Hello everyone,
This week has gone by very quickly indeed and we have some really nice progress to show and talk about. There is still no new build as of yet but we are making good progress with getting it ready.
Female Zebra Danio:
Male Zebra Danio:
These are Zebra Danios, often called "Zebrafish". They are the first of the Danios that will be added to the game. The longfin variant will be added at some point in the not so distance future. Other Danios will be added much sooner. The fish list on the forums has a nice selection of them to work on. I am quite looking forward to painting the leopard and panther danios. I kept some actual Zebra Danios around 13 years ago and they were quite lovely, friendly little fish. It will be great to add them into our game.
Female Black Neon Tetra:
Male Black Neon Tetra:
These were painted by myself last week. I was getting a bit burnt out with programming as sometimes happens and my brain was screaming for a more artistic task to do. I went through our library of fish photo reference files and picked out the Black Neon Tetra. It took just under a day to paint them both which is quite fast for me because I find painting quite hard, though the aim is not to be as fast as possible.. The day after painting these my brain was artistically satisfied enough that it could solve programming problems without complaining and good AI progress was made.
Female Lavender Plakat Betta:
Male Lavender Plakat Betta:
These Lavender Plakat Bettas are not quite finished yet. A few small paint tweaks are required but they are in a good enough state to give you all a sneaky peak at them.
Female Koi Plakat Betta:
We made the male koi plakat betta a few weeks ago but took a little longer with the female. We showed a rough painted version of her back then but now we can show her in a state of near completion.
This now takes the total count of fish species in the game to 16 but that number of individual fish is close to 30 because the male and female of each species are individually painted and modelled. This not only helps to give more variation to players when adding a lot of a particular species to their aquarium but it is also accurate to real life which helps satisfy those of you who know more about this subject. Judging from the fish list over on the forums there will be hundreds of individual fish added to the game over time. We certainly intend to add as many of them as possible and the goal is to be in a position where we can add two new fish species per week, which amounts to 4 new fish per week. That means over the course of a year we could be adding around 200 individual fish to the game. We are not quite in that position yet but that is certainly our aim.
Next week we should be able to show you all some of the mysterious progress that I keep saying we are making with the next build. Just to tease you all a little bit more, we are putting a feature into the game that we actually said we probably would never put into the game but after a lot of thinking about it I am happy to say we changed our minds and it will be in the game soonish. That is enough teasing for now though.
As usual we wish you all a great weekend and a good start to next week.
The Fishery Team