Fishery
development update #121
It has been quite a few months since the last news/update post and I would like to quickly allay any worries you might have. We are alive and well and we have not stopped working on fishery. We have been taking things a little bit easier over the summer. The last updates that we made involved adding entirely new item types, shrimp and snails, and it really took it out of us. Then all of a sudden it was summer and was very hot indeed. It was so hot that we could only really be productive in the morning and early afternoon because after that time the temperatures became unbearable. We decided to just take things a lot easier and recharge our 'fishery' batteries so to speak.
As summer was coming to an end we got an amount of requests to do freelance work which was more than usual. We have always done freelance work in parallel to working on fishery to help keep things going. Though as I said it was more than usual and therefore has taken more time away from working on fishery that we would have otherwise liked.
This is not necessarily a bad thing because having some time away from fishery has allowed us to see it with fresh eyes. One of the things I realized is just how much fishery is beginning to creak under it's own weight and probably more disturbingly is creaking under the weight of things that are yet to be added.
User interface and code in general:
There is quite a substantial amount of code which is related to the user interface that must be reduced and simplified. This is especially important because there is still more UI to add and at this point adding more would just make things even more bloated from a code perspective. The code in general across the whole game needs a good cleanup because as our ideas have evolved over time the code has not always kept up with those ideas and as a result things are a little ugly and making changes becomes difficult or time consuming.
It is sort of like decorating a Christmas tree with new decorations while the old decorations are still attached to the tree. There is an extra amount of work needed that is not related to the decorating at all but it is for making sure things do not snag on other things or knock off other ornaments. It becomes like performing surgery which I must say is what programming the game feels like these days and that is not good.
Languages:
Another problem related to UI is about making fishery support other languages than English. Now is a good time to start coding in support for other languages because if we do it later when the game is more complete it will just take longer. It makes sense to do it at the same time we are fixing up the whole user interface. The number of non English speaking players contacting us asking for the game to be released in their language continues to go up every year and it makes a lot of sense from a sales point of view to put this in sooner rather than later.
Tutorials/Help:
After we did the snail update we started working on tutorials and found that we cannot really seriously start working on tutorials until the user interface and language support are in better shape because any help or tutorial system will require a lot of UI and language related work.
Campaign/Story mode:
Really soon we have to start adding campaign features. But it is a massive chunk of the game. It also cannot be added until we have the UI, language and tutorials in place and working really well.
Sound:
There is not a lot of sound effects throughout the game at the moment but there absolutely should be way more sound than there is. Sound has really been neglected and I think it really hurts the atmosphere of the gameplay to have it absent.
We have come to the conclusion that we have to prioritize these key areas before we add anything else to the game.
When will the next game update be?
I am not entirely sure but it won't be a very very long time. The next update will include all of these significant changes including campaign mode features. It will be the largest update we have ever done. We have put a lot of these changes off for a while because they would take a long time but now they cannot wait any longer. What we have realized in the past few months is that in order to enable a lot more progress to be made in all other parts of the game we have to fix these large issues first.
We still have the freelance work and other commitments that we have to fulfill in parallel to fishery which does not always improve our speed but it makes sure that we can actually continue to work on the game. We will show off any cool progress we make in a news post and I will be responding to comments and forum threads as usual.
We wish you all a very good Thursday
The Fishery Team
development update #120
Build 81 has been uploaded to steam and it contains three major new features that we have been talking about for a long time.
Snails:
Yes snails are now a part of the game. We just have one species for the moment, the zebra nerite snail, but more will be added. They work pretty simply. Players drop them into the aquarium and they slowly move about minding their own business. They crawl over everything including the glass and make your little ecosystems feel that little more complete. They grow over time and when they have grown enough they will breed. Also now that we have a good technique for achieving this sort of creature navigation it does open the door for us to eventually add sea slugs ;)
Multiple substrate paint materials:
Using the same technique that we used for painting algae onto everything we are now able to apply multiple substrate materials to the substrate model data. For the time being players can choose to have just two substrate materials applied to the substrate at one time but we will most likely make it possible to add three or four. It is not difficult to add but we need to do some testing about how it may impact performance and see if players actually want more than two.
