This month’s update is a little shorter than usual, but nonetheless we’ve been working on some neat things that we’re quite eager to show off. Let’s get right into it, shall we?
As it tends to do around this time of year, a few of us got caught up in family and personal matters that needed to be tended to. While we experienced some unexpected speed bumps, we’re hoping to make up for lost time by pushing out the first handful of playable builds to our VIP backers as soon as possible. Below is our updated development schedule that better reflects the current status and internal goals.
There’s not too much to show on the programming front this month as we’ve been busy working on setting up our island and integrating it with our voxel terraforming system along with a host of fancy things like water shaders and yes, improved foliage performance. Voxels can be rather experimental on the scale that we’re working with, but the team is doing its best to ensure that it all comes together in the end!
For July we took to working on transferring concepts into 3D models and developing both new and older animations to our most recent standards seen in previous blog posts.
Building Concept Art & Models
The Sauropod House is the largest shelter available for housing animals in Prehistoric Kingdom, holding up to two-three fully grown sauropods at a time. Equipped with internal washbays and soft haystacks, your gentle giants are sure to feel right at home.
Back in March we first showed our new Nursery design which has since been updated to bring it up to scratch with our more recent building textures and style.
Animation
For July’s assignment, our animators completed the basic animation sets for the ceratopsian rig and bison (as first seen in May’s update). Meticulously watching over dozens of real world references from modern day relatives the team hoped to capture the many nuances and physical movements that are to be expected from the bison family. We’re extremely happy with how both the sets came out, and we hope you enjoy the new ceratopsian cycles!
https://youtu.be/ri76DLOOBgY
https://youtu.be/lcT07tDqbeA
Since switching over to a more generalised retargeting system, we swiftly revamped the hadrosaur animations to look far more alive with added weight and movement to their body.
Check out the new and improved run and walk cycles below (yes, we misnamed the first clip, but it’s not our fault – it’s the sneaky post-production, we swear)!
https://youtu.be/rk5b1Cpm0kI
https://youtu.be/mTFa-AkYWjU
Park Map
Inspired by real world zoos, the park map features a fullscreen stylised view of your island – showcasing all structures, animals, and infrastructure within your park.
It was important for us to retain as much open screen space as possible for players to take quick screenshots with while also offering a quick way to jump to each exhibit and check its total internal area with a quick glance.
The team’s composer has written another ambient track to play along with your busy paths, various construction sites, and roaring attractions.
DevLog #6 - June
Welcome to June’s DevLog!
We had an absolute blast this past month with some great progress across the board. All hands were on deck during June as we continued to chug along at a steady pace, making some very exciting advancements within programming, art, and game design. Without further ado, let’s get right into the development update.
June set us up with some great progress on building mechanics and terraforming, allowing us to finally start showing off the new systems (hurray!). Please keep in mind that everything shown here is a work in progress and is subject to change throughout the game’s development!
Fence System
Prehistoric Kingdom’s clever programmers have created the first rudimentary attempt at the spline-based fencing system. There’s not too much to say about it at the moment as it’s still being worked on, but the first stages of freeform and two-step placement is in.
Snapping angle and the rotation angle all works with the expected lovely curves that is made available through splines.
This progress on the fencing systems has made the team giddy at the thought of soon working on monorail building once all the kinks have been worked out…
Terraforming Demonstration
All of the basic tools are up and running so now it’s a matter of adding and refining terrain textures as well as hooking it up to construction in order to flatten surrounding land. It’s still a work in progress, so please excuse any wonky graphical artefacts. Here’s a look at some of the tools in action:
As you can see, Prehistoric Kingdom’s terraforming allows players to freely sculpt the terrain through a variety of methods and tools; the world is quite literally your canvas.
Players are able to paint the terrain freely by selecting ground types from the Climate Painter with the option of automatically painting rock or dirt in correspondence to the height of the terrain.
A cave sculpted out of a mountain. Create natural archways, land bridges, mountain ranges, and even “volcanoes” by digging out mountain tops!
Unsurprisingly, the art team has been working hard at bringing the assets of Prehistoric Kingdom to life. For June, we’ve got a hefty assortment of goodies to show off.
Building Concept Art & Models
In this update we’re taking a closer look at the structures directly used by animals and guests including shelters, amenities, and attractions.
Science Monument
Placed as a decorative object, the Science Monument increases the land value of the immediate area. Key decorations and statues like Monument buildings help pretty-up your park and act as core locations for guests to hang out.
Large Wooden Shelter
The wooden shelter is a large structure capable of housing most animals throughout their life cycle. Whilst quite basic in its material, this building will appease the majority of your creatures in its modest simplicity.
Metal Viewing Platform
Harkening back to real world zoos, the metal viewing platform is a staple of any park due to its ability to get guests up close and personal with extinct creatures without getting caught in harm’s way. This beautiful attraction offers the chance to entice nearby critters to investigate the tiny mammals jumping around on the other side of the glass.
Tropical Wet Island
After quite a bit of anticipation, this is how the tropical wet island looks from a distance! With players being able to terraform archipelagos from the seafloor, we can’t wait to see what everyone does in the future with our creative tools and map landscapes.
16km² of pure island goodness.
As you can see by the remnants of the large crater towards the north of the terrain, this island’s origins are volcanic – sprouting a small chain of archipelagos in its wake from the seafloor. The landscape is quite versatile, featuring cliffs, mountains, flat building space, and lakes.
We’ll be sure to show off more of our vegetation for this climate very soon, but until then, make sure to keep your plants on!
Both exciting and conversely terrifying, there’s very little interface designing left to do for the game. Of course there’s going to be tweaks as the project develops, but all of the base drafts and UI sheets for the first pre-alpha are eagerly waiting to be brought to life inside Unity.
Until we begin working on the second pre-alpha (which we are extremely eager to work on!) most of the interface work is going to revolve around polish and visualising in-game features.
Two words: editable signage. Ever wanted to name and theme areas of your park with custom signs and billboards? Look no further! Much to the dismay of long time zoo building players, a lack of editable signs and decorations in past titles has been sorely felt.
