Dev Diary: October 2023
Welcome to the October Development Update!
In case you missed yesterday’s announcement, Update 8 is now live on the Public Testing Branch! This is an experimental, work-in-progress release that includes Velociraptor, rewritten animal locomotion, AI and much more. As you can understand, this dev diary will serve more as a general status report due to the update having just come out.
To access the Public Testing Branch:
Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library
Go to Properties
Betas
Select 'ptb_public_testing'
This is an extremely large update with some significant changes, so we highly suggest reading the patch notes to understand what’s currently included in Update 8 so far.
We’re very excited to get this update finalized over the coming weeks, and for the remainder of this dev diary, we wanted to talk to you about why we chose to create a PTB (Public Test Branch) and how we’d like to use it going forward. Oh, and maybe some small surprises along the way.
Where We’re At
Throughout October, we got Update 8 to a point where all the animals had been upgraded and transitioned over to Version 2.
Currently, animals almost have total feature parity with their previous iterations, and most of their immediate issues are cosmetic; things like funny limbs, missing audio, missing animations or animals just getting into places they shouldn’t be.
Over the next few weeks, we will be deploying hotfixes and various improvements to Update 8 until it’s ready to become the live game. In particular, we’ll be focusing on stability improvements as well as ensuring the animals have been well polished with better balancing, IKs, additive animation and audio support. Since this update is just so darn big, the community will be instrumental in highlighting things that we may have missed as well as reporting any bugs or crashes players might stumble across. We want this release to be the best it can be!
Why a Public Testing Branch?
By creating the PTB, it gives players an opportunity to jump into experimental releases and help us find issues while the team continues to polish and finalize an update. In conjunction with dev diaries, we feel that it’s a transparent way to present where we are and get feedback without pushing a non-final release to the actual live game.
Players can use the bug report and feedback forums on our official Discord server to help communicate their issues.
How will it be used?
We plan to use the PTB as much as the team sees necessary, whether it be polishing the next major version, testing new mechanics, or double checking the quality of a hotfix before deployment to the live game.
If a patch has shown strong stability from internal testing, it is unlikely for it to be pushed to the PTB.
When will Update 8 be finalized?
We plan to spend the next few weeks addressing key issues and polishing Update 8 before it can be released to the live game. We will be deploying hotfixes until the team is ready to move on.
The Future
While part of the team are working on support for Update 8, the rest are developing Updates 9 and 10 in parallel. As stated in the previous dev diaries, these are primarily content focused updates and will be featuring more art-heavy additions like animals, maps and building pieces. Please enjoy another glimpse at what’s to come!
Update 9: New Species
Best known for its shark-like teeth and impressively tall stature, one of the largest theropods to ever roam the Earth is coming to Prehistoric Kingdom in Update 9. We’d like you to meet the one and only Carcharodontosaurus (car-car-oh-don-toe-sore-us)!
This ferocious predator’s name is not only a mouthful, but was actually inspired by the great white shark’s scientific name; Carcharodon! We reckon your guests will be screaming to see this dinosaur in action.
Update 10: New Species
Update 10 will be a particularly exciting time for the game, introducing a completely new building theme, a new map and two mammals that we think you’ll really love! That’s right, more mammals.
The first of which is none other than the Cave Lion! This creature is one of our absolute favorites thanks to their streamlined mane and thicker coats that give them a different look to their African relatives.
The team will be including both the Eurasian Cave Lion (Panthera spelaea) and the American Cave Lion (Panthera atrox) as alternate species in Update 10.
Eurasian Cave Lion:
American Cave Lion:
Development Bloopers
To close out this dev diary, we’d like to show you some of the fascinating oddities we dealt with while developing Update 8. Please enjoy some of our favourite behind the scenes bloopers and mishaps!
Created by carlos200022
Created by ProOz.
Created by 1ncognito.
Thank you for reading October’s dev diary!
Throughout November, we’ll be updating the PTB with new hotfixes that’ll get us closer to a final release for Update 8. We look forward to sharing more news about our future updates in the next dev diary and hope you have a wonderful month!
- The PK Team