Choosing substrate materials:
Substrate materials are no longer chosen via the shop/inventory but now have their own UI where players can choose the layers used. The substrate materials button can be found in the bottom left toolbar and that will open up the special UI.
Defining where layer 2 appears.
Players will then need to use a spherical substrate paint volume to define where layer 2 shows up on the substrate. These volumes are placed like any other object.
Paint Volume Settings:
The settings for substrate paint volumes are identical to algae volume settings. Players can define overall strength and spherical falloff of each volume. There is a maximum of 32 volumes that can be used.
Our next step for substrates is redefining how the actual model data works in terms of adjusting it's shape and resolution. We would like to go beyond just having a sculpting brush and have a more fine tuned set of tools for modifying the substrate's shape. I cannot say exactly when it will be added into the game but it will be relativly soon after we have ticked off a few more important things from our to-do list.
Camera bookmarking:
We have added a nice little tool for saving camera positions so the it can be set back to those positions in the future at the click of a button. The 'Camera Bookmark' button is placed next to the 'Reset Camera' button in the bottom left toolbar. It will bring up a UI where camera bookmarks can be created, managed and activated.
The code that governs how cameras work has also been improved. When the camera is set to orbital mode, which it is by default, it is now a lot less fiddly to rotate the camera and get nice positions. When the camera is framed in and following a fish, which is done by double clicking a fish or selecting it and pressing 'f', the mouse wheel can be used to zoom in and or out and it wont stop the camera from following it like before. In general camera interactions should be less tedious and fiddly overall.
The Lower jaw of the T.Rex
We wanted to add more coral, plants and other decorations into this update but the snail navigation code took a little longer to get right which meant that this update only has one new decoration unfortunatly.
There are also various bug fixes including a bug that made it so shrimps more or less never breed. The crystal red shrimp texture was also reworked to better resemble it's real life counterpart.
The next update will most likely focus soley on adding in-game tutorials because it really is well past time that we add them especially since some of the newer features are a little more complicated to set up like substrate painting.
It is also getting very hot in our part of the world and when things get really hot it can affect our productivity so working on something relativly simple like in-game tutorials/help is preferable because it does not require a lot of intense brain activity and we have gone without good in-game help/tutorials for far too long.
We hope you all enjoy the rest of the weekend and enjoy the steam summer sale.
The Fishery Team
development update #119
We have uploaded our 80th game update to steam and it comes with some nice new content and a nice new feature.
I can now reveal the identity of the mystery fish that was present in the last update post:
Dory.... I mean the Blue Tang, or Palette Surgeonfish or any of the other eight-ish names it has.
I suppose thanks to pixar if we do not have this fish in our game it is not worth playing. Much like making a dinosaur game that does not include a T.rex or a velociraptor. Anyway it has been on our list for some time and we try to add saltwater fish whenever possible to get a better balance of fresh and saltwater fish in the game.
Crystal Red Shrimp:
Another nice shrimp to add to everyone's collection and there are still more to come.
Giant Duckweed:
Another highly requested plant that we have had on our list for a long time.
We changed how algae works and in so doing also figured out a very nice way to solve another problem.
Players have asked for a way to paint algae in their aquariums. The problem is that the common method of doing this would affect performance quite a lot due all the data that has to be read, computed and then written. It would also quite drastically increase the size of the aquarium files that players save and load. So we came up with a way to do it that requires none of that but instead allows players to use simple spherical volumes to determine where algae is placed.
This gives players a lot of power to quickly experiment with where they place algae as well as how much is placed. You can have up to 32 of these volumes placed in the aquarium at one time which should be enough to make things very interesting and complex. Algae volumes can be found in the Utilities section of the shop/inventory. They can also be hidden via the overlay UI panel in the bottom right of the screen.