In Prehistoric Kingdom, however, the Edit Properties window on select decorations such as the vertical marina banner and the horizontal banner offer a range of bespoke graphical designs that can be swapped out by the player to better match their own park. Special decorations like the editable themed sign even feature a text editor that will display whatever is written into the input field. Cool, right?
To help get players right into the action, you’ll be greeted with small popups that provide a brief description of certain game features, mechanics, and interface explanations as you progress through the game. These can be toggled off permanently at any time, so rest assured that experienced tycoons don’t require unwanted help.
Sound Design Preview
Our sound designer whipped up a special new soundscape preview featuring some more familiar faces. Can you guess all the animals? Let us know on our Discord server!
The team’s lovely and very humble composer (who is definitely not in charge of writing our devlogs) wrote a new track that will play alongside the ambience of your park’s bustling environment. Exploring the Park incorporates world instruments within our traditional orchestral setting, making use of rainsticks, bongos, congas, and African shakers to expand the sonic scope of Prehistoric Kingdom’s music. We’re super happy with how it turned out, and we hope everyone’s looking forward to hearing more from the soundtrack in the future.
This month marks the long awaited redesign of our Allosaurus fragilis in all of its fearsome Jurassic glory. Alongside our carnivorous “friend” three new animals are ready to be shown off: Coelophysis bauri, Sauropelta edwardsorum, and Guanlong wucaii!
Ontogeny Sequences
Our laboratory hatched another four new babies this month (they grow up so fast…) and we’re not sure if seeing baby dinosaurs will ever not be completely adorable. For June, please enjoy our little spike nugget, noodle-neck, two angry lizard boys.
Alt. Skins
Much to the pleasure of our creature design concept artist, all Early Access animals finally have their alternate skin patterns, colors, stripes, and dangly bits designed for our texture artist to realize on the 3D assets.
Since there’s a total of 150 skins going into the game (excluding all genetic mutations like albino and melanistic variants), we have officially only revealed around 91 up until now and will continue to trickle them out over the next few months.
Resource management in Prehistoric Kingdom was first seen in its most basic form back in 2015 with the original tech demo and has been a staple part of our park construction and management since.
Reading about our gameplay plan isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but with our road map laid out in our last blog post we felt that discussing one of the largest components of the game was extremely important.
Your Island and You
The first thing to understand is that almost every map in Prehistoric Kingdom offers a gameplay challenge due to the weather patterns that correspond to the climate. Although some climates such as semi-arid don’t suffer from drastic changes, others like subpolar and tropical wet maps experience blizzards and violent seasonal thunderstorms that must be considered to effectively build the ultimate park.
One our biggest design philosophies is to ensure that players feel engaged and like they can influence the world they’re building directly. Stay on top of your park and its environment and you’ll be rewarded with efficiency and successful profits. Ignore the needs of your guests and you’re doomed to fail.
Generating Power
In Early Access, players will be able to construct six utility buildings that are used to generate power and water for your park:
Each of these structures offer a positive and negative trait within their role as a producer in your park, with the negatives often directly correlating to weather or their effectiveness over time as the park expands in its scope.
Due to the sheer size of maps in Prehistoric Kingdom, specialised utilities like water towers and solar panels can be placed in areas without high amounts of wind or surface water to maximise player building flexibility.
Making Connections
All major structures, amenities, attractions, and infrastructure require a connection to electricity and water. As the space available for building on our islands and mainland is extremely large, the second pre-alpha will introduce underground piping and cables to setup infrastructure beneath the terrain.
To avoid micromanagement and monotony, pipes are automatically constructed beneath pathways as players build and expand their park. Originally we had discussed power lines and water pipes as separate objects but felt that it would take away from the aesthetics by having large, ugly pylons decorating exhibit sides and land space.
For players who want the freedom to place infrastructure pipes separately from paths, they can be freely drawn out at anytime to connect new power sources to the grid!
Disaster Strikes
So, your park is thriving and electricity production is off the charts… but you didn’t check the weather forecast.
Once a thunderstorm hits the island or mainland, structures like the wind turbine will automatically shut down to prevent damage to the rotor. Depending on how the player is equipped to respond to this situation, there are a multitude of potential outcomes that are influenced by park layout, security, and back up utility buildings. Everything you’ve worked for is suddenly at risk in the blink of an eye, but there’s still a few options to pursue during this scenario:
Whilst not as effective in poor lighting conditions, an array of solar panels may just keep your park above water while you wait out the storm. They’re not as cheap to maintain as wind turbines, but guests are also less disappointed by the sight of them.
The Water Power Plant is expensive and has a high upkeep, but allows the player to push through the rain and lightning while pumping water and electricity from one location. It’s the most expensive option, but almost guarantees consistency.
Setting the park into emergency mode while the storm passes may effect ratings, but will ultimately protect guests from unexpected danger in the event of a power outage. Send your patrons to the security bunkers and hope for the best…
Remember, a cloud-free day keeps the danger away!*
*Safety on cloud-free days not guaranteed.
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And to finish it all off our good friends over at The Isle made this awesome crossover piece featuring their own animals and designs! How cool is that?
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Another month, another development update.
We’ll be back again in July to show more progress on the project. Keep an eye out for our mid-month updates, and be sure to follow us on our social media platforms if you haven’t already!
This month we continued to chop away at the game’s enormous amount of art, make some great progress with the programming side of Prehistoric Kingdom, and art (as we’ve all come to expect). As per usual there’s some big topics of discussion, so let’s get right into it!
June will be extremely exciting for us as we finally and properly integrate terraforming and get started on our refined building systems. All other departments? Business as usual! We’ll be continuing to work on the same tasks listed in last month’s DevLog.
Terraforming Progress
As to be expected the terraforming that we want to achieve for Prehistoric Kingdom is quite difficult as it’s untraditional to most game engines. However, while we continue cooking up the adaptive terrain shader, link up everything to the UI and work out the expected kinks, we’ll leave you with some extremely exciting and early looks at the structures that can be sculpted by players…
May has undoubtedly been an exciting and fantastic month for the art team with all the new stuff being worked on and prepared for the first pass on the building systems and animal additions that will be coming up in conjunction with our first Early Access pre-alpha for VIP Backers.
