Hello everyone,
Build 75 has been uploaded! Many many months of work has gone into it and hopefully the game is much better off for it. I have mentioned in previous posts some of the larger changes already like removing the plumbing system so I won't repeat myself in detail about those but a lot of what has changed in this build is due to us realizing that in some aspects of the game we strayed away from what our original intentions were. Over the past year or so we have added some new features which really were bad ideas and made things less fun and creative. The light exposure parameter is possibly the worst thing we have added to the game and I think probably no players will miss it.
We have also tried to free up as much UI space as possible. In the previous versions there were just too many numbers all over the place and too many little widget things in general that made everything feel so cramped. That has been reduced as much as possible and you will see that in screenshots further down in this post.
We cannot show you precisely everything because there is just too much to write about but I'll start with the major changes of note and then list most of the others.
The population UI for fish has been changed to show more than just how many fish are in your aquarium. Now you can see an overall idea of how healthy and hungry they are as well as their dietary requirements, genders and temperaments. It saves a lot of time clicking around on all the fish to get the same picture of how you need to care for your fish etc.
We have added some more artistic controls that have previously not been available to players. Players can now change the colour and opacity of the aquarium glass, it's shadow, the water surface, bubble particles and more. This is useful for creating a cohesive look especially if the background is very dark or very colourful. You can adjust these colours to better integrate the aquarium into the backdrop so it does not stand out as too bright or too desaturated. Or you can go a little crazy and make things extra colourful. It will help players make their creations that little bit more unique.
Reef species like coral and sea sponges have been added... Finally!. We only have one species of each at the moment. Time pressure was pretty hefty these past months but we will be adding much more as time goes on now that the core functionality is in the game. Bubble coral and a sort of generic yellow tube sponge are the species currently in the game. They require players to dissolve some 'reef food' into the water as well as meeting their temperature and salinity needs. Sponges also help clean the water so algae can be prevented from growing.
The info associated with the tank itself have been placed into this nice little ui panel that can be accessed via the main toolbar on the bottom left. This is also where you can rename your aquarium.
The display and overlay toolbar in the bottom right has been expanded to display more things and there is more controls for exactly what is displayed. For instance you can turn on the reef overlay but have it only display sponges if that is what you want.
Photo mode as a separate mode no longer exists. If players want to adjust some camera lens settings then they are free to do so at any time and the settings will stay that way for that aquarium for as long as players want. The button to hide the whole UI has been placed in the bottom right corner of the screen as part of the display toolbar. Players can hide the UI at any time and take screenshots at any time
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We removed features around oxygen and CO2 because we could just not get it to work or display the data in a satisfactory way. The way gas interacts with water is so complex and multifaceted that it never felt right or behaved well in our previous attempts. It also served as just another thing that would prevent players from adding things to their aquarium out of fear that suddenly the gas imbalance would ruin everything. If a feature hampers creativity that much then it has to go. That also means air stones had no place in the game anymore but adding bubbles is a must have feature so we have added simple particle emitters into the game that players can place anywhere without affecting the water chemistry. This also opens the door for adding more interesting particle effects like smoke or mist that can be placed around the aquarium. As well as particle systems that look like sand waterfalls, or normal little waterfalls or water fountains that can be placed above the water coming down from rocks. There is a lot of exciting potential with these particle emitters that will be explored in 2023. Their blue box can be hidden via the display toolbar in the bottom right leaving only their particles visible.
There have been some changes to placement settings. Floaty plants are no longer physics objects but they are animated to look like it without spending CPU on physics calculations. They are instead placed by the player on the water's surface. Placing things on the water's surface is a new option added for the placement attachment mask so players can add anything to the surface if they want. This is mostly in preparation for adding more surface plants like duckweed which is coming soon. We currently do not have a mechanism for players to physically attach objects to the water's surface so they can adjust the water level and have the surface objects follow but that will be added soon too. We just could not fit it into this update. We have also added the height offset attribute to the placement settings which allows players to change how far inside or above an object is placed on another object. This is quite useful when placing plants on very uneven or curved surfaces to offset them by a negative value so they are placed deeper into a surface and their edges dont appear to be floating.
The water lettuce roots have been replaced with something that actually looks good. They looked terrible before.
Non-uniform scaling has been enabled. It has to be turned on via the scaling settings menu and then you can squash and stretch objects to your heart's content. One thing to keep in mind is that if you non-uniformly scale multiple objects with the scale pivot set to group you will most likely see a small automatic adjustment to these object's scale after you have finished scaling them. This is tricky to explain but it has something to do with preventing "shearing" which is something that will very much upset the physics collision system so unity automatically adjusts things to prevent a meltdown.
