Hello and happy new year to everyone,
Build 44 will be uploaded later this evening. We had a little bit of a rest this week with us only working half a day each day but we still managed to knock a few nice things off of the to-do list.
Black And White Clownfish Female:
Black And White Clownfish male:
These lovelies are Black and White Ocellaris Clownfish. We did not realise how many varieties of clownfish their are until doing research for this game so it was a pleasant surprise and gives us more opportunities for interesting fish varieties to add into the game in the future.
Sponge Filter and Swim Levels:
Most of my time this week was spent on adding the sponge filters into the game and working on fish behaviour and animation.
Sponge filters are a new type of item added into the game. They work differently than the waste filter found in the plumbing system. These filters require electricity to run and they have a maximum amount of waste that they can hold. They take waste from the water and store it within themselves where it decays into nutrients. We are going to be doing a lot more testing to determine exactly how much waste should be consumed and contained within sponge filters as well as the speed that they consume and recycle the waste so keep that in mind when using them. There are 3 sizes of sponge filter. We might add larger versions in time.
Another small feature that was added was the "Swimming levels" of fish. Certain fish like to hang around at specific depths in the aquarium. In the above picture with the sponge filter you can see the guppies swimming around near the surface and the tetras swimming around the middle. All fish in the game have their preferred swimming level but it does not display in any UI yet. They do go away from their swimming levels when they feel like it. For instance if they wish to nibble a rock or some substrate they will swim from their preferred depth to do so. The same for food that sinks or floats all fish will swim to eat it so there is no worry about your fish starving because you dropped the wrong piece of food. However that will change somewhat in the future when more food varieties are added. Certain fish prefer to eat at the surface while others prefer to eat near the bottom. This will be a feature too.
Here is a quick rundown of some other changes:
- Last week all the first were swimming a little slowly which was not intended and has been fixed.
- The puffer fish act a little more curious and swim around the bottom checking things out. If you have some interesting little caves/tunnels made out of rocks or wood then they seem to wander into them more often.
- New help entry that talks about the new sponge filters.
- Changes to fish obstacle avoidance. The size of the fish's collider is taken into account when determining if it needs to avoid an object. making it more accurate in certain circumstance.
- Placement settings in the shop are visible by default. We have the feeling not everyone knows they are there.
- fixed a bug where plant fertilizers particles are not playing when a scene is loaded and the fertilizer is already underwater.
- Changes to the wander and flock code ensures that if for some reason a fish cannot reach it's target because of an obstruction it times out and picks a new target to wander to.
- When running the game in windowed mode it will not pause if the player clicks outside the window.
- fixes to maths behind calculating how much food each fish eats with a single bite and how much should be removed from the hp of the food item.
Next week we are back to full days and lots more things to work on. If all goes well we will finally be able to replace our googly eyed red terror cichlid though I think it might return much later in the game as an easter egg. There are also a few other loose ends from last year that need to be tied up. Busy times indeed.
Once again we wish you all a happy new year and a good weekend.
The Fishery Team.