Building Concept Art & Models
Buildings! Lots of buildings! Next to the creatures it must be said that we really love working with our concept artist and modeller to bring the architecture and structures of Prehistoric Kingdom to life. For May we took a focus on the infrastructure and guest amenities that will inhabit your park.
Gift Shop
The gift shop is your guests’ favorite place to purchase prehistoric-themed souvenirs and assorted gifts. Do not fret, as we will make sure the balloons and the dino-present statue look as cute as possible when it comes to the ingame model.
Food Stash
Coming in a variety of food groups, the Food Stash is recommended for small or medium sized creatures. Its vertical design is useful for constructing a paddock with tight spaces.
Ranger Station
Responding to emergency situations, the Ranger Station houses a car, transport truck, and helicopter to subdue escaped animals and carry guests to safety.
Central Hub
The Central Hub is a large building designed to educate guests about the park and its prehistoric inhabitants. As this structure is categorised as an attraction, it draws crowds to its rooftop theatre and viewing deck. To really push the attention of detail in Prehistoric Kingdom you’ll see a few information signs popping up around your park to breath a little more life into the world.
Dynamic Animal Physics
We’ve always wanted to take our animals just that little bit further and today we’re happy to announce that creatures will be featuring dynamic physics to better simulate fat, flesh, fur, and feathers in ways that we simply couldn’t before.
Our Brachiosaurus, for example, features a large fleshy fat deposit running down the majority of its neck. Thanks to this new system we’re able to properly simulate the unique area of the animal’s body and have it constantly react and adapt to its movement; regardless of animation.
An even better area to look at would be how feathers will move on our floofier friends such as the Gallimimus. It’s a far less rigid movement and helps to envision how we imagined these critters moving with fluffy integument.
Animation
With fifty creatures currently learning how to walk we stepped back for a moment to assess how we were going to cover such a vast range of animals in the most effective way possible. For us, this means setting up shared rigs that are built around the main family groups going into the game.
While similar species and genus will retain the same general movement style (which was to be expected even with personalised animation sets), we’re making individual changes on a per animal basis to ensure that nothing looks off or imperfect compared to related genuses. As a whole this allows us to put way more detail into base animations and ensure that they are the best they can possibly be for the project. It’s extremely important to note however that certain species may feature distinct animations and actions that are unique only to them, so there’s no need to worry about everything looking the same. Apart from that it’ll make adding future content additions that much more easier.
You can take a look at some of the newest animations for our Tyrannosaurus (large theropod rig) and Baryonyx (spinosaurid rig) below.
Nothing super crazy to show here! UI for this month was mainly focused on management, options menu, and bringing our old save/load menu up to scratch with the newer style.
New Creatures
This month we’ve got some classic faces appearing fresh off the back of their concept art. Give a warm welcome to Bison latifrons, Iguanodon bernissartensis, Parasaurolophus walkeri, and the fearsome Acrocanthosaurus atokensis!
New Skins
Since last time you saw our favorite big cat, we went ahead and made several improvements to both the mesh and the textures of Smilodon. We worked predominantly on the feline’s face, bringing its proportions closer to what the animal probably looked like. Moreover, the model now features shape-keys (sets of geometry data that can smoothly transition to each other) that allow it to close its eyes (like all the other animals we have), but also retract its claws, yawn, show aggression, and even display pregnancy! Exciting times for mammal lovers, indeed.
Ontogeny Sequences
May gave us some time to revisit a familiar face and incubate some new hatchlings and babies to show off to everyone. This time it’s a lizard boi, demon gecko, duck thing, teetho, and a little moo-moo. We’re proud of our naming conventions.
Alt. Skins
Much like April we focused on pumping out a wide variety of skins across a number of animals. While there’s again too many fit neatly into one post, here’s some of our favourites!
We’ve gone ahead and decided to improve our Tyrannosaurus by giving it an additional scaly design, moving the feathered Highlands look to its floofier cousin Yutyrannus.
Allosaurus also received some much needed love this month with a complete animal overhaul that will greatly improve its body proportions and overall look in the future. You will see more of the updated model in future posts.
Like we did for Tyrannosaurus and the following Acrocanthosaurus, we removed some of the feathered designs, favoring more likely scaly designs. In the case of Allosaurus, scales are all that remain, with the two previous feathered skins having left us to join feather heaven.
Our projected release roadmap is expected to span over 2018 and 2019 to deliver a valued product to our backers and fans alike. Currently, we’re looking at the following structure for how we present and develop the game. Please note that is a rough outline and does not detail every specific item and piece of content!
Pre-Alpha 1 Creation (Q3 2018)
The first official private pre-alpha for VIP backers will set the basis for Prehistoric Kingdom’s creative gameplay. Terraforming, revised fencing/path systems, 17 animals and a brand new map provides a thorough look into the games tone and atmosphere.
Pre-Alpha 2 Management (Q1 2019)
Core and expanded management features such as visitors, finance, security, and resource management will be integrated alongside new animals and buildings.
Alpha Progression (Q2 2019)
Released to Kickstarter backers who donated to appropriate tier levels, Alpha introduces progression aspects to gameplay as well as overlay tools and shaders that will help provide information about your exhibits and park.
Beta Backer Testing (Early Summer 2019)
Beta presents itself as the very last large scale testing of Prehistoric Kingdom before being pushed to the store platforms. Featuring the majority of animals, buildings, systems, and features that will be available within the live game, we’ll be working together to squish as many bugs as possible!
Early Access Launch Public Release (Summer 2019)
Prehistoric Kingdom will be available to the public on Steam and the Crytivo store.
We want to be as transparent as possible with everyone and outline our current development plans so that all of our backers and fans can understand where we’ll be headed. If plans or the schedule changes for whatever reason, we want everyone to be on the same page so that no one feels left in the dark or like they don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. At the end of the day, it’s a big game. Hopefully this provides a little bit more clarity, and we cannot wait to show more. Features or dates may shift back and forth but in the end it’s to bring the absolute best that we know we can!
