Hello everyone,

It has been a very busy week once again and no new build as of yet but it is coming closer. We made a lot of progress in a few different areas this week.

Discus fish painting work in progress:

This is the first female discus fish to be painted. Whenever we paint a new type of fish quite often we spend time trying out techniques so we have a better understanding of the visual language of a fish. For instance the clown fish requires different techniques in brush work and use of gradations of colour than would be used when painting a betta fish or a guppy. For this particular discus which is based on a Blue diamond variety it looks like we will have to paint two different colour maps. one with deeper more saturated blues and another with brighter slightly turquoise blues and they are blended based on the angle of fish's surface relative to the camera. Sort of like what you get with butterfly wings where if viewed from the right angle they have this sort of metallic brilliance to them.
Then of course we have to deal with adding some fish scale details. We knew these would be tricky customers indeed but actually the hardest part about painting this particular fish is finding the right blue colours. If you do an image search for "blue diamond discus" you will find that it is really hard to find exactly the same set of blue tones from image to image. This is important for us because we put together a colour palette for each fish and we want to try and get the true set of perfect blue tones for this variety but if all images show different blues then we have a hard time deciding what is the true blue colours of the blue diamond discus.

Mealworm:

The next food item we are working on is the mealworm. There is also a slightly sneaky agenda we have with adding this fellow. It allows us to prototype some of the kinds of animation techniques we hope to use for shrimps in the future. Specifically getting some interesting leg movement using only shader maths. We cannot use traditional skeleton based animation techniques because it takes a lot of processing per creature. We want players to have hundreds of shrimp or crabs scurrying about so we have to do things the hard way and the mealworm is the perfect vessel to try out these techniques over time.

Floaty plants:

Our first floating plants have been added to the game. The colours look a little radioactive at the moment and will be graded to look more natural this week. This is water lettuce and it is dropped into the aquarium where it floats about and makes the water's surface look more interesting. It's leaves are out of the water so it will not consume any Co2 from or add Oxygen to the water. All it consumes is Nutrients from the water. This is useful because players can reduce excess nutrients in the water so that algae levels can be controlled naturally.

The Nudge Tool:

Floating plants cannot be manipulated in the same way as other plants in the game because they rely on physics calculations to give them buoyancy to make it look like they are actually floating on the surface of water. Our solution which is quite well timed is to introduce the nudge tool. I say that it is a well timed solution because this tool was suggested by players who want to be able to move fish if they get stuck while navigating.

Fish Harassment:

You can see here that it is now possible to confuse the heck out of your fish by telekinetically moving them through the water. It is a short term fix for their navigation problems but It also has other uses.

Food Presentation:

Other physics objects like food sometimes fall into hard to reach places and fish cannot get to them. Well not anymore because players can now drag food into a neat little pile if they so wish.

Debug Menu Additions:

The next thing to be added to the debug menu is the ability to turn of the pre selection UI. When you move your mouse over any interactable object in your aquarium a little UI panel appears that says it's name and some other information. Now it can be turned off. It is especially nice to turn off when using the new nudge tool as you can see in the gifs.

Well that is it for this week. It has been quite busy with a few different areas of the game being worked on. This coming week we intend to focus on fish painting entirely so we should have some finished discus to show you all. Hopefully we will have two pairs of varieties to show you which will amount to four uniquely painted fish and the painted mealworm and perhaps even get started with an angelfish. We will do our best.

We wish you all a relaxed Sunday.

The Fishery Team.