Hello everyone
It has been an exceptionally productive week with some quite exciting things to discuss about upcoming features but unfortunately for a second week in a row we cannot upload a new build.
This is because we have been rather too enthusiastic about making progress and have broken certain parts of the game. We did say this month we plan to completely rip the guts out of the game in order to make big changes. The problems always arise when we have to suddenly put all the guts back in and expect everything to work with no problems and the culprit is as always the user interface. Despite these minor setbacks we are extremely happy with the progress being made and it is really opening doors for more gameplay features that we are going to add in the future. Some of which we are going to talk about now.
A subject much talked about in the forums and reviews is the subject of water chemistry. Specifically controlling water chemistry through the use of machines. Like filters, C02 regulators, thermometers, PH regulators etc. Specifically people talk about the current lack of such items in our game.
The problem we as game designers are trying to capture the essence of that part of the aquarium experience so we can satisfy players who want to deal with the more technical side of things, but not have it overlap too harshly with the creativity part of gameplay.
In other words filters, regulators etc. can be a little bit big, bulky and ugly and may visually ruin an aquarium. However we think we have solved this conflict.
Quite often for medium to large and extremely large aquariums there is fairly large amount of plumbing involved just to keep the water nice for the plants and fish but the size of the filters and regulators are themselves so large that they could not fit inside the aquarium at all and must be placed either next to or beneath it. This is known as a "plumbed aquarium". This is how we will implement filters and regulators and all the wonderful machinery and piping associated with it.
These images are just a quick concept mock-up made in our 3D software and are made only to represent the possibilities of what things could look like.
There will be a menu button the quickly switches to a new mode where the aquarium becomes invisible and the area underneath the aquarium becomes visible and the focus point for the camera. Players can then work on constructing the plumbed filter system. There is an intake pipe and an output pipe represented in the images by those two arrows. Players will need to connect the water coming in from the input pipe to various devices such as filters, temperature regulators, PH regulators, C02 regulators and then connect to the output pipe which brings the modified water back into the aquarium.
Each aquarium is a different size and so is the size of it's "plumbing area" meaning larger tanks have more space for this than smaller ones. This means players will need to think creatively about how they connect up their systems to best make use of the space. The end result is that players will have full control over the water chemistry and it wont be annoying either visually or technically.
It also goes beyond having simple filtration and C02 regulations. For instance, there will be fish and other organisms added to the game that love eating algae so there must be a plentiful supply in the aquarium for them eat. Players will be able to tweak their systems so they can have a perfectly balanced, high algae content aquarium.
There will even be little devices that can be added to the system that put algae spores into the water to keep algae growth at a consistent level.
The possibilities are huge, we could have hormone injectors that add special breeding hormones to the water to increase fish fertility (when we have added the breeding system). Or players could harvest breeding hormones from the water and sell them in career mode (when we add career mode). Players might also want more electricity so they can have more powered decorations or air stones in the tank. Why not add a few mini electricity generators into the pipeline so the power output is higher, or even add a small nuclear reactor which increases power and water temperature so you can have tropical fish and plants. Certainly no downside or unforeseen consequences to surprise players with there.
It is such a fun and exciting set of features that I fear I am rambling so I shall wrap this up by saying this is being worked on and we are going to try and get the first version of this mode into the game before the end of the year and of course we shall keep you updated with it's progress.
The Fishery Team