The way fish grow has been changed a lot. In previous versions when a juvenile grew into an adult it would transform into the fully grown version of the adult instantly. This was especially disturbing for the larger fish in the game. For instance the juvenile Oscar fish would grow from a 1 inch juvenile into a 12 inch adult in the blink of an eye and this just did not look good and could cause problems if the juvenile was in a tight space.
The way this works now is that the juvenile changes it's model to the adult version but only scales up by a small amount and over time this adult will grow into it's fully grown form provided there is enough space for it to do so. Also when you get a new fish from the shop it comes as a smaller version of the adult. This allows players to experience a sense of their fish flourishing. As time goes on they get bigger and helps to keep things feel alive and players can see progress in their creations. In the picture above you can see the fully gown adult next to too young adults and two juveniles.
We have added a "mask" to all lights except the ambient light which allows players to choose what types of object a specific light will illuminate. This sort of thing is the basis for lighting in computer graphics as it gives the lighting artists very specific control over the final look of an image and we think this sort of thing would be very useful for our game too. The way it is used in the image above is that we have some very bright spot lights illuminating the tank but when the fish swim closer to the position of these lights they reflect a lot of light and become very very bright indeed. A solution is to have two sets of lights in almost the same position. One set illuminates the tank but not the fish and the other set illuminates only the fish but with less intensity than the first set so the fish can swim up near to the light without looking like they are viewing a nuclear test.
Fish Behaviour Bugs:
There were a lot of problems with fish getting stuck in a sort of behavioural loop especially in behaviour states like "algae nibble" where a fish was unable to reach the nibble location but will keep trying anyway until the player's computer turns to dust slowly via erosion. This has been fixed. In fact the guts of the fish behaviour code has been ripped out and replaced once again and is now many times more robust. However there is always the possibility, though we do not encounter it very often, that fish get stuck due to being a physics object in a tight space that is literally impossible for them to get out of. In that case we recommend acting as you would when seeing a kitten up a tree that cannot get down and help the little fellow out. In fishery, players can use the "Nudge" tool or simply move the decorations trapping the fish.
Fish Navigation:
Fish do not swim around and around scraping against the glass anymore. Now fish behave very curiously and seek out every part of the tank while generally attempting to stick to their swim level in the process. We have also changed how they detect and go after food. Now they will seek out food that is actually within viewing distance and that is not obstructed by anything so there is much less chance of them having trouble navigating through a maze of objects to get to a piece of food that is partially hidden under a rock. This is also aided by their new behaviour to explore their tank more which allows them to get a good look around the place for food.
Plants and fungi:
Plants and fungi do not die in a irreversible way anymore. Before this release if a plant or fungi dies then it must be deleted and replaced which is terrible because it could mean hours of careful work placing all these things is wasted and must be repeated. Now these organisms can be brought back by simply getting the water chemistry right again and all will be well. The same is also true for coral and sponges. We have also added some new species of plants. Sea Lettuce and fern seagrass.
There are of course a lot of other things we have changed. More or less everything got tweaked in some way and I am happy to say that a lot of code got deleted which was no longer needed or it was rewritten to be faster and smaller. In general the game should run a lot better than previous versions. this is especially noticeable on slower machines. I'm still using a 7+ year old quad core as my primary machine for the reason that I notice when things slow down. Players can of course easily slow the game down a lot by adding many hundreds of fish and a lot of lights so there is always performance improvements that can be made so players can do that sort of thing.
And now for some reflection.
2022 has not been a great year. if 2022 was a meal served to me at a restaurant I would politely ask the waiter to send it back along with my insults to the chef. Though after finishing this update as well as our new trailer we feel that Fishery is in a good place. Still lacking a lot, still with a lots of work to be completed but way better than it was a year ago.
Things have been made more difficult now that we have quite a few more competitors making aquarium games. When we first announced the game there were none and now there are close to 5 I think but that is the way it goes and I think the style and direction of those games is quite different from that of Fishery and without trying to be insulting I think we have done certain things significantly better and that gives us a lot of drive to keep going.
The previous years have seen a lot of time wasted by us tweaking how water chemistry works and adding features that seemed like interesting ideas but ultimately caused the game to become more complicated, more tedious and ultimately require even more work to get them to be finished, like the plumbing system. But I think we have learnt our lessons in that regard and the way forward is a lot clearer.
We hope many of you take advantage of the discount currently on Fishery during the winter sale and we hope the remainder of the year is happy for you all.
The Fishery Team.