Dev Diary: February 2023
Welcome to February’s Development Update!
In this post, we’ll be discussing some changes to the roadmap and delve into Prehistoric Kingdom’s next update. As we’ve just released Update 5, this dev diary will be a little more information heavy.
Speaking of the now-released update, this latest one adds the Research system, various range graphics and a bunch of little changes to Challenge Mode. Please check out the patch notes to see everything new in Update 5!
Where We’re At
The team is concurrently working on a handful of updates that we hope to release in the first half of 2023, focusing on new gameplay features and further development on animal AI.
While saying is easier than doing, this year we’re trying to be more frequent and consistent in our updates. The Research system, even if its initial offerings were quite basic, was our first step towards that goal in addition to the two other patches released in February. We want to better maintain the game by releasing fixes and general updates in a more frequent manner between larger releases, targeting additions that help the game find a better footing while we work on the big stuff.
We’ve learnt a lot from 2022 and that extends that to our animal roster. There are a lot of amazing prehistoric creatures in our backlog, so we’ve made some adjustments to help release them. Throughout the year we’ll be including animals in our big, themed updates as you’d expect - just like the Desert one back in December. However, we also have them sprinkled throughout 2023 to occasionally coincide with a few smaller gameplay updates. The team hopes that by the end of the year, there should be quite a few new faces running around your parks. You might just meet one of them very soon!
In February, we were also able to have two new members join the team! They’ve been settling in, helping to balance parts of the game and begin work on some new developments. This includes modular grass masking, a huge quality of life change that auto-removes grass under certain pieces such as floors and feeders.
With everything said, we’ve updated our Trello roadmap to better reflect where we’re headed and what we’d like to do. Keep in mind that everything is subject to change and that there are no public dates, treat it more as a step by step process.
Animals
Right now, we are heavily overhauling the technical side of animals - improving their locomotion, AI, and responsiveness. We’re putting more resources into them than ever before!
In parallel to all the coding, the animation team have been creating the new animations required for this revamped locomotion system. Strafes, walking backwards, turning on the spot while walking and even trotting are all part of our endeavor to create more convincing and responsive animal movement. You can see some of our tests below.
This includes swimming, too! This upcoming traversal feature has been designed to use the same types of animations, allowing animals to strafe or go backwards even when in the water. It’s all intentionally built to fluidly go between states rather than rigidly stop-start!
It’s important to stress that we’re not simply retreading old ground. Everything is being done in service of developing future behaviors like socializing, herding, hunting and combat. All of your bug reports, feedback and requests have been an important part of designing what we want from this next stage of our animals.
As much as we’re sure you’d love to see the monotony of animation tables, mixers and a lot of editor tooling, not too much is ready for presentation at this stage. It is, however, a massive update and it will take time. We will continue to share progress as the systems evolve.
What’s in the Pipeline?
Let’s talk about Update 6! This is our next gameplay update and we’re expecting it to launch this month in March with everything mentioned below.
Donation Boxes
Donation boxes are a module that allow guests to donate directly to the park. Strategically placing them in high traffic areas near good scoring exhibits will help net a greater number of donations.
However, donation boxes have a limited monthly capacity! This means that once they’re filled up, guests can no longer use that box. At the end of each month, their earnings will be automatically collected and the boxes will be emptied. Players can research bigger donation boxes to help raise the potential of their monthly donation income.
For those of you who are familiar with Challenge mode, you might know that donations are already a thing! Well… sorta. You see, donations in the current game provide a consistent flow of cash as long as there’s an animal in the habitat. It was one of those systems that we knew was going to get a second pass to improve the game’s simulation and management.
Our goal with this new iteration is to make donations feel more organic and help to reward players in a more meaningful way.
Updated Rocks & Styling
In Feb, the art team got around to remaking all our rocks to better compliment our other assets, dubbing these ones as “igneous”. This is all part of our grand plan to introduce new varieties like smooth, beachy rocks or jagged, stratified rocks.
The new versions make use of a tiling detail texture to preserve their upclose fidelity no matter how big or small you’ve scaled them. We’ve also included two brand new cladding pieces that are perfect for building flatter shapes like floors and walls.
It was important for us to keep the general shapes fairly close to our current rocks in order to preserve player builds. Some adjustments may be required depending on how you’ve used them in the past, but for the most part they’re pretty close! We’re still working on how they look, so there will be some visual differences in the final release.
Now, let’s not take this next part for granite. This update will also be adding moss, sand and snow styles for rocks! These three substrates will always appear on the top side of a rock no matter how you rotate or scale them. Each substrate is fully recolorable so if red snow or purple sand is your jam, you’re welcome!
New Animal
That’s right, the first animal of 2023 is right around the corner! We’re keeping it a secret for a little while longer, but if you’re lucky, you might just get a new Species Spotlight trailer as we get closer to the release of this update.
As mentioned earlier, we are still deep into overhauling the technical side of the animals. This will (hopefully!) be the last creature to use the current animal systems before everybody is updated in a few months.
Created by Atiel.
Created by luci257.
Created by joseph.af95.
Thank you for reading February’s dev diary!
The last few months of development have felt especially productive for the team. As stated above, we will continue to strive for more frequent updates to better maintain the live game. Please stay tuned for more information in March while we carry on developing the next update.
Until next time,
- The PK Team
