Hello everyone,
We are still working hard on the next update. A lot of good progress has been made but things still feel a little too incomplete and lacking in a lot of areas. Some of which I have talked about in recent posts so I wont repeat them but I can show you all some of the more interesting changes that have been made recently.
New aquarium shapes
I have been talking about adding this change for years and finally players will be able to have aquariums shapes other than cuboids. We are also going to be adding spherical shaped aquariums in the next update too which are going to look really cool.
You may or may not be able to see in the image that some of the little water floaty particles are outside the glass. I still have to go in and tell the particles where their limits are. When something as simple as an aquarium shape is changed it usually means that every other feature could be impacted in some way and it is a matter of playtesting over and over again and seeing what is not correct.
Updated shop and storage ui:
The shop and storage ui has been given a small makeover. The icons are now bigger so you can actually see the items and they display the cost of each item. I'll explain a bit about in-game money in a little bit. I have also made it so the storage feature works with shrimp and snails now too.
Money is usually a big part of most creation/management games and it will play a big part in Fishery. In the screenshot everything is the same price. This is just because we have not priced every item in the game yet but for now it is the underlying mechanism that is important. And yes we are stealing the old french franc money symbol purely because it is a fancy "F" for fish.
Money is the first of the campaign/career features. Players will start off with an amount of money which will be enough to buy an aquarium, some fish, maybe some plants and a few decorations. Players will then be able to breed the fish and raise their offspring so they can sell them and buy more expensive fish to breed and sell and so on.
That is the basic career loop that we are working on and it will expand into completing specific objectives and career contracts. We are also working on adding a "research tree". Not every feature will be available for players to use from the beginning. For instance water changes will be something that needs to researched by the player before being able to use it.
It will sort of function like it does in other management sim games like jurassic world evolution, surviving mars, or even tavern master. Players need to make a certain amount of progress or reach some sort of milestone before being able to research a particular item or feature. Researching that item will then open the door to new unlockable research and so on. It is also a good way to teach players about each feature one at a time so everything is not so overwhelming to new players and things can be properly explained and knowledge of the game is built upon piece by piece.
I am going to do another news update post in a week or so which is going to show how the new maintenance systems in the game are going to work and also some small changes to how substrates work and if I can squeeze it in, a nice picture of a spherical aquarium.
I will not fall into the trap of trying to predict when we might have this update ready and on steam again because I am so terrible at it. The good news is that nothing is going wrong, everything is going quite well but it is just taking time. One change leads to another change which leads to another change and so on. But the game is getting so much better as a result, so I think I will just end by saying I'll try to be more regular with news updates and show lots of nice pictures and share more information in the mean time.
I hope this is not too disappointing, if anything we are working hard on this update to offset any disappointment you have felt in the many months since the last build update we have uploaded. Our hope is that when we do this update it will keep you busy and happy for many hours exploring all the changes instead of maybe 15 minutes like it would have with previous updates. It is all about putting as much valuable gameplay into the experience as possible.
On that note we wish you all a very happy Sunday evening.
The Fishery Team