even if they are very stressed.(in later updates this will affect the viability of any resulting eggs)
  
• Adjustments to the physics collider for the banana food item. It was too small before and caused it to jump around too much on the water's surface.
  
• The aquarium volume need in the fish selection UI was not updating properly.

We added a new reef rock:


This is the first of a few variations of reef rock that we will be adding. This is in preparation for adding more reef/marine species and decorations in the near future. This will of course include coral which we hope to start adding in summer if all goes well.

A new example aquarium has been added called "Angel Delight".


This has been a little bit of an "odds and ends" update. There are lots of other bigger things we are working on that need a bit more time but hopefully a lot of very cool and interesting things should be coming to the game during summer.

I am taking a little break for nineteen days starting from Wednesday the 1st of June. I am going on a little low budget camping expedition into the Scandinavian wilderness where the bears and wolves are apparently even more shy than I am. If any of you happen to be in the general Scandinavian area and come across someone wearing a Fishery t-shirt while painting watercolours of trees then do say hello. It will be good to have a little break and clear my brain before starting the next batch of updates.

My illustrious colleague will not be taking vacation at the same time and will be painting some new fish variations which will be put into a new build as soon as I am back.

As usual we wish you all a very good weekend and a splendid start to next week.

The Fishery Team

Hello everyone,

Build 72 was uploaded a few days ago on Saturday. It includes a lot of tweaks, fixes and enhancements.

Lighting Help Text:

We have added help text for the overall light control buttons. We also modified it's naming so it does not cause too much confusion with the new lights that we added in the previous build.







Instead of the light control buttons being called "turn on light" or "turn off light" they are named to be less confusing and the new help text should better explain what having each set of lights on or off will do in regards to the light exposure of your aquariums.



To make it even more clear we have modified the name of light exposure to be "Day light exposure" which should also make it more clear that it increases only when day lighting is enabled. We also slightly modified it's help text too.



To be consistent we also made sure to match the naming change for the requirements for fish and plants etc. So now every organism that had a light exposure need now has a "Day Light Exposure" need.

Hopefully this should clear up any confusion that we have created on the subject of lights and light exposure. If not then of course let us know and we will see about making further tweaks.

Lighting Gobos:






We added another small feature to the new lights. They are called "Gobos" or "Cookies". Think of them as shapes put in front of the light to cast a shadow. They can be applied to directional and spot lights. They are useful for spicing up the lighting a little bit and creating more interesting light patterns. We have added 12 simple-ish shapes to begin with but later on we will add some more interesting and complex ones. When Gobos are applied to direction lights they will start to behave more like a a spot light in the way that it's position is taken into account more than when a Gobo is not applied. We will add Gobos to point lights at some point in the future too.

We made further tweaks to how fish swim, their general behaviours and other enhancements:

• Fish overall motion should look a lot more pleasant when they are shoaling together.
  
• Fish more noticeably swim at their preferred depth.
  
• When larger fish take a bite of their food they are closer to the food and it looks more natural.
  
• The shape of fish physics colliders are now a much better fit than before so there is less chance of them getting caught or knocked around in tight situations.
  
• Pathfinding is a more efficient.
  
• At night once fish have slept enough they will swim slowly around so it is less boring.
  
• Algae and Waste visuals have been tweaked to be visible in the amount that matches their saturation better.
  
• Algae and waste that appears on the glass now interacts with lighting and shadows and is not 100% bright no matter the lighting conditions. It has also been tweaked to look better.
  
• Algae and waste particles have been turned off because we could not get them to interact properly with shadows and they stuck out and looked ugly. We will turn them back on in the future if we solve this.
  
• water fog has been tweaked to be less bright.

We jammed a lot of fixes and tweaks into this build and we still have a lot of similar items on the to-do list for the next build which hopefully will be uploaded some time within the next one or two weeks. Very busy time indeed but it is great to make things work better.

We wish you all a very good week.

The Fishery Team

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