development update #128

Once again this a news only update because I was unable to get the new build of the game ready to play in time for the end of March. This has happened again for all of the usual reasons. Adding, modifying, refining, and remaking parts of the game ends up taking longer than I had hoped. They take longer to work on but the result is better than expected most of the time. Which then drives me to do the same to other features and I get onto a bit of a roll with things and before I know it I'm behind in the schedule but ahead in what I had expected the result would be. Things sort of snowball from there. I/we, (My colleague at Lilou studio and I) are really feeling good about how development is going now. Real progress was somewhat slow and with a fair bit of friction before now. For example when it comes to water chemistry in the game we made a lot of updates previously but we were going around in circles in terms of how actually good it was but now we have got it to a place that we are pretty happy with and can make a lot of tweaks without having to rewrite parts of the code again.

Note: keep in mind that not all the data in the screenshots is correct or final. especially when looking at item prices, statuses. A lot of data is still using test/debug values. but it will of course all be working correctly when the update is on steam.

water chemistry ui preview. showing saturation and demand/ supply of oxygen. mousing over the icons reveals a text label telling players what they are.

For instance the whole system for calculating how water chemistry changes over time has been rewritten in code from scratch again and for the final time. In other words the way that the numbers are crunched when it comes to calculating how oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients, algae, waste, interact with eachother and interact with items placed in the aquarium is working much better now. We are also happier with how the data is displayed to players, which for years I personally was very unhappy with.

Plant selection UI

It also ties in with the redesign of the graphical user interface which is more colourful and interesting than the old one that everyone is used to. I am particularly fond of the new icons which are everywhere now. I used a 15 year old version of a renderer called 'Mental Ray' to render the icons because it is difficult for modern renderers to get a somewhat retro look in terms of lighting and shading and I was not happy with the results of more modern renderers. Furthermore it helps Fishery to stand out among the growing crowd of aquarium games that seems to be arriving on steam every few months, but more on that later.

Various languages - (Not all data is translated or active but it will be when the update is released) Japanese Russian Chinese

The use of icons in more places than before is especially important now because we have to account for the length of words changing due to all the different languages that we are supporting. We have to try and keep the user interfaces to be as concise as possible so they do not take up too much space. Some words or phrases might be short in english but longer in German or Russian.