Dev Diary: September 2024

DEVLOG

Oct 1

Welcome to the September Development Diary!

Update 12 is chugging along! As the last pieces of art start to come through, we’re focused on developing tutorials and getting the update finished. You can expect a trailer in October announcing its release date, showing the main features and dinosaurs in action. For now, however, let’s look at some new content!

Update 12

Ankylosaurus

After the reveal of our green Ankylosaurus last month, it’s time to show off another skin! Featuring dark stripes and a yellow body, this Anky is loud and proud with its striking contrast. Carnivores beware!

Rustic Theme

After much speculation, the long awaited Rustic Theme will be arriving in Update 12! Inspired by US National Parks, this building set makes heavy use of woods and sustainable materials to achieve its vernacular look.

Taking a peek at the construction options, you’ll primarily find aged materials that seem like they’ve seen a thing or two. In order to perfectly capture our references, the wooden walls have been given extra 3D geometry to truly make them pop out!

Of course, the Rustic Theme wouldn’t be complete without its decorations! We’ve got some gorgeous wood carvings, lamps, signposts and giant hollow logs for small animals to walk through.

Coastal Map

Welcome to Redwood Valley, set on the American West Coast. This mountainous region is home to a variety of coastal foliage, like its namesake, the redwoods. Featuring a graveled coastline and varied terrain, this map features tiered areas of flatland with slopes connecting each of its plateaus. A fitting environment for many North American dinosaurs!

Though we’re still finalizing the layout and density of foliage, you can get a rough idea of how this location will end up feeling below.

The Coastal biome itself is also being updated with new trees, improved underbrush and additional flora such as rhododendron and lily of the valley. As it’s currently one of the oldest biomes in the game, the upgrade will be pretty transformative!

Theme Updates

Starting with the Basic Theme, we’ll be adding two recolorable wall styles: raw wooden planks and wood look tiles. These materials are especially great for more lowkey builds, offering a nice and simple aesthetic.

Alongside a new stone material, polished terrazzo, the Modern Theme will be getting an extra coat of paint with updated wood materials!

Official Prefab Redux

Coming in Update 12 is a much needed standardization of our official prefabs with fresh designs. It’s important to us that without interacting with the workshop, players can access a bunch of easy to use prefabs for all themes.

So, what’s changing? For the guest centric prefabs, there’ll be a wide array of structure layouts with styling available in every theme. Their foundations will be consistently sized, too, depending on the building.

This means that if you’re thinking of swapping your Basic Restaurant for a Modern Restaurant, it’ll fit perfectly. Easy peasy!

As for logistics and park services (e.g. loading bay, staff center, etc.) we only plan to release Basic prefabs for now, but we can revisit them if community demand is high enough.

The Future

Ontogeny

Lots of work was done prototyping ontogeny in September. We’re making good progress with animation scaling and have started on getting the animal entities smoothly transitioning as they grow.

As we’re going for a real time growth system, we’ve been taking a look at bone proportions and seeing how much of the animals we can change before they begin to stretch. Thankfully, it’s all looking good!

Even with our rudimentary tests, watching these gangly little beasties walk around and eat next to their adult counterparts is truly something. We’ve got a good pipeline going and are excited to tackle the challenges ahead of us. We seriously cannot wait to get them more polished and show you all!

Below are some examples of our current growth stages for the T. rex and Triceratops. We don’t have alternate normal maps for babies yet, so keep in mind that things like ridges, bumps and keratin will be toned down in the future!

When we spoke of ontogeny earlier this year, we mentioned that there’d be 1 baby skin per animal. Today, we’re pleased to confirm that alternate species will receive their own texture and ontogeny, rather than sharing them.

In most cases, this’ll be as simple as a change in color palette. But for something like Triceratops prorsus and horridus, they’ll have unique designs to better transition into their adult colorations. You can even see that their horn nubs are shaped differently!

One of the other cool things about ontogeny is sexual dimorphism! Though included in all species, this feature will be best observed in animals with horns or tusks, like mammoths. By stopping growth stages a little early, we’re able to give animals a more gracile look, depending on the sex.

All in all, a lot has changed since the last time we tackled ontogeny. Afterall, we couldn’t have baby Tyrannosaurs having meteorite flashbacks, could we?

Alternate Species

When creating our animals, we often like to include alternate species that wouldn’t make it into the game on their own. They help add variety, but can often feel like approximations by sharing an identical shape to the animal they were based on. To this, we say no more!

As you can see above, Tarbosaurus will look quite different from Tyrannosaurus, especially when it comes to bulk. This is a huge improvement over its current in-game appearance, where it appears more like a soft T. rex with dewlap.

Excitingly, we’ll be extending this philosophy to every alt species in the game, making anatomical adjustments where possible. In the case of animals like Camarasaurus, we especially look forward to making the silhouette of all three species unique!