Alpha Release
Welcome, park managers!
Prehistoric Kingdom’s Closed Alpha has finally arrived! An early version of the game is now available to play for eligible alpha tier backers and early adopters. If you should have access and currently don’t, please consult our previous blog post to find your key.
If you’re having issues, please get in touch with Crytivo support so we can get your key delivered to you! Any delayed keys or problems with receiving them is an honest mistake and we want to make sure everybody who needs a key gets one.
Now, let’s get into the details!
Alpha: Features, Support & The Future
These are our core features currently available in the alpha, offering a small selection of sandbox and work-in-progress challenge mode features for you to play with.
We are so excited to see what the alpha players come up with. Even from our VIPs we’ve seen some insane builds thanks to our suite of creative tools and extended functionality like full modular pathfinding on both the animals and guests - how cool is that?!
The visitors can be a little funky to look at (all male guests went to the same barber!), but their pathing capabilities are what counts here. Their visuals and animations will be drastically improved with time.
Everything has room for improvement and alpha is no exception! Over the next few weeks we’ll be providing stability fixes and a handful of content additions such as absent animal behaviours like eating and drinking.
On the user experience front, building state icons are one of the things we’ll be adding to better signify structures that require power or buildings that have reached guest capacity. Currently, the power status of a building is only displayed in the Management View or in its UI popup when selected, so it’s definitely something we’ll be improving.
Release Roadmap
As discussed in a recent livestream with Crytivo, we’ve provided an updated roadmap for our release schedule as well as what you can expect to see from beta.
It’s very important to note that these are estimated dates as we are taking community feedback into account during both alpha and beta. We want to release a stable product for Early Access and we will take the time necessary to do so.
We’ll also be adding a few more animals into the beta on top of our current six present in the alpha.
Keybinds
As we’re still working on setting up support for custom keybinds in-game, please refer to the sheet below for various inputs. Building actions do have on-screen prompts, however! Players can also access a Help menu by pressing F1 or by navigating to the left side of the screen.
Known Issues
Though we are already aware of various issues in the build, we felt that these were the most pressing to notify alpha players about to prevent duplicate reports.
Animals
Certain slopes may cause quadrupeds to be angled weirdly.
Returning to a quadruped from a distance may cause its body IKs to briefly freak out.
Creatures may get stuck or stop moving. Picking up and replacing the animal should fix them.
IK issues can cause creatures to jitter or render their animations at a lower frame rate.
Creative
Painting water at different heights can cause slight water plane “bleeding” on large slopes when placed directly next to each other. This can be fixed by smoothing the slope.
Hard slope limits haven’t been introduced for terrain tools like raising and roughen, resulting in unnaturally sharp pillars or “spikes” if used excessively.
Some terrain tools can be a little too quick at max intensity (raise, roughen).
Forests can become overly dense at max brush intensity very quickly.
Modular grid visualization can become offset. This is purely visual and does not alter the building mechanics.
Due to its massive size, there can be unintended edge cases with the modular system. For more specific details, please refer to the GitHub.
Misc.
Saving is still somewhat experimental! Please make multiple saves to ensure you do not lose progress.
Cancelling actions can cause painted trees to disappear for a single frame.
Paths can experience lots of visual artifacts, especially on slopes. This will improve throughout Alpha.
To report more issues or UX suggestions, please visit here.
Additional Notes
Due to some issues we’ve disabled planar reflections until we can get them ready for general use. We’ve implemented makeshift screen-space reflections for now, though you may notice missing data in areas that should be reflected as black. This is a temporary workaround until more time can be spent on improving it.
There’s also a lot of audio and related systems to cover, which means certain actions like modular group duplication, water bodies and guest crowds are silent. Some of these areas will be updated with sounds during alpha support.
If you have any further questions, please be sure to contact Crytivo’s support or get in touch with us through Twitter, Facebook or Discord.
Thank you for all your support so far. For those of you joining us in the alpha, we hope you enjoy your time with it! Once everyone has had enough time to understand our tools and the way the game is played, we’re expecting to see some truly fantastic stuff.
Until next time,
- The PK Team
