We've learned so much from our community here on Steam for Tyto Ecology, and are proud to say we are now live with Tyto Online for Early Access!
Launch week 20% discount brings it down to $19.99. On full launch next year we do plan on Tyto Online being subscription for a simple business model to constantly put out more content, so this is a discounted pre-purchase for the first 3 months that also includes all the game time until then.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/544290/
Tyto Ecology Updates Moving Along!
Also, we want to make sure you guys know we're not ignoring Tyto Ecology and the updates we let you know about recently. Tundra and babies are both heartily moving along!
Aren't they just squeee adorable?!
Big News and Upcoming Updates!
Hello, everyone.
We wanted to give you an update on our progress with game content updates we're working on!
Alaskan Tundra Ecosystem
First, we're working on a brand new biodome DLC, with the Alaskan Tundra Ecosystem!
We decided to do this one because when you look at the biomes of the world, arctic tundra represents a gap in our current offerings and is a unique experience. It's been requested a few times, although the Savannah is more often requested -- and we REALLY want to get to that too, but we thought rounding out the biome representation first was a good idea.
Plus, we'll be releasing this in late December alongside the winter holidays, so it's great timing! Here's a few of the Alaskan Tundra animals we've already created: Arctic Fox, Arctic Ground Squirrel, Polar Bear, and Arctic Hare.
Twice as Cute, Just as Delicious
We have been looking forward to adding "real" babies into the game for some time now -- the current ones are scaled down versions. But as we all know, actual baby animals are adorable for their big faces and eyes and well, just have a different proportions.
We don't have a release date on this one as we'll be working on babies alongside our other work. We basically have a huge backlog starting with the babies we think gameplay will benefit from most, such as the bigger animals or ones that look unique to their parents (have you ever googled a baby tapir?!).
Annnddd birds.
We also have no promised date for birds, but one of our awesome interns, Michelle, decided to tackle this as her own project. Once she finishes, we still need to do a lot of integration and testing to make sure it goes into the ecosystems well. Birds are surprisingly challenging, as we have mentioned on the forums, because of figuring out how the AI will work to allow them to get eaten sometimes, where they go to sleep rather than just passing out on the ground like our other animals, etc. It requires a lot of new work and some more complicated behaviors than we currently have, but will be really exciting when we're able to do it!
Plus, we are really excited about the incredible golden eagle!
We'll keep you updated as we go, as always!
Tyto Ecology Halloween Sale. Because balancing ecosystems is terrifying!
Hello, all!
Now's the time to prompt your friends who haven't played Tyto Ecology yet to get on it. We're doing our FIRST SALE since we launched the game, 30% off with the Halloween Sale through November 1st.
If you looked at Tyto Ecology around launch and it's been sitting in your Wishlist ever since, here's a summary of some of the major updates we've done over the last 5 months, based on the feedback of our awesome players:
Major art overhaul with hand-painted texture update.
Completely redone camera controller as a god-mode camera.
Himalayas biodome as paid DLC, and recently added some free additional animals based on player request.
Predators can now fail hunts, resulting in much more dynamic ecosystem results as the animals all try to survive.
Greatly improved performance, stability, and polish.
Much, much more (re-arranging plants during placement, territory cross-breeding, just tons of smaller updates to make it more enjoyable)!
Also, if you haven't checked out the Himalayas DLC yet, now's the time -- only $2.79 with the 30% discount. Remember, red pandas are worth it.
Introducing: The Burrowing Owl!
Some of you should be feeling pretty smug right now! We had a Discussion Thread with players trying to guess the next release. We were surprised when people starting guessing right with such little information to go off!
This patch is a pretty simple one. We're introducing the Burrowing Owl and lowered the volume of the Gila monster a little bit. Below you can find some screen shots and a GIF. Let us know what you think of this cutie, who can be found in both the desert and the grassland!
Patch 1.10.2 / Green Iguana Addition!
Hello, friends! Thanks to some cool things happening around our company, this update got pushed a little later into the day. Below, you'll find the patch notes and, once in-game, you'll find the newly added Green Iguana!
Thank you everyone for the continued support. We hope you find the Iguana as adorable as we do. Let us know your thoughts in the comments and as always, happy building!
Patch Notes
Added the Green Iguana to the Amazon Rainforest!
Gila monsters now come as 4 instead of 2 and cap at 6 instead of 4.
Modified formula to make predators fail less hunts.
Made omnivores prioritize fruits less and carnivores prioritize fish less to promote more consumption of prey animals.
