Hello everyone,
It has been another busy week and we have done much. There is no new build this week but we can give details on something special that will be in the next build.
Generic fry and juvenile:
Ahh yes, the first phase of the breeding features will be in the next update. In the above gif you can see a juvenile fish and a tiny fry. They are meant to look somewhat generic. This is because the first version of breeding that we put into the game will be relatively simple.
What we mean by simple is that all fish that exist in the game now and any new ones we add for a will all breed in the same way and their offspring will look the same until they grow into young adults. The "style" of breeding that all fish will adopt at first is based on how zebrafish breed. The female releases eggs and the male fertilises them soon after. The eggs then hatch around 3 days later and if all goes well these young fry will survive into adulthood so they can have babies too.
Certain requirements will need to be met before the fish are comfortable enough to breed. They must be healthy, not stressed, the population in the aquarium should not be too high etc. Each fish will have their own requirements specific to their species. These requirements will be shown to players in game. Quite often fish eat eggs that have just been released, often by the female who released them, this means that the eggs need to be protected. In the wild the eggs usually fall in between small rocks or into some dense vegetation where larger fish cannot follow. We of course plan to imitate this as best we can in our game so players will be encouraged to use specific types of substrate and have specific species of plants present in their breeding aquarium so when the eggs are released they have a higher chance of survival.
As we develop these features further we will implement more breeding behaviours such as bubble nests, giving birth to live fry etc. We will also be looking into ways that players can separate fry from adults without just deleting adults from the aquarium. Adult fish will only eat fry if they themselves are starving. There are species of fish that will eat fry as soon as they see them. That behaviour wont be added until we have ways to reliably separate them so we don't frustrate players. There are quite a few ways to do this in real life like adding a little box within the aquarium or having large separators that effectively split the aquarium in half. These are being looked into as well as a few more ideas that could be interesting.
So to briefly summarise. Breeding will be in the game a small number of weeks from now. It will be simple at first but all fish currently in the game as well as new ones we add will be able to breed. Over time we will upgrade all the breeding features to accommodate the various ways that fish breed as best we can. That will include updating the fry and juvenile models to look like young versions of the species they belong to but for a while all fry and juveniles will look as they do in the gif at the beginning of this post.
Feel free to ask any questions and I'll try and answer them asap but I will be working on fish AI intensely tonight and over the weekend so I may not reply to questions too often but I will reply to them.
We wish you all a great weekend.
The Fishery Team