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That’s it for May!
Thank you for reading this month’s DevLog and make sure to join us once again in June for another exciting update! Feel free to follow our social media platforms below to stay in touch and never miss an announcement.
This month we had a heavy focus on the art side of Prehistoric Kingdom’s development – spending most of it on buildings, sounds, music, animals, animation, concept art, and designs for the remaining alternate skins. Some team members were busy with their personal lives, but in the end we pulled through just in time for another update – how about that?
Our tasks from last month will be carrying over into May as they’re quite large and will require a lot of time to be dedicated to them.
For the most part programming during this part of the development cycle is pretty boring. Unfortunately we’re going to have to wait until next month to start showing the terraforming in action as most of the work has been done in the back-end, but there’s still some things to talk about.
For starters, our new camera is feeling great! It’s more responsive, flexible, and overall feels way more polished. With our new camera system we’re aiming to make following animals feel way more dynamic and personal as well as respond better when building.
The artists in the team have been working madly this month to keep chipping away at all the art assets required for the game, both for buildings as well as animals. While we can’t show everything as it will spoil some pretty cool things that will be coming up Soon™, here’s a look at some of the best parts of April’s development.
Building Concept Art and Models
The collection of buildings and structures of Prehistoric Kingdom continues to expand as we delve further into security, animal care, and guest amenities.
Food Stash
The Food Stash is a basic feeding structure that is suggested for small-medium animals. Don’t worry, however, as the food items going into the game will not be as large or odd as they are in the concept art – this is only to clearly illustrate the contents of each basket type. While most animals will be satisfied by basic plant feed or red meat, more specialised creatures may require fruits, fish, and insects!
Ranger Station
From the Ranger Station, trucks and cars can be dispatched to transport guests to the safety of protective bunkers, as well as carry staff to the last known location of an escapee. A small helicopter based atop the structure makes this building highly advised when wrangling dangerous animals who aren’t afraid to get a little defensive.
Fast Food Kiosk
With a customizable menu and pricing options for guests to choose from, the Fast Food Kiosk works perfectly on the side of a path or in the middle of a plaza due to its multiple entrances.
Emissive maps allow us to create lights, signs, and other objects that mimic their real world counterparts (not to mention it makes buildings look awesome at night). Speaking of which, check out all those illuminated screens and surfaces!
Animation
This month we took the time to begin animating our Edmontosaurus to experiment with new ideas and work on bringing our dinosaurs to life. A handful of other creatures also received a helping hand in learning how to walk but they’re not quite ready for their public debut. It’s still a work-in-progress, but please enjoy the first look at the walk and run cycles for our Edmontosaurus.
One of the other neat things we worked on was setting up a system that allows us to dynamically move the eyelids of an animal through animation or inside the game itself. This means that animals will feel just that little bit more alive by being able to close their eyes while sleeping, threatening, and blinking at random intervals. You can see this in action with a few of the animations above.
Status & State Icons
In our original August demo our status pointers for building resources looked something like this:
To better support the evolving complexity of Prehistoric Kingdom they’ve been revised to not only look better but also provide a quicker visual response to the player with colour information. While the icons themselves will be implemented in a way that doesn’t make them obstructing or annoying in-game they can be disabled from the options menu for players that are looking for less of a helping hand.
New Building, Path, and Fence Toolbars
Continuing the theme of upgrading, revising, and overhauling, the three building toolboxes have gotten some much needed love. We experimented with a few different layouts to greatly improve upon the design featured in the demo, and we hope that you enjoy the first look at the new tools and building options coming in Prehistoric Kingdom. For us, we want customization, creativity, and flexibility to go hand-in-hand when building the park of your dreams.
Building icons are not representative of fence types. Sorry Timmy, but you can’t use toilets as fencing for your Tyrannosaurus.
Players can select objects to be placed on top of paths automatically through enabling the Path Objects window. From here you can pick between bins, seating, and even change the color of lighting that’s placed at a frequency determined by the player. We aren’t 100% on the design and layout yet, so don’t be surprised if it’s changed the next time you see it.
For those with a keen eye, you might have spotted some scary looking sliders to control how paths and fences are built. We’re going to go into a detailed breakdown of what they do once our spline-based fencing and path solution has been implemented, but the main thing to take away is that players will have an extremely precise amount of control in regards to the curvature, angles, and placement of both fences and paths.
Sound Preview
Our sound designer has created the main soundsets for all 50 Early Access animals which includes our dinosaurs and mammals. While individual calls, roars, and grunts will be showcased in our upcoming animation previews, please enjoy this short soundscape that was designed using five of our animals! Can you guess what they are?
This month our composer started working on some new themes that will reoccur throughout Prehistoric Kingdom’s soundtrack. Two other pieces were written in April, but enjoy the first look at one of the herbivore theme variants going into the game. It has more of a whimsical quality that is sure to compliment the player as they release their first large herbivore into its paddock!
Most of April ended up being dedicated to pushing out the last of our alternate skin designs as well as setting up some ontogeny for a handful of animals. Before we get to them, however, say hello to Ouranosaurus nigeriensis, Oviraptor philoceratops, Miragaia longicollum, and our revamped Styracosaurus albertensis!
Ontogeny Sequences
With a new batch of critters come their ever-adorable life stages! This month it’s a glimpse at a tiny crocodile, rhino, and… a duck?
Alt. Skins and Concept Art
We got through a lot of new skin designs this month. As we’d like to save some for the next DevLog, here’s half of the recent concept pieces done during April.
This months gameplay discussion is more conceptual in its explanation as most of the art and mechanics behind it are yet to be complete. With that said, those of you that enjoy reading about our ideas and understanding the game will enjoy this one!
Shipping and Storing
Large and infinite quantities of food is not something that just magically appears, right? Especially not on an island in the middle of the ocean or in an isolated part of a mainland continent. For an enormous zoo or theme park housing extinct animals that are a multitude of sizes you’re going to need to ensure that animal feed is shipped to your park on a near monthly basis (depending on how many creatures you own).
