Mar 13, 2020

FISHERY - Undercover Cheese

Hello everyone,

It has been a very good and productive week and we are happy to say that a new build has already been uploaded.

Now that we are not 100% focused on just getting the plumbing system in the game we have been able to focus on lots of things that have been irritating to us and players over the past few weeks. But we did make a few small additions to the plumbing system too.

We added the first "Nutrient Injector". It adds nutrients into the water via the plumbing system. This means players will not need to rely on adding dissolvable fertilizer balls into the water periodically. Hopefully this will ease everyone's stress. We intend to add lots of these kinds of plumbing devices over time. Each device will do one thing. There will be different versions of each device. For instance this nutrient injector is quite small but perfect for small aquariums. Larger aquariums might require adding more than one in order to add enough nutrients to the water. This is of course fine but it would also make sense to make larger nutrient injectors that can add much more nutrients into the water so things are less tedious.

Power generator:

Heater:

Filter:

We also added the first versions of particle effects and animations to the existing plumbing objects. These will also improve over time, they will get dirty and show signs of wear over time. We really want the plumbing system to feel like a mechanical digestive system. Lots of different devices doing different things but working together to support the ecosystem above it.

Fish selection UI:

Now that we are not focusing 100% of plumbing we really want to knock a few things off the to-do list. This brings us to the UI. There is still a lot of confusion as to why a plant or fish might die. This is because the needs of these organisms are not properly communicated to players via UI. Hopefully this first set of ui changes help.

Water chemistry UI:

Plant item, shop UI:

These UIs have gone through many iterations in six months but each change gets us closer to what works well and helps us make better choices when programming the internals of the simulation. Quite often if the data is too complicated to display to players in a coherent manner then the system is probably overly complicated or missing something important. As time goes on we change it over and over and eventually end up with something that with hindsight is totally simple and obvious but we are not there yet.

We also spent more time finding and fixing bugs. We found a few rather ugly bugs at the beginning of the week and patched them out of the game.

Next week is going to be very interesting. We have another long list of things that we hope to get into the game so stay tuned.

The Fishery Team

Mar 13, 2020

One Week Later - A First Update

Test Tube Titans - GhostTime

After watching a number of people play the game this past week, as well as listening to feedback on the forum and some notes from my friend's 4-year-old son, I've made a number of fixes and improvements to the game. Here's the most note-worthy changes:

New Difficulty Settings

- Damage Scaling - This option will let you turn down the damage your titan takes to 50% or can prevent all damage to your titan, making it completely invulnerable.
- Wave Intervals - Slow down the rate of reinforcements showing up by 2 or 3 times, or turn off enemy waves completely.
- No Dismemberments - If you're sick of your titans breaking their arms and legs, this option is for you.
Note that enabling any of these difficulty settings will prevent you from submitting your scores to the leaderboards, but will otherwise allow you to progress through the game at your own pace.

Other New Changes

- Hands will now never break off - the hands were a little too easy to break so I've fixed them from ever coming off again (though your arms can still rip off given enough pressure).
- Blood Toggle - in the visual settings you'll be able to turn off blood if you are sensitive to it, or if you have a child playing and want a slightly less violent experience for them.
- Humans should be easier to kill now - hitting them with a kick should knock them out now, instead of always having to crush them every time.
- Eating humans now lets your titan recover 10x as much health, which is a huge advantage, especially in the early game.
- Auto-walk controls using the left stick have been re-jigged - they should be much more functional in general, although using per-foot controls will still be the most effective way to get around. Some titans may be affected for the worse by this change, but in general I think this should make the auto-walk much more effective.
- Made a few of the first lab upgrades cheaper - larger holding cells and research upgrades for level 2 will cost the same as other early upgrades to incentivize these essential ones.
- Lowered the minimum height for the gameplay camera since I know some players wanted this.
- Various minor text fixes.

The change should be going live around the time of this being posted. As always, if you notice any issues you can let me know in the forum and I'll see what I can do for future updates.

