Hello everyone,
It has been an eventful and tiring week indeed. A lot of work has been done to improve the behaviour of the fish. We had very much hoped to be able to to have a new build showing it off today but we sort of ran out of energy. The last few builds we managed to upload really took a lot of brain power and I am personally fairly exhausted when it comes to coding. Excellent progress has been made but I would really like to refine things further before showing it to players
Not that I am complaining and this is not some sort of crisis. I just need a change of task to rest my brain a bit. So next week and probably the week after I will focus purely on making fish art. My esteemed colleague is busy working on some lovely new backgrounds which we should be able to show soon.
Most of the fish in the game are fairly old. You should be able to easily figure out which ones are old because they have very cartoony eyes. Our latest fish designs are much more refined, the models are much more detailed and our ability to paint these fish has improved greatly. The changes we made to the animated fish shaders in the last few weeks actually require the models to be more detailed so the animation looks smooth and lovely.
We have already shown in previous posts the progress that has been made on the Tiger barb fish, platys and guppies. My first tasks next week will be finishing these off and adding them to the game. It is important to replace the old fish before we add any more entirely new species just so the art style stays consistent among the fish and does not cause any confusion to new players.
The fish list on the forums keeps growing and over the weekend I'll check out more suggestions made by people and add them to the list. Each species requires a little bit of research before adding it to the list. The main thing we look at is the size of the fish. Adding really large fish, for instance a fully grown bluefin tuna would be quite difficult because we don't currently have an aquarium big enough to put them in and we need to experiment with how the physics system deals with such large objects interacting with smaller ones. We don't want smaller fish being accidentally blasted into orbit because a tuna swims into it.
We are actually writing a set of career mode objectives where players will need to raise bluefin tuna until they are juveniles to help increase the numbers in the ocean.
Sorry again that we could not get a new build out but good things are coming very soon and there will always be a new post every Friday detailing our progress.
As usual we wish you all a good weekend,
The Fishery Team.