On an island, a Shipping Harbour is placed to transfer food from the mainland to your park. From here you can check the current food stock, order more, and check the remaining time until your shipment arrives. If a player is using the mainland to start their prehistoric zoo the same system applies but now with a Shipping Depot instead of the harbour. More trucks, less giant cargo ship.
By default the Shipping Harbour and Depot have storage facilities built into them, allowing for a small but suitable amount of feed to be kept inside to help out with the early game. With an ever expanding list of hungry creatures to be satisfied, however, any excess food is going to need to be stored in an external Storage Warehouse. For players on smaller and more challenging maps or those with a mass-overpopulation of animals, this provides an interesting balance of space, population, security, and money management that should be considered to efficiently run your park.
Feeding Time
Food can be accessed by animals in two ways; placing feeders in their exhibit or by finding plants/carcasses in the world (let’s hope you have more plant life available in your park than corpses, yeah?).
By default feeders placed inside an exhibit by the player are empty. Instead, the food type is automatically assigned and filled based on the animal groups that are dropped into the paddock to cut down on the time needed to try and find a specific type of food dish. Pick a design that works best for the paddock, animal size, and aesthetic that you’re going for! If for whatever reason you don’t like the assigned food type it can be manually changed by selecting the feeder and editing its properties to closer fit what you had in mind.
All food dishes are refilled by keepers who must travel on foot or by vehicle to reach the exhibit. A keepers experience will directly tie into how an animal will react to their presence, so technology such as automated feeding cranes may be a wiser implementation when dealing with the more… ravenous bunch.
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That’s a wrap! Thanks for reading April’s DevLog. Make sure to keep an eye out for our frequent Twitch streams, join our Discord, and follow our social media accounts to keep up to date with the game (links down below).
Greetings, everyone, and welcome to this months development update!
The team has been busy working on new Early Access material and beginning the process of rebuilding our core systems and foundation to improve upon our user experience and ensure that Prehistoric Kingdom is ready for new features and content. Much love and effort is being put into crafting a unique gameplay experience that will feel challenging and rewarding for tycoon veterans and new fans of the genre.
On March 4 we released the Jurassic Patch to our pre-alpha demo and were simply blown away by the sheer creativity that our community has shown us! While there were issues reported on our Discord server and Steam forums, we took note and pushed out a hotfix as quickly as possible to address the majority of large issues that our players were experiencing with the AI and other things.
For our OSX community, we’re pleased to announce that the demo is available on Steam for you to play around with! We’ve learned a lot over the past few months, and we cannot wait to get the full game into everyone’s hands.
March was extremely successful as we managed to achieve everything that originally set in February. While certain components will be continued through the next few months, here’s a glimpse at what’s to come!
Architecture Setup
For the last two weeks our programmers have been working on Prehistoric Kingdom’s architecture to improve the game development process by redesigning all of our systems to be future proof. This entails things such as creating new user interface prefabs, loading systems, and making the addition of new buildings or animals to the game as easy as possible. By going through the laborious process of rebuilding old systems from the demo, we can greatly improve the functionality, performance, and feeling of the game.
This enhanced approach to our workflow means that programming conventions and general engine work within Unity should be far more comprehensive and welcoming to each team member when working with the game’s deep and complex systems.
During March we looked deeply at the game’s art style and aesthetics to recognise trouble spots regarding consistency and how we can make Prehistoric Kingdom both look great and run well. In the future, we have plans to redo some of our older creatures and art assets to bring them up to par with recent additions to our growing catalogue of models, textures, animations, sounds, and designs.
Shader Updates
Something we’ve wanted to look into for a while now is a revamp of some of our custom shaders in Unity. While it’s certainly not finished, we’ve been testing out a decal system for body damage when an animal has been attacked or wounded. In conjunction with this change, our animals will look far more detailed than previously seen before.
It’s not perfect as we’re still experimenting, but so far the results have been promising:
Similar effects can be applied for to visually assist features like disease. We gave our Tyrannosaurus a quick skin inflammation to test it out:
Issues like skin inflammation will play a vital role in maintaining an animals health. More diseases will be revealed in the future!
Mediterranean Isle & Tropical Wet Foliage
Our resident level designer, programmer, and tree connoisseur, Victor, has been up to some ever so lovely things recently. Now that we’re looking to improve our art assets and quality wherever we can, here’s an early look at our Mediterranean Isle inside World Machine. It’s not quite ready to go in-engine yet as we won’t be touching maps for a while, but we can’t wait to see what it looks like once it’s there!
We recently added a concept artist to help out with building designs and realize our expansive list of structures that will be featured in the game. Here’s the first look at some of our buildings:
The Fast Food Kiosk is a small building for your guests to purchase meals and drinks set by the player. It’s been designed so that visitors can access cashiers from four different sides depending on path access, meaning that the kiosk can be placed both within a plaza or on the side of a pathway and still be fully functional.
A Restroom is required for when your guests need to, you know… go. The internal trash can and recycling bin mounted to the outer wall along with solar panels attached to the roof makes this building worthwhile even when alongside its larger counterpart.
The Animal Nursery is the birthplace for all of your prehistoric animals before moving them out into the park. We felt that the original design didn’t quite fit its purpose and opted for a larger modern aesthetic. Additional foliage and greenery will be added in-engine.
The Thermic Modulator alters the temperature of an exhibit while retaining the chosen climate. To keep its design relatively hidden from guests, its outer texture adapts to the ground texture beneath it.
Buildings are something that the team has wanted to see for the longest time and we hope that you’re just as excited as we are to reveal new building types each month. Remember to supply your structures with sufficient water and electricity, or else you might just find yourself in a predicament!
UX/UI Improvements
While not strictly linked to the graphic design side of development, our UI designer has been working with our programmers to ensure that the future of Prehistoric Kingdom is as nice to play with as it is to look at. A smattering of concepts were created during March to compliment the on-going game plan and feature design, as well. The interface for selection, demolition, animal selection, and terraforming have been finalized along with some tweaks to existing sets to name but a few.
Expanding upon our previous two state cursors from the demo to cover a wide range of activities!
Besides a handful of other improvements such as new mouse cursor states and button feedback/responsiveness, we’ve added a collection of charming phrases during the loading screen to make waiting just that little bit less tedious. We might even throw a few easter eggs in there – who knows?
Loading screen backgrounds will change depending on the map. All 50 Early Access animals can be viewable as the animated creature based on chance.
A small sample of the 20+ game-related phrases and easter eggs. Revolutionary? Nah. Neat? Definitely.
New Creatures
That’s right – even more animals to show! These critters might not come as a surprise to those who have been following the live streams but here are the new creatures (and alternate skins) of March. Say hello to Ankylosaurus magniventris, Baryonyx walkeri, Carnotaurus sastrei, and Edmontosaurus regalis!
Alt. Skins & Concept Art
Last month we showed off our Pachyrhinosaurus. Today we’re revealing its two alternate skins; Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis and perotorum!
Alternate skin designs for Carnotaurus, Deinonychus, Edmontosaurus, and Styracosaurus:
And finally; artwork for Prenocephale and all the remaining mammals!
Base Mesh Completion
With the conclusion of our last livestream, the remaining Early Access base meshes have been completed! All of our beautiful animals will be moving onto sculpting, texturing, rigging, and animation over the coming months.
Terraforming is a key part of any great zoo building game which is why we’re looking into completely overhauling the system currently implemented within the pre-alpha demo. The details provided here may be altered as development continues, but here’s the general idea of what we’re looking at.
Terrain Editing
With the user interface getting an extreme makeover, we would like to focus our terraforming systems around voxels due to the hundreds of creative possibilities that can be accomplished with them.
Up to three different water colours can be chosen (“salt”, “fresh”, or “muddy”) when painting water into a paddock. This is complimentary feature the main tools – raising, lowering, flattening, and smoothing the terrain.
We’ll do our best in researching and implementing a voxel terrain system due to the ability to freely sculpt caves, arches, and overhangs from the terrain. The creative power that comes with something like this has the potential to be truly amazing, so we’ll be sure to report back on our progress in the next few DevLog’s.
Climate Painting
Climate painting in Prehistoric Kingdom offers deep customization for hardcore builders as well as simple tools for players who would rather not get into the detailed side of exhibit design.
Players will have the option to paint both ground textures and make use of the ‘Quick Design’ tool simultaneously, enabling or disabling the automatic placement of rocks, ground clutter, and foliage during the painting process. Rocks and trees can be individually placed by lowering the brush size to its minimum value or painted directly onto your terrain through increasing the size and intensity of your brush.
Overall, terraforming will feel far more integrated into the game. Some of you may recall having to use a separate foliage removal tool instead of demolition when experimenting with the demo. Not only will trees, rocks, and clutter behave like the rest of the structures and objects in the game, but their functionality will be, too. Clicking painted objects will activate the editing gizmo – allowing for a more streamlined exhibit building experience.
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And that concludes March’s DevLog!
We will be continuing our daily streams as well as posting a few more times a month on our social media pages so there’s less of a content drought in between blog posts. With that said, we hope you enjoyed reading and we shall see everyone in April!
Last week's release of the Jurassic Patch was extremely well taken, and we were humbled by it. Everyone showed off their limitless creativity by building magnificent parks and reserves, and watching the new and old animals alike wander around and display their behaviors.
However, we do acknowledge that it wasn't without fault. To this extent, we took some time to fix some of the more immersion-breaking bugs to make the whole experience that much more enjoyable during the wait for Early Access. Furthermore, we polished some of the new behaviors and added that little extra detail on top of them.
Patch notes are as follows:
Audio
Eating sounds for carnivores have been added
Drinking sounds for all dinosaurs have been added
Fleeing dinosaurs now vocalize to the herd
Reduced volume range for Camarasaurus vocalizations
Volume pitch for infants adjusted
AI
Dinosaurs will no longer teleport out of their enclosures
Dinosaurs will now react to threats even if they are eating/drinking/resting
Dinosaurs will now sleep. This is a separate need from resting and will slow down hunger/thirst while increasing health and energy
Dinosaurs should no longer get stuck in a state until they die
Dinosaurs should no longer get stuck turning
Dinosaurs should now react better to vehicles
Dinosaurs should no longer glitch into the air
Moving a dinosaur will now reset its state in case it does happen to get stuck
Carnivore aggression has been toned down
Carnivores should have an easier time grabbing infants
Dinosaurs will now look around and vocalize while resting
Dinosaurs can no longer be placed where there is no navmesh. They will now appear red until moved somewhere valid
Various other improvements to AI and related systems
Animation
Animals will sometimes yawn when resting
Animals will shake after exiting water
Animation stutter has been reduced
Attack animation syncing has been improved somewhat
Animals don't reset when time is paused anymore
Building
Gate bug where gate cannot be deleted is fixed
Various bugs that prevent placement of new buildings have been fixed
Paths no longer affect the navmesh. Dinosaurs can now walk on paths
Rocks will now affect the navmesh so that animals will path around them
Reduced game lag when placing a building
Fixed bug when moving an animal after deleting the nursery it spawned from
Fixed various bugs that could result in being unable to place or click on buildings
Dinosaurs
Allosaurus body size has been modified
Camarasaurus has learned to swim
Camarasaurus now has significantly more health
Camarasaurus now has additional attacks
Camarasaurus can now properly deal damage with its tail
Camarasaurus can now threaten predators
Camarasaurus body size has been modified
Dryosaurus can now graze
Gallimimus can now preen themselves
Gallimimus can now graze
Stegosaurus can now graze
Stegosaurus should now properly use its tail for self-defense
Triceratops can now graze
Tyrannosaurus now pants when low on energy
Tyrannosaurus has a new random idle animation
Velociraptor can now dust bathe when resting
Velociraptor can now preen themselves
Misc.
