Hello everyone,
It has been a one busy week indeed. Firstly a big thank you to everyone who bought the game and a further thanks to those who gave us feedback. Based on that feedback we made all the following changes. We will probably add a lot of similar fixes to the next few updates so the game is less tedious, confusing or annoying. Then we can pile on more art content and larger features. The game has already changed quite a lot in the last week. We ripped the guts out of a lot of code and removed a lot of things that were not working and we hope to do the same every week.
Cameras:
- The camera controls were just not working. We have remade entirely how the orbital camera works. Hopefully now it is more intuitive and allows players to navigate and get the right position with ease. For instance zooming by scrolling the mouse wheel will zoom into or out of the place where the mouse is positioned. Similarly the camera will orbit around the point where the mouse is when the player initiates the orbit movement. It seems quite simple but it works and feels much nicer than before.
- We have also added more settings for the camera in the game options so you can have even more control over the speed of certain camera actions.
- when you double click an object or select it and press "F". the camera zooms in and frames itself to that object. This was present in the first release but now you can orbit around the object without quitting the "framing mode". This is especially useful if you are framed in on a fish and want to rotate the camera around it without stopping the camera following it.
- The arrow keys now have the same effect as W,A,S,D
- Q and E move the camera directly up or down relative to the camera's rotation.
Creativity:
- The old shop ui has been removed and replaced with a set of more specific creation panels for the different types of objects and they are more organised. Specifically the initial aquarium selection panel has the aquariums organised into size categories.
- There are now creation settings attached to each object's creation panel. for instance when placing a decoration or plant you can choose to have the object align to the surface it is placed upon or not. it can have a random rotation or scale and you can adjust an initial scale option. this is useful if you want to create a set of small rocks and you don't want to place each rock and scale it manually. you just set it once and it will effect any object you create after that.
- when creating something that is dropped into the aquarium like a fish, fertilizer, food etc you can choose the number of items to be dropped at once time.
- new dark backdrop.
Quality of life changes.
- if you wanted to delete an object in the previous versions you needed to press a button to go into recycle mode, then select and object and then select a button that says sell. We have now come up with the radical idea to just use the delete key...
- you no longer need to press an extra ui button when you want to create something from a shop panel.
- money no longer exists. Money is something that will be part of the career system that will be released in the future but serves no purpose now. It caused a bit of confusion and made no sense to some people so that is gone. for now.
- item descriptions are also gone. most item descriptions have not been added to the game. there were a lot of "description coming soon.." which frankly looks unprofessional and makes the game look even more unfinished. so they are removed until a later date. Most likely there will be some sort of encyclopedia in the game that will hold all item descriptions and tips for players to browse when certain types of information will be useful when trying to uncover certain secrets and "hard to achieve" events.
- pressing p creates and saves the current screen to the desktop as a .png this is useful because you may want a screen-shot that has the ui visible and don't want to hit print-screen and then paste it into a paint app and save etc etc. now we have turned that feature off when the player is typing the name of their aquarium or renaming a fish that uses the letter "P". a real face palm bug from us that is fixed.
- the ui for renaming the aquarium after initial creation and naming is hidden for now and will be merged into the new and improved version of the aquarium manager ui that will be released at some point soon. which also means some more ui space is freed.
General:
- pressing escape brings up the quit menu.
- loading times should be a bit faster. There is less work being done during the loading routine which decreases load time and reduces memory use.
- we have added more graphics options that help improve performance. Players can now set the global texture resolution. this will improve performance for players with computers that have less graphics memory.
- players can turn off the water volume fog. This tends to slow things down a lot when an aquarium is very large and very dirty.
- hide the aquarium glass. the reflections of the glass were a bit distracting for some players. now they can be turned off.
- the ui has been completely changed around to make a bit more sense and increase overall space. less ui clutter is better.
It was a busy week indeed but the game is already much better than it was. Here are some things we wanted to add this week but couldn't get it into the game in time but will most likely be in the game during the next few weeks.
- creation brush tool.
- new substrate materials.
- more creation settings in the shop panel.
- tweaks and improvements to the manipulation tools - move, rotate and scale.
- few more tweaks to the camera.
- make the water chemistry simulation better and less confusing.
- fish behaviours and attributes: Idle/rest, fatigue/sleepiness
It is still a long road ahead but we are going to get there.
The Fishery Team.