This does mean that algae is no longer a simulated thing in the game. It was another one of those features that was not very satisfying and more than a few players expressed a desire to control it in a more decorative sense. We do favour art direction over simulation in a lot of cases because it allows for more creativity and more things to do in the game.
Some of you may also be thinking that we could use the exact same technique for applying different substrate materials to the terrain and you would be correct. This pretty much solves a lot of the problems we have had with having more than one substrate material. We have been working on more advanced ways to sculpt and change the shape of the substrate but we encounter a lot of problems when we factor in substrate painting features on top of them. They just have different requirements and they clash which would require us to do some very complicated and ugly things that slow everything down in order to get it work.
So essentially the technique for having more than one substrate material painted onto the substrate model is solved and we hope to have that ready for the next update we do. This now allows us to get even more creative with our new substrate sculpting/generation tools because the systems are independent of each other and we can focus on making them good.
I did promise that we would have a new decoration this update but I woke up with the idea of how to do these algae volumes and therefore how to solve the substrate painting problem and I had to just code it and put it into the game because I was just too excited. But I promise the next update will include more decorations.
The next game update we do will probably be towards the middle-ish of June. We are adding another much requested feature into the game and we want to get it right. We also want to focus on adding more coral, decorations, substrate materials etc. into the next update. They always get pushed back when we are under time constraints so this time I want to make sure we don't delay them further.
We will of course show you all sneak peaks in the weeks to come ;)
And with that we wish you all a very happy Friday and a lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team.
development update #118
We have uploaded a new build for you all to enjoy, build 79, and we have mostly focused on creating new art content as well as some touch up and tweaks to existing artwork. More details below.
Green Jade Cherry Shrimp
I could be wrong but there are not a lot of aquatic species, other than plants of course, that are completely green. It seems quite rare and when I saw this shrimp I had to put it into the game. The next shrimps we add will have more colour and pattern variations like stardust shrimp, crystal red shrimp etc.
A new animation for shrimp was added this week too. When shrimp swim up to floating food and start eating it they now perform a specific 'eating while not standing on the floor' animation.
Hifin Platy
I find platys to be very sweet. For that reason alone I made this one when I had some free time recently and I was still in 'fishery mode'. I also made the pintail variety but it is not painted yet.
Mystery Fish
This will be fully painted and added to the game in the next update. Can any of you tell what species of fish it is? Put your guesses in the comments.
Other changes we made.
- Fixed some weird errors that occur when the game closes.
- Slowed the speed of the caustic reflection animation so it is less distracting and sort of messes with the relaxation vibe.
- Adjusted the overall brightness of some fish that become too bright when put into aquariums with medium to bright lighting.
- Touched some texture maps for fish that have been in the game a while and need updating.
We should have a new plant, new fish, new decoration and a new shrimp in the next update which should be on steam in around two weeks.
We wish you all a lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team.
development update #117
It has been a busy week and we have uploaded a new build to steam that includes some nice new additions.
We have added two new colour varieties of cherry shrimp.
Blue Velvet:
Yellow:
Some other changes:
- Shrimp breeding has been enabled. All shrimp varieties currently in the game can breed together.
- The little ui that appears when players mouse over shrimp icons in the inventory now displays all important information.
- The maximum size that shrimps grow to has been slightly increased.
- Fish breeding takes less time to happen.
I have not yet begun to work on getting the fish storage system to work with shrimp, It will also need to be renamed, that work will probably start fairly soon but I don't think it will be in the next update. The next update will be in two weeks. It will mostly consist of new art content with the usual bug fixes, quality of life changes, optimisations. There are also one or two additional shrimp animations that will be added and we may add yet another colour variation of shrimp if we can squeeze it in.
Much work to be done!
We wish you all a very nice weekend.
The Fishery Team
development update #116
As promised, shrimps have finally come to Fishery.
