Hello everybody,
Everything is going well with the shrimp update. All we have left to do is the usual endless tweaking of animations, code and a some very easy but very boring and tedious UI modifications. For instance we need to modify the overlay UI to allow for activating visual overlays for shrimps now and we have to reorganise it so it does not take up too much space etc etc. It is sort of the game making equivalent of doing tax returns. I think we have a good chance of getting it onto steam by the end of next week if there are no major problems and it does not look like there will be any at this time.
I also need to mention that when we publish this update to steam the price of fishery is going to increase significantly. We have said before that we only intend to increase the price once the game is out of early access but even after all this time the game is still not ready for a full release and we still have a lot of promises that we intend to keep. We also don't want to spend a lot of time earning money doing non-fishery things. It keeps us alive and keeps things going but it takes time away from working on fishery which then means fishery takes even longer to complete and over time things become more difficult. Aquarium games sit in quite a small niche and every year that niche is getting more crowded with games that are not too dissimilar to each other in appearance, general gameplay and price. That is not necessarily a bad thing for potential players who want more choice in the market but it does dilute sales for us and we have to make sure each sale has a larger impact.
Anyway to get back to this upcoming build, everything is actually going very well. Getting the shrimp navigation to work pretty well was easier than I thought it would be. What I am very happy with is that the shrimp navigation manages to allow the shrimps to crawl over things and swim around without things getting too complicated. It still needs a few tweaks here and there especially when it comes to adjusting timings of all the animations.
Animation is being done the good old fashioned way through hand key framed skeletal animation which takes longer to setup, create and modify but it is really the only way to animate them properly.
Here is a look at the eating animation.
and with all the controls.
It is probably going to be tweaked some more but the sad thing is that shrimps are so small that players won't see much of the animation details unless they are zoomed in quite close to the shrimps. We exaggerate the movements so players can actually see it from a distance. We can also adjust the speed that the animation plays during gameplay so smaller shrimps move faster than some of the larger ones. This helps just sell the feeling of scale a little better and it creates some variety in movement when looking at a lot of shrimp at once.
Here is the latest version of the 'run' animation but the gif is a little jittery:
The movements are exaggerated so they can be seen at a distance. There are a lot of uneven surfaces in aquariums so we animate them as if they are walking over bumpy surfaces like gravel or some lumpy wood otherwise their motions may look unnaturally smooth and perfect.
It is all coming together quite nicely and we hope this will satisfy everyone who has been asking for shrimps for a long time.
We wish you all a great weekend.
The Fishery Team