Reduced the leaf points of: Beavertail, Barrel Cactus, Orchids, Maidenhair Fern by around 33% each.
UPDATE 8:46 PST: -- Mac Issue FIXED
One of our programmers took a break from Hurricane Matthew prep and ran in to fix it up. Mac users will have a new download if they are on the first version of this patch. :) Thanks, everyone!
UPDATE 7:43 PST: -- Mac Issue.
We've identified a Mac issue that may prevent play for some users on this update, and are in the process of fixing it. If you get this issue, you'll have a popup at launch that says there's a global shader cache issue around COOKED content. We're aware and in the process of a fix. Will post when it's updated!
(Despite yet ANOTHER Hurricane approaching.)
Tyto Ecology Update: Gila Monster now in Mojave Desert!
It's the moment you've all been waiting for! (Right?!)
The Gila Monster is now available in the Mojave Desert.
And the even better news is that the Gila Monster helps eat your Deer Mice and Desert Kangaroo Rats! It's a relatively slow-eating small predator, so don't expect it to handle the population by itself, but it's definitely a nice addition with its small prey and insect eating niche!
Patch 1.10.1 Notes
Added the Gila Monster!
Animals no longer get stuck inside pineapple plants.
Sagebrush now have their correct bloom and stasis models.
Extra Small animals now have smaller babies.
Fixed a biodex entry typo.
Pollinated fruit plants now have at least 1 plant in a reproduction cycle even if no mammals eat fruits from it.
Fixed a bug where animals would sometimes sleep immediately after playing their defense animations.
Ferns now correctly turn red when their placement is invalid.
Tyto Ecology Update: Gila Monster now in Mojave Desert!
It's the moment you've all been waiting for! (Right?!)
The Gila Monster is now available in the Mojave Desert.
And the even better news is that the Gila Monster helps eat your Deer Mice and Desert Kangaroo Rats! It's a relatively slow-eating small predator, so don't expect it to handle the population by itself, but it's definitely a nice addition with its small prey and insect eating niche!
Patch 1.10.1 Notes
Added the Gila Monster!
Animals no longer get stuck inside pineapple plants.
Sagebrush now have their correct bloom and stasis models.
Extra Small animals now have smaller babies.
Fixed a biodex entry typo.
Pollinated fruit plants now have at least 1 plant in a reproduction cycle even if no mammals eat fruits from it.
Fixed a bug where animals would sometimes sleep immediately after playing their defense animations.
Ferns now correctly turn red when their placement is invalid.
Announcing our next game: Tyto Online
We've been leaving some hints that we've been working on another project, and are thrilled today to tell you all about Tyto Online, the game that this company was originally founded to create.
Tyto Online is an educational MMORPG where you explore a futuristic, alien planet as you solve problems and complete quests, learning real-world science with your friends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNI8cm-sxiI
Company History & Background
In August 2014, we completed a successful Kickstarter for Tyto Online, with over 300 early backers who believe in what we’re working to accomplish. After heading deeper into development with the new funds, we quickly realized that our ambitious goals needed to be approached in smaller steps. We decided to take a small piece of Tyto Online’s gameplay, the create-your-own ecosystem portion, and release that as its own stand-alone, offline game.
You all obviously know that game already as Tyto Ecology.
Releasing this first game was a tremendous learning experience for us. It gave us useful insight into what you all enjoy the most, what releasing a much larger game would entail, and taught us how to engage with our awesome and lively community around our product. It also allowed us to grow as a team so that we can tackle more complex challenges in the future.
Early Access
A game like Tyto Online takes a lot of time and resources to craft. We’re an early stage independent studio, and we’ve accomplished a lot with the support of our Kickstarter backers, early investors, and the revenues from our fantastic Tyto Ecology players. We decided we want to keep building like this, in close communication with our player base, and so we’re going to be launching Tyto Online in early access. This is planned right now for this November, just two short months away!
Those of you who pointed out that Tyto Ecology should have been early access when we launched will be pleased to know we learned from that experience. :)
While we're talking about this -- tossing us a vote on Greenlight would definitely help!
Okay, so what does this mean for the future of Tyto Ecology?
Obviously our attentions are going to be on developing the game that should be able to support the future of our company with Tyto Online, but we're not abandoning our awesome player base here.
First, we will be releasing new creatures, one every two weeks, for the next two months. These are a free add-on, of course! Our first creature, launching this week, will be the Gila Monster for the Desert! We know you all have been dying for some new reptiles.