Camera will no longer fall below terrain
Vehicles will now properly collide with trees
Improved overall game performance significantly for CPU bound machines
Reduced game hiccups when loading a dinosaur or building for the first time
Pathfinding improvements
To better support trackpad users, Zoom In (R) and Zoom Out (F) keys are now incremental zoom instead of absolute. To mimic old functionality and snap to the closest zoom press Shift+R, to the furthest zoom press Shift+F.
UI
Animal counter will now properly reflect animal count and exclude dead animals
Animal statistics (i.e. body weight) are now correct
The AI is still being fine-tuned and is not perfect, and as such there are still a few small issues which we may or may not address in a small, final bugfix patch. Some of the known issues are:
animals can glitch in and out of the ground when filling their needs
turning animations aren't always perfectly synced with the object
carnivores can be overly aggressive when in packs, resulting in unnecessary herbivore slaughter, though to much lesser extent than previously
That said, we hope you'll keep enjoying the game, and as always, have a great time with the new build!
Jurassic Patch Release & Changelog
It’s here! The Jurassic Patch is the final big update to the free pre-alpha demo and we are excited to finally be able to release it!
We have to start off by apologizing for the unusually long wait: as many of you might know, we ran a stressful (but very successful, thanks to you!) Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2017. Coupled with logistical hiccups, it sure had its toll on the development process. To quote our last devlog (in reference to the patch): "It’s not quite as grandiose as we initially expected it to be, and in an ideal world we would have liked the AI to be more polished and bug free. We’ve unfortunately had to disable the saving system as its issues were plentiful, and simply were not worth continuing with in the demo."
That being said, we did add 4 new animals, as well as more buildings, decorations, and visual overhauls. As such, we firmly believe you will be having some more fun with this early version of the game while we move forward with development. We can't wait to see what you create. To share it with the community, make sure to join our discord server!
The change-log is as follows:
ADDED: Several new structures:
Added short stone fence.
Added woven horse fence.
Added elephant fence.
Added high metal fence.
Added sauropod feeder.
Added bright herringbone path.
Added simple asphalt path.
Added dark asphalt path.
Added 5 logs and sticks as decorations.
Added 3 more boulders as decorations.
Added the 8 Mediterranean trees as decorations.
Revamped the UI graphics:
Remade the main menu.
Remade the new game configuration menu.
Added additional UI colors.
Revamped the nursery menu.
Changed loading screen image.
Revamped animal selection menus and functionality.
Added time state UI.
Revamped path icons.
Expanded upon the building information panel.
Four new dinosaurs:
Allosaurus fragilis.
Stegosaurus stenops.
Dryosaurus altus.
Camarasaurus grandis.
New AI behaviors: Perhaps the largest aspect of this patch is the new improved AI. As aforementioned, it's not quite as bug-free as we might have hoped, so it's hit and miss. However, when it does work as intended, it gives in for quite interesting behaviors worth witnessing.
Animals will make herds, flocks, and packs of varying sizes depending on the species.
Animals will now look at objects and creatures around them.
Infants will hide behind adults during combat.
Carnivores now hunt animals that are comparable to their own size or smaller.
Pack hunting.
Large carnivores can eat small babies whole.
Herbivores will defend themselves using defensive stances, attacks, or flee.
Threat displays.
Injured animals will begin to limp and attempt to escape.
REMOVED:
Saving system (due to issues with new features and systems).
CHANGED:
Terraforming now works under animals and decorations.
Updated large palm model and texture.
Updated small palm model and texture.
Decreased random wait time for next track play.
Brightened sky.
Reduced max bloom values.
Randomized wind turbine rotor rotation.
Turbines auto-rotate to face wind direction.
Increased dinosaur growth speed.
Restore position option in vehicle depot menu is now always enabled.
Enabled path building under structures.
Tweaked vehicle controls responsiveness.
Updated Brick Wall Fence.
Updated conflicting building descriptions.
Merged the 'Dirts' and 'Natural' path sections.
Added pointer arrow to the water pump.
Adjusted night and overcast graphics.
Improved game post effects.
FIXED:
Fixed Velociraptor eating and drinking.
Option menu disappearing labels have been fixed.
Fixed gate placement bug.
Fixed dinosaur size jumpiness in nursery menu.
Fixed weight issues in Tyrannosaurus eating animation.
Fixed animation reset after pause in animals.
Palisade fences now have their own description.
Fixed short fence selection hitboxes.
Fixed night time red sky shader bug.
Nursery scale has been aligned with the animal previews.
OPTIMIZATION:
Optimized vehicles and depots, allowing for far more depots built at once than before.
Optimized building state pointers.
Optimized resource system.
Happy Holidays + Status Update
Happy holiday's from the Prehistoric Kingdom team! We've had a great year, and we hope that you enjoy our brand new Megaloceros to celebrate.
Your support as a community has been amazing, and we appreciate all the backers and 20,000+ demo players who are working together to make our game a reality. As a project that was originally created back in 2014, we couldn't have asked for a better group of people to lead us into the home stretch.
The Jurassic Patch
The Jurassic Patch is still getting worked on - improving the overall graphical quality of the game and it's AI. Animals now feel like proper animals and are far more interesting to look at while they go about their business! While we're still improving combat, creatures can herd, flock, threaten, hunt, look at other animals/their environment, and more.
We've added a handful of new fences and objects to play with, as well as introducing advanced editing for all the trees in the game so that players can move, rotate, and scale foliage just like the rocks!
Speaking of foliage, here's a look at the brand new palms and colour grading! One of the complaints that we saw a lot of was people how overly bright and saturated the public demo looks. Now that we've changed them - we agree! While we'll strive to keep the game vibrant and colourful, we feel that this is a step in the right direction.
Because of this, we've also edited the textures and foliage of the Mediterranean Isle to - shockingly - look more Mediterranean.
Oh. And the Tyrannosaurus has learned how to close her mouth properly. There's still some work to be done, but we hope to get the Jurassic Patch out to you all as quickly as possible!
Kickstarter
As of this post, our Kickstarter campaign is at a steady 76%, with a numerous amount of updates having been posted over the last month.
