Hello everyone,
We hope you have had a very nice and festive time so far. We have been planning lots and lots of work that we will be doing for all of January's updates and we have been enjoying a few mince pies.
As we have said in previous posts there is no game update this week but we will be talking about a very important feature which will serve as the backbone of the game. Also note that all the names and terminology used is just for illustration purposes and the diagrams are just to try and help explain things a bit more visually in some places because there is a lot of text.
Career mode:
It may not actually be called "Career Mode" in the game but using this term is the simplest way to explain this set of features.
In it's simplest form career mode is the "things to do" in fishery. Think of it as the system that deals with objectives/missions/jobs and allows players to make progress. Progress in this mode comes in the form of unlocking more items to use in your aquariums such as fish, plants, decorations and more aquariums etc. While at the same time levelling up your experience so you can take on more complex objectives and earn money.
"Aquarium School"
Players will start off career mode as if it is their first day in "aquarium school". After the annoying but necessary tutorials about how to move the camera and select objects, players will be given a set of assignments which introduce them to the fundamentals of the game's systems. What is Oxygen? How does it affect the aquarium? Can there be too much or too little of it? This information will be taught to the player through a set of assignments.
An example of one of these assignments would be that the player must raise the oxygen level in an aquarium so it can support a few fish. It will also explain how players can tell if fish are unhappy with the oxygen level and give tips to achieve a good balance of oxygen creation and consumption.
Once the player has a basic understanding of the core systems in the game they can then access the more complex assignments that teach them more complex and specific features of the game which will allow them to acquire"Qualifications".
"Qualifications"
In real life people cannot operate a vehicle, perform heart surgery or imprison someone without owning a piece of paper that says they are allowed to do so. It will be the same in Fishery. Players will unlock new fish, plants, decorations and more after they acquire qualifications specific to those items.
There will be a lot of qualifications and players can choose which qualifications they want to acquire. Some players may only be interested in breeding fish. Therefore they would need to start by acquiring the "Beginner fish breeding qualification" which could consist of a set of assignments such as:
- create a small freshwater aquarium and decorate it with rocks, bog-wood and small grassy plants.
- maintain an oxygen level of "medium high".
- feed your fish with high quality fish food until their diet status is "superb"
- create an nice area for where your fish will lay their eggs. (this depends on the species, some lay eggs on the floor, others create a bubble nest, other methods are...classified)
- increase the temperature to allow for better egg incubation.
- separate the baby fish from parents to prevent them being eaten. (some fish do this but not all)
- raise the hatched babies to be juveniles.
After all these tasks have been completed successfully the player then acquire the chosen qualification and they will unlock more items and receive money. There will also be scenarios where the aquarium is already set up and players need to modify it in order to pass their qualification exam.
Players can then choose to go onto the next level of qualification in that subject which might be "Intermediate fish breeding qualification" which can be accessed only if the previous qualifications of that subject have been acquired.
Some of the more advanced qualifications may require other qualifications not directly related to the one players are trying to access. For instance there might be an "advanced fish breeding qualification" that requires "Intermediate Botany" or "beginner fish care"
There will be lots of qualifications that cover a large range of subjects like fish health, plant care, decorating, habitat maintenance, plumbing, automation using machines, algae control, waste management, breeding, aquarium specialisation and many more.
All the qualifications will be displayed in a nice window so players can keep track of it all and it will be very clear what each qualification unlocks. There will also be a sort of encyclopedia that gets updated with all the important information about a qualification after it is acquired so players only need to do a bit of reading instead of re-doing the assignments if they have forgotten some of the knowledge.
"Job Portal"
Just like in real life when people complete a degree at university or an apprenticeship they are then able to find work based on that qualification. The same is true for Fishery. When players have qualifications they can then seek and accept jobs from the "Job Portal". The job portal is the in-game version of a freelance job website. Players can browse and accept jobs they are qualified for in exchange for unlocking new items and money to buy them.
For instance if a player has the "Intermediate Fish Health Care" qualification they would be able to accept a job that is titled something like:
"My fish has an illness and it needs medical help". If the player accepts it, they then receive a sick fish that they must nurture back to good health. Depending on the type of illness the fish has, the time taken to cure it will vary. This might require the player to build a specialised medical aquarium fit for curing a particular illness. If the fish gets better then the job is complete and they receive money and a positive review. If the fish cannot be cured or dies then no money is received and they get a negative review. But we don't want every outcome to be the same. It might be that the person the player is doing the job for realises that their fish would have died anyway and still gives the player money and positive review.
"Storylines"
We really want to avoid a situation where every job of a certain type is more or less the same with a few changes in text so a lot of work will go into making sure there is a lot of variety in everything. There will be storylines associated with some characters in the job portal. Perhaps players do a small job very well and the client comes back with more work that is more work interesting allows players to unlock more items that are rare.
For instance if you do a job for a high-end fish seller, at first you might be asked to breed some fish that are quite simple to breed and then after several successful job completions the fish seller comes back with a very rare species of fish that needs breeding. As part of the reward for successfully completing the assignment the player unlocks this rare fish, and this may be the only way to unlock this fish.
Just as an example of a few other example job titles. "Design a tropical aquarium for a hotel lobby" "I'm going on vacation please look after my fish" "my fish wont breed, help me make my aquarium more suitable for breeding" "I have too much algae, HELP!"
Each job will come with a description, success or fail conditions, reward/payment info etc.
Hopefully this gives you all a glimpse of what we have been cooking up behind the scenes. The entire system is much larger but this should give everyone an overview of the sort of thing that is planned. It is quite enormous and we will be adding it into the game piece by piece. The first release of this system will hopefully be sometime towards the end of January. It will have some basic assignments and qualifications and we will just keep adding to it from there.
Players will of course still be able to make sandbox aquariums.
There is a lot of text for everyone to digest. Hopefully it makes sense. If some parts are confusing then write a comment and we will try to explain it better. As was said before the exact naming of things has not been decided just yet so the naming may not make much sense or seem not well thought out.
Next week's development update will most likely not include an update to the game itself but we will post more information about upcoming features we are working on.
We wish you all a very happy new year!
The Fishery Team