Hello everyone,
build 49 should be uploaded in a short number of hours. We are just doing some final checks and testing.
We have made progress that will allow us to add to some very interesting and needed changes to the game.
The barebones version of the day cycle has been added. You can see a little ui in the bottom left of the gameplay screen. What it shows is the age of your aquarium on the left and the current time of day on the right. There is a little progress slider in the middle that shows the progress through the day.
There are also two buttons for turning the light on and off. The player is in control of the light but there will be a small bit of ui that allows you to set the time of day that the lights turn on and off automatically but that will come a little bit later.
We now have these 3 key pieces of data that can be used throughout the game by anything that finds it useful but keep in mind that nothing in the game actually looks at this data yet. Lots of changes will come in the following weeks to make this a reality.
The first things that we will program to take advantage of the day and night data will be keeping track of the age of fish. We can have the growth cycle of fish make more sense and feel more natural. Algae can grow according to how long the aquarium is exposed to light.
Fish only need to eat once a day and at night they will be able to sleep to regain some energy. Certain breeding behaviours like breeding at first light in the morning can be achieved. Each species of fish and plants have their own requirements for hours of light per day that players will need to take into account when housing these species together.
Plants consume oxygen from the water when there is no light to generate energy which means the levels of co2 and oxygen will alternate cyclically making it possible to naturally balance out the water chemistry over time instead of levels going permanently up or down.
We can now also start to make steps towards making the lighting customizable. This will be a bit further down the line in development but there will be the ability to control the brightness, colour and depth that the light reaches and later on more advanced lighting setups will be possible.
It's a giant list of things that will be possible now which is very exciting.
Small tweaks to the sculpting ui.
We took away some of the on screen controls of the sculpting tools in favour of having keyboard shortcuts about 2 weeks ago but soon after we made the update we were informed that not every player is able to use the mouse and keyboard at the same time while playing the game. We have added back these on screen controls that now allow for the same functionality by using the mouse only.
Accessibility is something we probably should have been a bit more mindful of when making all these changes so in the near future there will be more of an effort to at the very least make sure that playing the game only with a mouse is possible and not cumbersome. We have also been researching more into what we can do for players with colour blindness.
We know almost nothing about the subject of accessibility so a lot of research is going to be done into this area so over time our game can be played by hopefully almost anyone.
Next week will be very busy indeed. There are some new fish models that need to be finished as well as some new types of plants that we hope to get into the game soon. There is also the matter of integrating all the new day and night cycle functionality into the game so hopefully next week's update will be very interesting indeed.
Luckily we can have a little rest over the weekend before this huge set of tasks and as usual we wish you all a very good weekend too.
The Fishery Team