Hello everyone,
It is Friday once again and we have a new build. It is more of a cleanup/quality of life update but as you will see further down we have been furiously working on lots of other more interesting things.
The code for all UI buttons types is some of the oldest code in the game. Code this old is usually made at a time when we are not 100% sure about how the game should function and there is usually a bit of over-engineering done because we assume that certain types of functionality will be needed later on. Now that things are a lot more clear, all button code has been cleaned up. The code has been vastly simplified and reduced in size. There is also less logic that must be processed in order to determine what the player is doing to the button so the correct actions can be executed. Again this not very glamorous and exciting but craftsmanship in software is important and often overlooked.
Another small UI bug fix. When in windowed mode some parts of the ui would appear in the incorrect place for one frame and then snap to their correct position on the next frame. This would happen to ui elements that appear at the position of the mouse and are activated when the mouse is over an object or another ui element such as a shop button. This was very annoying and is now fixed.
Switching to windowed mode is now simpler. Rather than players cycling through a list of window sizes they can just resize the window like any normal window.
Tiger Barb Work In Progress:
Progress has been made with painting the tiger barb fish. They are not finished just yet but I think they are going in a good direction. Special consideration has been made to keep them stylized but also feel like they are referencing the real animals as much as possible. Male Tiger barb fish have more red in their colourings than females. We exaggerate it a bit here only because we don't want to cause confusion when players need to identify the genders of their fish for breeding etc. Critique is always welcomed but do keep in mind we are still working on them.
A few other small things have been worked on that will probably make it into the game very soon. Such as small quality of life fixes like objects created with the brush are not always created inside the radius of the brush. We also are trying to get the brush to feel less clunky and clumsy.
Pausing the game will actually be possible. We added it into the game when the plumbing system was first added but there is not a separate control that players can use if they need to. We were actually going to have pause ready for the very first release but it had a bug where fish would become invisible and not become visible again unless the game was restarted. Something in the fish shader did not like what was happening so we did not add the pause feature initially. However Pausing was entirely re-engineered for the plumbing system and now works 100%.
More progress has been made with the career/campaign mode. For those who are reading about this for the first time career/campaign mode is going to be the part of the game that is actually the "game" part. You start off in aquarium school and learn the basics of how everything works in the game. Then graduate and begin a career based on qualifications attained in aquarium school.
You then interact with various characters in the game that hire you. The jobs you get might be something as simple as "Please look after my fish while im on vacation" or something more complex like "Design a self-sustaining aquarium for my rare Betta fish and keep it within a budget of $8000" or "My Cichlid has a strange disease and needs to be nurtured back to health".
As you complete jobs you gain money and unlock new fish, plants, decorations etc. This also increases your rating so you can complete more complex jobs. You could also take some of this money you earn to go back to aquarium school and gain more advanced qualifications. Most jobs in the mid-late game will require players to have certain qualifications so it is important to gain as many qualifications as possible over time.
We want each career path to be very interesting and not feel like a repetitive grind to earn some random points that unlocks more items. This means each task the player has to complete should be as unique as possible. I have played open world games where the main story missions become very repetitive and are clearly the same mission types over and over again with different character names and slightly different objectives. However the side missions were a lot more engaging and more interesting outcomes sprang from their conclusions.
We want career mode to be like a game full of interesting side missions where players are actually interested to complete the task they are given and look forward to the next one. This also means there can be plenty of secrets. An interesting series of interactions with specific characters may lead to unlocking special items.
As you can imagine this requires a lot of writing and a lot of planning but we are getting it done. Aquarium school will serve as the way we teach players how to play the game which essentially means it is the tutorial system and it will be the first part of the career mode that we add into the game. If everything goes to plan the first iteration of aquarium school will be in the game before the end of May (2020).
Be sure to check out the forums. A new post has been made and pinned that shows an incomplete list of all the fish we are planning on adding into the game. Feel free to reply to it with your suggestions, we will add them to the list and at some point add them into the game.
As usual we wish you all a great weekend.
The Fishery Team