Hello everyone,
We are in fact early with week's development update. Quite a lot is being worked on but a good portion of it wont be ready until next week's update. That will include the new fish we are adding and more realistic eye textures for all fish. We wanted to get the fish eye textures into this week's update but we need to spend a bit of time modifying the models of each fish to accommodate the new eye shapes.
We have also been making significant progress in the planning stages for the career system. The career system will be the answer to the question that people rightfully ask, "what the heck do you do in Fishery?". The main thing that is missing at the moment is some sort of progression coupled with tasks and other things to do. This will be one of the first things added to the game when we come back in January and it will significantly change the game for the better.
A quick reminder that next week will be the last update we do this year that will accompany a new build of the game. There probably will be a development update post like this one every Friday over the Christmas season. It will probably talk more about certain ideas and plans we have for the first weeks of 2020 and later on in the year.
But more of about all of that next week. What have we been working on that has made it into this week's update I hear you ask.
The treasure chest item now looks and behaves much nicer than before. This has been something that has bugged us for a while. We built this lovely little treasure chest but the treasure inside looked like it was from a game made in 2002.
The treasure has been made with more polygons and made the shader has been modified to look shiny. We have also animated the lid to open and close every 10 seconds and when it opens it emits bubbles. Players can have the same amount of control over it's gas balance and rate as they do with the air stone. From a computer code point of view the treasure chest is a type of air stone.
Changes have been made to the scale manipulator so it's visual appearance is more consistent with the translate and rotate manipulators. Changes have also been made to the rate in which objects scale when the manipulator is manipulated. It was quite sensitive and hard to make precise changes to an object's scale. This has now been reduced so things scale at a rate that hopefully does not frustrate players.
All items that can be scaled have had their maximum scale limit removed. This means players can scale things to be as big as they want. The minimum scale limit is still in place. This is to prevent the physics system soiling itself when physics colliders are scaled too small or even inverted.
A fair few quality of life fixes have been made to how manipulators and creation brushes react when players switch game modes. For example being in the shop mode whilst having an object selected and manipulated whilst switching to inspect mode and then back again would not see the translate manipulator re-appear but the translate button would still be turned on. That is a bit of a mouthful to say but it's goofy and annoying behaviour which does not create a pleasant creative experience. Similar fixes were also made for the brush creation tool.
Well that is it for this week. Next week's update post will probably be quite long because there will be much to talk about. As always feel free to ask questions, talk about features you want in the game, request new fish, plant species etc.
Have a great weekend,
The Fishery Team