Hello everyone,
Build 53 has been uploaded. It includes some really nice quality of life improvements and fixes. But before we talk about that:
Dwarf Gourami Pair:
Our Dwarf Gourami pair has been modelled and is ready for painting. We are glad to be adding these into the game soon as they are another popular request from players.
We have a nice pile of newly modelled fish that we have been making over the past few weeks and now the time has come to paint them all. Our aim is to have them all painted and added into the game by the end of the month. We will be showing our progress at the end of the week as always.
Debug Menu:
This is another requested feature. A menu for controlling sandbox parameters and other options. It only have 1 option at the moment but much more will be coming soon. The option that is included this week is a visualiser that we find useful when debugging fish movement. It creates a trail behind every fish so we can see where the fish have been swimming for the previous 16 seconds. We find it quite mesmerizing and even though it does not really have much use in terms of gameplay it perhaps brings an extra layer of interest for players.
It is especially useful for us when we debug fish movement through tricky or confined places. The shape of the lines help us to see if the fish navigates cleanly between obstacles or just whacks into them. Other options we will be adding will be the usual sort of sandbox options. For instance players will be able to turn off fish getting stressed or dying. Fish wont care about the oxygen levels, plants wont care about Co2 levels etc.
This should hopefully prevent some frustration felt by players who just want to create something nice but not have to worry about balancing all the water chemistry at the same time. It also should prevent some frustration caused by us not tweaking the numbers to their optimum values just yet. If fish get too hungry too fast then players will be able to turn off fish hunger so they can continue to play the game instead of turning it off in frustration. We will aim to add a few new options every time we make a new build.
Quality of life changes were made to some fish behaviour options. Semi-aggress and aggressive fish will not gobble up every fry in sight. They will only eat them when their hunger dips below 50% and there are no other food sources in the aquarium. This is a temporary change until we have ways for players to separate fry from the adults.
Tweaks were made to how fish navigate so they don't get stuck so often and then starve to death in confusion. Their obstacle avoidance abilities should also work better than before.
Pre-selection UIs have been made more clear and have been updated to match the selection UI style.
Some of the changes that we plan to do this month are quite large so we cannot guarantee that we can upload a new build every week but we will of course be posting our progress every week so everyone is kept up to date with what is coming. Some of the more interesting changes that we are aiming to add are:
- The ability for some fish to give birth to live fry.
- Fish predation V2, it wont just be fry that can be eaten whole but larger fish will be able to swallow smaller adult or juvenile fish in one gulp.
- Floating plants,
- More food choices for carnivorous and insectivorous fish.
As usual we wish you all a lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team