development update #122

It has been a quite a while since our last post and we have been busier than ever in that time. The majority of freelance work and other projects are out of the way and as a result we are able to work more on our little aquarium game. We were not working on the game 100% in that time but we have still managed to get quite a lot done.

UI: Firstly I managed to fix a lot of the issues that have been irritating me about the UI. Specifically how much code there is devoted to the UI and how often it gets executed. As a result we both notice a performance boost overall when playing the game which is good. It also means adding new UI is less painful and requires less code. There is still some UI related code that needs to be update, cleaned up, reduced or deleted but most of the time consuming work is done.

Language Support: We have also made a lot of progress with adding support for languages other than English. We have decided on a good way of doing it after doing some quite time consuming and rigorous testing. Fairly soon the game will have this feature implemented. Ideally I would like us to support as many languages as possible but we will start with supporting 12.

General Code Cleanup: There are parts of the code that were written years ago that are now simply obsolete both technically and philosophically. Think of it like rust on a car in the way that it only ever gets worse over time unless it is addressed. Much of that "code rust" was in the UI code but there are chunks of it in various other parts of the game which are in the process of being fixed.

Water Chemistry And Metabolisms: We have come to call this part of the game "The Widow Maker", and for good reason. It is just so difficult to get right. It is hard to make it fun for players that are experienced in the real world with keeping fish and for players that know nothing about fish. It also has to be balanced in such a way that it allows for chaotic and non-chaotic outcomes without us specifically directing it to do so. The potential for players to manipulate the water chemistry in interesting ways is meant to be a big part of gameplay, but it is very hard to get the numbers to balance correctly.

On the one hand it can be fun and interesting to see everything go wrong in the aquarium for the first few times playing the game but it has to be something that experienced players can tame and understand without it feeling so difficult and chore like. It is also very uninteresting to have to wait a long time for things to happen. If fish take too long to breed then most players will be fast forwarding the game for most the of the time just to get breeding to happen more often.

I don't think that is very fun or interesting. It would be much more interesting if players had the option to add fertility pills into the aquarium which speed up a fish breeding cycles instead. This way players are more engaged with what is going on with the water chemistry and are having fun experimenting with modifying it. We will also tweak breed times too. Needless to say the water chemistry is changing a lot and I am happy to be adding