Hello everyone,
Here is some more progress.
Spherical aquariums will be in the next update. There are a few small things still left to iron out (like the floaty water particles staying inside the glass) but most of these are fairly simple to fix. The only issue that will remain with spherical aquariums is sculpting on the substrate. When sculpting in a cylindrical or cuboid aquarium the sculpting algorithm only needs to worry about pushing the polygons of the substrate up or down; However when sculpting inside a sphere the polygons on the edge of the substrate that are touching the glass not only move upwards but also have to move outwards or inwards depending on how high on the sphere they are.
This is actually quite complicated and it means creating a whole new system for generating the substrate mesh. I must say that this is a little beyond my capabilities at this point in time especially when taking into account everything else that needs to be programmed. The solution is that players will have a selection of pre-sculpted substrates for all spherical aquariums to choose from. This is not ideal and is inconsistent with the other aquarium shapes but I think I as the programmer have to compromise here for the time being.
I'll quickly talk about the new-ish "Maintenance" system that we are getting ready to put into the game. There are a number of utility items in the game like filters and heaters that are mechanical and would in real life require cleaning and unclogging. In the very early versions of Fishery we had a version of the maintenance system that would stop utility items from functioning after some time has passed so simulate their becoming clogged with waste. Players would then have to press the maintenance button and after a short period of time the utility item would work again. Hopefully during that maintenance process the entire aquarium does not descend into chaos just because a filter was not working for 5 minutes.
This became very tedious in those early days and we ended up removing it because it was just wasting players' time by giving them buttons to press at certain time intervals with no real sense of progress. What is different this time is that we are combining it with the new "Research" system in the game where players would be able to decrease the amount of maintenance needed on items by unlocking and completing the maintenance research tree. Over time this means that players will be able to decrease how often maintenance needs to be performed and speed up maintenance but it will require that the player spends time unlocking the research by completing objectives and milestones and then spending in-game money performing the research. Eventually getting to a point where maintenance is done automatically after all the maintenance research is completed but it will take a while to progress that far.
By that time players will have really complicated aquarium setups that will require all this research in order for things to run smoothly. Especially when we add proper auto-feeders and more devices for modifying the water chemistry. Eventually fishery will indeed play like a proper management game.
Keep an eye out for more news soon.
We hope you are all keeping well and enjoying Sunday.
The Fishery Team.