Mar 13, 2020

Update to Version 0.149

The Political Process - Verlumino

The game has been updated to version 0.149.

Additions
- Added a button to Contact All Organizations (it is no longer necessary to contact each individual organization and PAC).
- Added a button to Attend All Available Organization events (where the player gets to know the policy interest of each organization). It is no longer necessary to contact each individual organization to attend that organization's event.
- Added an option to sort the election type in the election archive menu; you can now specify if you want to view all elections, general elections, or primary elections.

Fixes
- Fixed an issue where the election history archive would not reset if loading a save file before version 0.148. (This occurred only when playing a game with election history data and then loading an old save file in the middle of the game).
- Adjusted teacher salary legislation so that teacher salary cannot be set to 0. This is to prevent a possible error if the value is 0.
- Fixed an issue where the history of cabinet members would not update if player won reelection as an incumbent.
- Fixed an issue where details for the Cannabis Sales Tax legislation did not appear in the legislation news section.

Improvements
- Adjusted general elections to account for "party loyalty". This will prevent a candidate from winning 90% of the opposing party's votes. It is still possible for a candidate to win voters from the opposing party, but it will be much less than 90%.
- Adjusted the city council budget process so that a member of the majority party makes budget decisions. Previously, the highest ranking member of the city council, regardless of political party, made budget decisions, which could lead to the possibility that the city council rejected the mayor's budget even though the majority of them should have supported it.

Mar 13, 2020

Patch v0.5.1 released!

Australian Football Coach 2020 - Statto Software

The first patch is coming not even eight hours after the first public release of the game! Thanks to everyone for their feedback so far.

Nothing game-changing here, but a couple obvious bugs are fixed, and some minor improvements on places like the selection screen. Expect another patch in a day or so as work continues, and please continue leaving feedback!

VERSION 0.5.1
- Fixed bug: Scoring shots would stay displayed on the screen in some instances
- Fixed bug: Fixture lists loaded from a file didn't display on the matches screen properly
- Fixed bug: Unhappy players no longer request contract extensions
- Fixed bug: Game wasn't saving on exit
- Improved: Assistant coach selects team now turned off by default
- Added: Height and weight added to player selection screen
- Added: Force white/black jersey numbers
- Added: Player morale to Renew Contract screen
- Added: Option of opaque or transparent players on matchday screen

Mar 13, 2020

I Like My Heat Tidal | Update 25

Universe Sandbox - 24 is the highest number

Run Steam to download Update 25, or buy Universe Sandbox via the Steam Store.

Update 25 brings significant improvements to our temperature and surface simulation, adding stability and accuracy, drastically improving speed, new object properties, and a rewrite to our tidal heating model. We’ve also added some often-requested features such as “Replace Object” and graph data export, as well as relocating save data associated with removing the “²” from “Universe Sandbox”.

Major Surface Simulation Performance Improvements
Moving from Shader Model 3 to 5, a feature of most modern graphics cards, allowed us to utilize new technology (compute shaders), lowering the video memory requirements of the surface simulation by almost half and increasing performance substantially. Moving forward, this will allow us to add additional complexity to surface grids, better collisions (using smoothed-particle hydrodynamics), and gorgeous graphical features. Because of this change, we have updated our minimum system requirements.

Temperature & Atmosphere Rewrite
Tidal heating and temperature calculations have just received a major rewrite. This includes significant improvements to vapor flow, atmosphere energy retention, and overall object energy absorption and radiation. You can see these properties in action in the new Energy Flow section in an object’s Surface tab, and in our new Energy and Heating guides.

Hot-swappable Celestial Object
A "Replace Object" button has been added to the Properties panel. This will allow you to hot-swap any object in the simulation for any other object, enabling a bunch of fun scenarios that were hard to do in the past.

The “²” is Silent
Just call us “Universe Sandbox”, we’ve gotten rid of the “²”. When loading the update for the first time, you may notice a "Migrating Data" message. We're automatically reorganizing settings and saved files to reflect the name change.

Check out the full list of What's New in Update 25