Hello everyone,
Just thought it would be nice to show you all the progress that we have been making over the past few weeks. We have been mostly spending time working on art content for the game. Creating new content as well as fixing up some old content that is not holding up that well due to it's age.
Some of you might remember a few posts ago I teased some of the new fish by showing the dark silhouettes of them and asking viewers for guesses as to what they might be. There were quite a few guesses that were correct.
I think pretty much everyone guessed the copperband butterflyfish.
There were a few who guessed one was the lemon tetra.
I think perhaps one person got correct the identity of the last fish but I have not painted it yet so I shall just keep you all guessing in suspense.
The paintjobs for the black moor goldfish have been finished. They come in two slightly subtle variations.
A bit of time has been spent improving some existing fish. For instance the neon tetras currently in the game are among the first fish we made and they look a little outdated so we repainted them to look nicer.
The same was done to the tiger barbs. We were about to paint a set of emerald barb textures on the tiger barb models but realized the models were a little too fat and had some other shape issues we did not like so we adjusted the models and repainted their textures. Now there is nothing stopping us painting emerald barbs, gold tiger barbs, albino tiger barbs etc.
We have not just been making fish. We have been making some new decorations too.
This first item which most people would certainly not consider to be a decoration is the sort of thing that I have seen all my life when I go for a hike near a stream or river. We are going to be adding more "trash" decorations into the game over time so expect to see things like bottle caps, pieces of circuit board, broken glass etc in the future. As I say it does not make things prettier but it does give players more options to tell more types of visual stories in their aquariums.
There are so many types of rock that we want to add to the game that we could spend half a year just making rocks but we of course cannot do that. We can however do our best to sneak them into the game every month if possible.
Hakkai rock/stone is an interesting style of rock that is looks like it has been smoothed by erosion but also has lots of weird holes and dimples in it which apparently have been caused by bugs eating them. These types of stones are used a lot in Japanese style aquascapes.
We are still aiming to get the new build on steam in early to mid December which means November will be very busy for us indeed. Lots of tweaks and fixes are still needed and there is still plenty of art content to work on but it will be worth the effort. The next update post we do will probably be around the first of December where I will show you more of the larger feature changes and quality of life improvements we are making.
We wish you all a good week and good beginning to November.
The Fishery Team