Dev Diary: April 2023

DEVLOG

May 1

Written By Prehistoric Kingdom

Welcome to the April Development Update!

With the recent release of Update 7, the game has officially been in Early Access for one year. Over the last 12 months, we’ve seen so many amazing community creations, parks and screenshots that continue to blow us away. From gigantic starships to custom prehistoric flora, your boundless creativity shows no end. Happy anniversary, PK!

The previous update introduced an expanded power system, new modules, biome presets and a lot of fantastic terrain-related quality of life changes. You can check out the patch notes for Update 7 here!

For the remainder of this short blog post, we’ll be providing some key information about when you can expect the next update for Prehistoric Kingdom.

Where We’re At

The Public Roadmap Trello has been updated to better reflect our internal goals. The cards don’t necessarily show absolutely everything coming in these releases, but they do provide a general idea of what to expect. With every major patch, we get closer and closer to a full release.

The next big patch, Update 8, includes a technical overhaul for the animals - reworking their locomotion and development backend to support future behavioral features like hunting, combat and breeding. This has been a big job! Not only do these new foundations need to be finished, but all of our existing animals need the old system ripped out and replaced.

For this reason, we are expecting Update 8 to release in mid-late June. We’ll have more information for you in the next dev diary, but we wanted to let you know in advance that May will likely be a quieter month.

The Next Animal

We’re excited to announce that Update 8 will also be including a brand new animal! This species is perhaps one of the more infamous creatures in the fossil record, growing in popularity through its cultural significance. In the world of Prehistoric Kingdom, though, things aren’t quite the same!

Land Value

Land Value is an upcoming feature in Update 8 that combines exhibit score and park attractiveness into the park’s rating.

This is a localized system that evolves with the park, making areas “positive” with beautiful habitats/scenery items or “negative” with power generators, broken facilities and low cleanliness. Guests will be naturally drawn to places with high land value, potentially donating more generous amounts to Donation Boxes.

Our goal with Land Value is to tie many of the game's independent scoring systems (exhibit score, cleanliness) together into a single management view while fleshing out the building system with consequences (e.g. placing a big, loud power plant near a guest plaza). We believe this addition will help to make everything in the game feel more interconnected.

Genetic Mutations

Genetic Mutations will finally be making an appearance with Update 8. Procedural in nature, we’ve continued to develop and curate the look of our mutations, including new features such as eye coloring to more accurately capture the essence of this natural phenomenon.

An animal rating system will also be included alongside mutations to add further value to your albino, melanistic and leucistic specimens.

What’s in the Pipeline?

For our final piece of news, we’d like to leave you with teasers for the animals coming later in Update 9. As stated in a few blog posts now, the team has some truly great creatures on the roster for this year.

The Next, Next Update

Since they’re not coming in the next immediate update we obviously don’t want to give too much away, but we know how much you love to speculate. We’ve got a sneaking suspicion that quite a few of you will be very pleased! Stay tuned!