Hello everyone
It has been quite a while since we have updated you all with the latest goings on with Fishery. We did say we had planned to release a new build the first week of August. That date came and went with no update.
We have both gotten a bit burnt out lately and we sat and evaluated the state of the game and we found that there are just some aspects of it that are not working well and we should really fix them sooner rather than later.
The biggest feature on this list of things that were not working is the plumbing system. That has been completely removed. It was fairly interesting and made our game different to the other aquarium games that have recently come onto steam but it became a bit of a monster. We had some bigger plans for it that included much more plumbing devices that did interesting things but from the start it confused players a lot and perhaps was a little too much of a mini-game within the main game. I was personally was quite proud of it because how it works is fairly complicated and the code was quite tricky to get to work. Ultimately it became too much of a distraction for players who just want to focus on what is inside the aquarium and not what is in this abstract parallel dimension of artificial life support that the plumbing system was. It also became a little too much of a distraction for us making the game because what we planned for it took up a fairly sizeable chunk of art content, programming and our attention. It is unfortunate that it has to go but when things are just not working despite our best efforts then it has to go.
The first thing we did after removing it was to replace the two main things that the plumbing system allowed for. Artificial filtration and temperature control.
All of these devices are to be placed within the aquarium itself now and they come in three sizes that fit nicely in all our various sizes of aquariums. These devices would have run on power produced by power generators in plumbing system but power is no longer part of the game either because that was getting tedious too. We could have players pay for power consumption but adding virtual energy bills into the game as an exciting new feature would not be a good idea right now.
Light exposure is also gone. Why? you ask. Because it was so utterly terrible. I think no player liked it at all. It just made things annoying and tedious. We also hate it. Since light exposure is gone there is no reason to have a day and night cycle. Therefore the day and night cycle is also gone. We have kept the fish sleeping behaviour and now they take little rests at the bottom of the aquarium when they feel like they need a rest rather than when players turn the lighting to night lighting. This allows players to just focus on what they want to create and not be interrupted by the need to turn the light off or have the lights automatically turn off and things become dark. Lighting is still in the game and players only have to focus on one set of lighting rather than two.
Well enough about what is deleted. You are probably more interested in what we have added:
We added more visual overlays allowing players to see all the plants, food, dissolvables without looking at boring numbers. We will continue to add more visualisations like this.
Food the replenishes itself. Herbivorous fish will come and nibble at this special plant and so long as the water chemistry is what this plant wants it will regrow and provide more food in an endless cycle. We are going to have a carnivorous equivalent too.
One other change we have made for plants is that they cannot actually die the way they do now. Their health will go down to zero, they will turn brown etc but once the water chemistry is habitable for them they can fully recover. This means players who kill their plants do not have to delete the dead ones and replace them all which is not fun or interesting at all especially if you have hundreds of plants.
Tube sponges! This is Aplysina Fistularis and it acts as a natural filter for marine aquariums. The natrual filters for freshwater aquariums are the fungi which are already in the game but we are making them work more affectively in the next version.
Some of the old decorations in the game need replacing. The above image is the new versions of the stick decorations. The old stick decorations look like they are made for a playstation one game. They were made at a time when we had not much confidence in unity's ability to render large amounts of objects without slowing down. As time has gone on we have increased the quality of our art content because Unity was in fact able to handle it with all the other things we are doing in the game to degrade performance like navigation and collision detection. We will be doing this with more of our older decorations.
We are also adding some new stuff like this stone age head carving. We imagined that this is the sort of thing archaeologists might find at the bottom of a riverbed near to an old crossing point.
We are also adding more fish of course. We have been modelling a lot more fish and are making progress painting them. These fish are unfinished but they are looking nice enough to show nonetheless.
Harlequin rasbora wip:
Black moor goldfish wip:
I cannot say with too much accuracy when the next update will be available on steam but it will be before the end of the year. It is rather big and has a lot of changes including bug fixes and many of tweaks to animation, physics, particles, new object types (including coral). There is a lot more than what we have shown here. Things have changed so much that we have to redo the trailer and a good number of screenshots as well as parts of the steam page description. We don't like doing that too often because it takes some time to complete. Therefore we are doing as many changes as we can now that would require such changes to the steam store page so we don't have to do it again in another month or so.
In the meantime we will keep you posted on our progress and we hope you have an enjoyable Sunday.
The Fishery Team