Howdy all and happy holidays! The brand new Winter Update for Megaquarium is brimming with new features, improvements and even some new stuff to build!

New and improved Staff Management

Managing your staff just got a whole lot easier with a new and improved 'Manage' tab and zoning tool
The new 'Manage' tab shows your staff in a vertical list rather than a grid. Each row has enough space to show useful information such as what they are currently doing, which zone they are assigned to and what their skill priorities are. What's more, you can directly adjust the skill priorities right from this tab, rather than having to bring up each individual staff window. You can also get directly into the new and improved zoning tool by clicking on the zone button itself...
I'll be the first to admit that the old zoning tool needed some improvement, but I'm really proud of its replacement! As you can see in the screenshot above, all the zones are shown at the same time and in different colours, so it's way easier to get a overview of how your zones are set up. Even better you can now directly edit zones and reassign staff with a few easy clicks, all from inside the tool, no more having to go find each individual staff member just to edit a few zones.

The Chicago tank!

Players have been calling out for a new rounded tank that is larger than the Belfast or Small Tunnel Tank but not quite as big as the Mega Tank. One that comes out early enough in the ranks for your fully grown Spotted Eagle Rays. Well, I listened! Introducing the brand new Chicago tank. Rather than just being a large version of the Belfast tank, I've tried to design something interesting.
This tank comes in two variants, one with the access on the inside edge, and one with the access on the outside. This means it can be used as an internal or external corner of your wall of tanks.

New large decorations

The update also comes with 6 new decorations spanning sizes between 2x2 all the way up to 6x3.
I'm also planning to add some brand new plants in the early part of next year. They are fully designed, I'm just waiting on the assets from my artist.

Steam cloud support

Some of you might wonder why the game didn't release with Steam Cloud support. The truth is that I had a fully functional version working pre-launch using Steam's own "auto-cloud" feature. However, literally days before launch I discovered that the system had serious flaws including being unable to delete saves from the cloud, once they were up there. For me, this was totally unacceptable. Therefore, I waited until now, when I had some more dev time, to implement a really robust version using the more complicated Steam Cloud API. The bonus news about this is: with this in place, I'm halfway to implementing Steam Workshop, which should also land in the early part of next year!

Other changes

• Added information about the max size an animal can eat when fully grown to its tooltip.
• Slightly reduced volume of small tunnel tank.
• Swapped Angel and Lemon shark ranks so that you have access to the Mega Tank at the same time as the Lemon Shark
• Added difficulty tooltips on the main menu.
• Redesigned animal animation system to avoid clipping issues and weird movement of larger animals.
• Fixed various issues to do with animals eating each other.
• Fixed bug where negative prestige would not show on prestige bar on load.
• Fixed various minor graphical bugs.

As always, please let me know if you notice any bugs. I'm around until this Thursday and then I'm on my hols for a couple of weeks. Happy holidays everyone! steamhappy

[ 2018-12-15 16:40:22 CET ] [ Original post ]