Thank you all for supporting the game! While our Steam updates can be sporadic, our social media accounts are frequently updated if you want to see more. <3
Prehistoric Kingdom - Now Live on Kickstarter! Jurassic Patch Progress Report
Hello everyone, back to a blog post for some incredibly exciting news!
As most of you already know, we have been working on the project completely unfunded for around 3 years now. In this time we went from iteration to iteration, progressively bettering both the project and ourselves. After having launched a working demo (to which we'll still provide support, more on that later in the post) we believe it's finally time to 'up our game' (no pun intended)!
Our project is now live on Kickstarter! You can find our page HERE.
Kickstarter allows us to do just that, as it gives us the necessary funding to spend more time on development and work more efficiently. As such we'll be able to present a product sooner rather than later. Here's where we need your help! Consider donating to the project and telling all your friends and family about it! Even small donations help, and the more people that can check the project out, the better! This holiday season you have the chance to help make this game a reality, resting assured that we all greatly appreciate your love and support!
The campaign page itself is jam-packed with never-seen-before new content in the form of concepts, in-game screenshots, gifs, and videos! Those with a keen eye will be able to find sneak peeks of the upcoming Jurassic Patch! These past few weeks we've been busy setting the campaign page up, but that doesn't mean we've forgotten about the game itself! Not only have we added the new 4 animals in their entirety (Camarasaurus, Allosaurus, Dryosaurus and Stegosaurus), but we've also improved on the AI system and some interface graphics. It's all still very much WIP, which is why we want to spend some more time on polishing before launching it, but some great looking results are already popping up!
Ending this blog post with much excitement, we want to remind everyone that we'll be doing frequent updates throughout and after the campaign, so stay tuned!
We are also streaming right now, come join us here!
Demo V.0.1.4.3 Patch Update - What's to Come
Hello again, everyone!
Last Wednesday, we finally released the new and improved Prehistoric Kingdom Pre-Alpha Demo - a collaboration of 11 months of unpaid work from a team that can be found all over the world. While we are still humbled by the positive reception and thank you all dearly for supporting us, there are obvious issues with the game which we are working hard at to fix! Most notably we have added grass removal for paths and buildings, as well as improving how terraforming behaves with fences, paths, and more. We have a very large, text filled blog post to get through today, so please enjoy the patch notes below.
PRE-ALPHA DEMO V.0.1.4.3 PATCH NOTES
FIXES:
CHANGES:
ADDITIONS:
Things and Tips You Might Have Missed!
Dinosaurs:
Building:
Vehicles:
Gameplay:
Miscellaneous:
The Future of the Project
Updating the Demo
Two words; Jurassic Patch.
Yes. The Jurassic Patch is the main content update that is expected to hit Steam “Soon™”. In other words, we do not have an ETA on its arrival. But we do however have a very clear idea on what to expect, so hold onto your butts!
“But Mr. and Mrs. Developers, what are the new objects?!” we hear you cry! They’re a surprise, but we are very confident that you will all enjoy what we have planned. Regarding the Lite-Challenge Mode, it will act as a taste of basic management that follows the current Sandbox mode goal (build a park that isn’t designed for guests but rather a reserve). This means that players will have to deal with money, complete missions/objectives to earn money, wrangle a monthly upkeep, and ship resources to the island in order to sustain their animals and build structures. The AI will be getting an improvement too, leading to the much anticipated hunting and herding! To accommodate our new additions to the demo roster, we’ve overhauled the Nursery UI (as detailed below). Stay tuned for more info!
“Okay, that nice and all, but what can we expect in the meantime?” Bug fixes, mostly. With today’s patch, we’re hoping to eliminate the majority of the issues that users have experienced in the demo. And while in a perfect world that’d be all done and dusted, we’ll continue checking the #pk-bug-reporting channel on our Discord server and try to add some quality of life improvements.
In terms of updates, there might be one or two more blog posts before we go to Kickstarter (which will be preluded by the Jurassic Patch). Behind the scenes, we are hoping to stream more often and interact with the community directly, but due to the global location of our team it is incredibly hard to find an appropriate time where a large portion of the development team is available at once.
Redesigning the Nursery
As development picked up its pace over the last few weeks before releasing the demo, we realized that we were going to have to look at a new approach to how users will navigate the user interface for our Nursery building. Combining our intentions for the future and looking at user feedback, we are hoping that this new design will mitigate issues such as being unable to find certain animals (for example, we have found that some are unable to find the Triceratops) and will make the future animal additions far easier to recognise.
Non-final concept art of the new Nursery UI. Text + Icons are a work in progress.
Breakdown of the user interface.
Type Selection (Purple)
Preview Window (Red)
Creature List (Green)
“Quick Stats” (Turquoise)
Description (Blue)
Animal Sequencer (Orange)
Animal Holder (White)
Community Spotlight
We have seen some amazing things built so far in the demo! Because of this, we wanted to share some of the screenshots and builds that have impressed us the most. With longtime players of multiple tycoon games becoming interested in our project, we only expect to become more blown away by the creativity of our community each and every day.
Fountain - Created by Narwhaler
Estuary with Mangroves - Created by T_L
Small Paddock - Created by DrBylund
T. rex on the Hill - Created by Gale
Cave - Created by Ammonite
Sleeping Tyrannosaurs - Created by YourCasualFox
Smile! - Created by Byron (Developer)
Addressing the News
We would like to reconfirm our dedication to Prehistoric Kingdom. We are confident that it'll give our players a unique and fun experience. Because of this, we tip our hats, and greatly look forward to where we want to take the game.
Until Next Time…
We are both humbled and pleased with the reception to our initial Pre-Alpha demo. The feedback given over the last week has been crucial for our understanding towards player interaction, usability, and expectations. There could not have been a better result, and we hope that you, our supporters, are as excited as we are regarding the future of Prehistoric Kingdom.
With Kickstarter on the horizon, we hope to begin explaining the game in a broader sense. To the now 6000 (and counting) players who have played the demo, and thousands more who have watched gameplay on YouTube, we thank you deeply. If you’d like to keep up to date with the game, we have an Official Discord Server: https://discord.gg/3pRpYTE