It has been a long time coming. We have been promising to add shrimps, among many other things, into the game for years and I think we have cruised along on a lot of good will and trust from players who really want us to keep our word. I hope this really does help prove that we are not all talk when it comes to these promises. It may take us a while but we really are going to see this whole thing though to the end.
In this build we only have the male and female red cherry shrimp. They wander about and do shrimpy things like find food and nibble it as well as stop and rest and take it easy for a bit. They start off quite small but as time goes on they grow bigger like the fish do.
There are a few rough edges because we could not fit everything we wanted to into this update without delaying it another week. I think they are pretty minor and easily fixed. Fun can still be had with the shrimps as they are at the moment.
Some of these "rough edges" are:
- breeding is turned off. It is actually all coded and working but I really think we need another day or two of testing and fiddling to get it ready for player consumption.
- Shrimps cannot be stored in the fish storage inventory yet but they will.
- The info ui in the inventory does not display shrimp gender as well as other details yet.
- When shrimp eat they do so in a variety of positions, like swimming up to the water's surface to nibble something. We need to add another type of eating animation for when shrimps eat whilst swimming/floating in the water.
- Shrimps dont climb all over food when eating it yet. they instead eat it from the edges but our aim is to have them climbing all over it.
We are going to do another update a week from now that smooths out a lot of these rough edges and we are going to add some more shrimp colours too. We are aiming to add Yellow cherry shrimp and of course the Dream blue velvet shrimp.
We really hope you all enjoy this update. Some of you have been asking for shrimps for around four years. This is still only the beginning for them, we are going to add more animations, more behaviours, more varieties as time goes on.
As usual we wish you all a very lovely weekend and we shall see you back here next Friday with a new update.
The Fishery Team
development update #115
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
development update #114
It has been a little while since we have done an update post. I took a little break in January because I completely knackered myself getting the last update finished and on steam. Then I got Covid again in early February so I was not at my best for around two and a half weeks. Though since January I have spent much time researching, planning and testing things for the future of the game which I think will be quite beneficial for future updates.
As you might have been able to tell from the thumbnail for this post, we are finally adding shrimps to the game. Red Cherry Shrimps to be precise. More shrimps will be added as the year goes on.
We are aiming to get the next update onto steam towards the end of March and shrimps will be a part of that update for sure. The paint job on this little fellow is not finished yet but it is good enough to show so you can all get an idea of our progress. These shrimps are pretty small. They grow to a size which is a little bit bigger than a cardinal tetra so you wont see them as closeup as in these pictures unless you zoom the camera way into them during gameplay.
In the next few weeks we are going to be working on the animation which is certainly going to be tricky because there are a lot of legs to animate as well as the antennae. I am looking forward to animating the front limbs especially for the eating animation. I will post an update showing this animation in the coming weeks.
A lot of time will also need to be spent refining how they navigate around the aquarium. They crawl around and swim which is especially tricky because it uses two navigational techniques but I have written some code prototypes which show a lot of promise.
This is a new decoration that will be added in the next update. I think it is quite sweet and I can imagine it looking good in an aquarium with lots of plants and mysterious lighting.
We will keep you updated with the shrimp progress in the coming weeks so keep an eye out for that. This is the year for adding a lot of promised things into the game.
We wish you all a wonderful weekend.
The Fishery Team
bug fix patch #5
Build 76 has been uploaded today. It is a small bug fix build that fixes the following issues.
- Radial backdrop not saving and loading it's colours correctly
- Any backdrop would not correctly display default settings when loading a different scene that has the same backdrop type as the previously loaded scene.
- Water level not being saved and loaded correctly.
- Gobo settings in the direction and spot light selection UI was not displaying correctly.
- Both species of pufferfish were missing females
Small fixes but some were pretty annoying and really needed to be fixed. Remember to tell us about any bugs you find and we will fix them asap.
A larger post that talks about what is coming in out next bigger update will be posted in the coming weeks when we have something nice to show.
We wish you all a lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team
development update #113
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
.
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.