We know some of you have been looking forward to potentially a brand new ecosystem with new DLC, but we do want to go ahead and let you know that's not on the books this year because of everything else we have to accomplish.
The game will continue to be supported alongside Tyto Online, though! Since Tyto Ecology exists as a feature inside Tyto Online, updates that it sees will often be able to be integrated back into Tyto Ecology. We know not all of you are going to want to play in the online gaming / MMO style, so we will make sure to bring development updates back here as well.
Please don't hesitate to ask us any questions about this, and we look forward to hopefully playing Tyto Online with many of you, as well.
Patch 1.10 Now Live!
Full Patch 1.10 is now live! Thanks so much for the help from our awesome community on testing it as we got ready to go live. This is a pretty major feature update, definitely the largest that we've done since launch.
We hope you've been enjoying the art update that went out last week ahead of this!
Updates to Predator-Prey Relations!
Your predators may now fail hunts! Well, technically the poor little prey animal might be clever and get away, but this makes things much more fair and realistic.
You will see an "escape" icon above the prey animal's head when this happens.
The chance that a hunt will be successful is impacted by the difference in size of the defending animal to the predator, if the defending animal is tough, and we also made some chance adjustments for if there is an overload of prey (like deer mouse overpopulation), in which case they won't fail hunts bc that would just be silly with 1,000 mice nearby!
There is now variation in when a predator will begin a hunt; they used to start at 80%, but now it will be within a range of 65-80%.
With the changes above, you should also notice more predators sharing hunts (especially with their children, which have a great chance of hunt failure because they are smaller).
Awww, look how cute the murder-beasts are sharing a kill. Which you'll see happen much more often with this new set-up.
Additional Feature Updates
<*>We now have an interface to show you the meat points on a carcass that can be eaten by another predator, and how that converts into detritus if it is not eaten before the carcass decays away.
<*>Territories can now cross-breed. Before, when you got down to 1 animal in a territory and it popped up that "Can't reproduce," you basically just started wishing for it to die so you could put something else there. Now, if there is another territory of the same species nearby, they will reproduce with each other!
<*>You can now randomize plant clumps during placement by pressing the space bar while in the process of placing plants.
<*>You can now toggle territories via a hotkey ("T").
<*>Options menu redesigned; should reduce accidentally hitting the wrong button!
<*>Added a "Max Time Away" setting right from the biodome selection screen.
Bug Fixes & Tweaks
Lowered leaf count across all plants (to better balance the ecosystem's carrying capacity with all our new changes) and updated their leaf bar values in the AddLife tool to be more accurate.
Reduced how much detritus decomposers remove.
Increased the level 5 detritus to 12,000 from 8,000.
Increased Max detritus to 15,000.
Animals no longer walk beyond their territory range.
Made starvation rates happen slower in fast forward.
Starvation notification prompts at 40% instead of 50% to adjust for more variability in hunting.
Changed Ant from a consumer-scavenger to a decomposer.
Changed the way that the "This Zone is Locked" is activated to be less annoying as you take pictures close to zone walls.
Updated movement speeds of animals.
Updated skipping cost of Tyto Coins to be more efficient at higher times.
Increased Badger hunger rate.
Decreased Frog brood/ reproduction values.
Chevrotain maturity increased to 10 months.
Lowered Pika brood/reproduction values.
Increased the hunger/stomach size of most rodents, so they require more food each time they eat.
Fixed a bug where Himalayan tigers weren't eating carcasses.
More cool things coming soon...
Just going to leave a teaser here. You guys have been asking, and we've been listening. :)
Don't worry, we're not adding more fast-breeding rodents to the game.
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Side note: the reason this wasn't up last week is because the dot in this image is our office:
One of our programmers making an extra backup at the last minute:
But everything is fine. We survived, just without power about 24h at the office. :P
Patch: Art Update -- Now Live!
Hello awesome community,
As many of you know, we've been working on Patch 1.10 with many very significant changes. We are still working on balancing those, but since we have an art update just sitting here, we figured we'd go live with that now, with the full Patch 1.10 soon to come!
So, what does this art update mean?
Every texture for plants and animals from your original 3 biodomes (desert, grassland, rainforest) has been updated.
Many animations for animals have now been updated, as well.
Some of the animals have been completely redone from the ground up (such as the fox and cougar).
Most animals now close their eyes when sleeping (not snakes, snakes are weird).
All the art now fits cohesively into our colorful and hand-painted art style. Here are some screenshots we took in the game while testing:
