Dev Diary: January 2025
Welcome to the January Development Diary!
It’s a fresh year with new features on the horizon. We’ve been steadily working on improving the animals behind the scenes with work on ontogeny, sociality and combat for 2025. The thing is though, we actually need your help.
Patreon and Our Future
As a niche indie project, development funding can be hard to access, especially through the Early Access period when most potential customers understandably hold off from buying the game until it's complete.
Currently, the majority of our funds are generated during major Steam sales, but revenue can otherwise leave us spread too thin to have the financial security necessary to pay the entire team or commission new work from our artists. This has put us in a tough position, having to weigh our vision for the game against what's financially viable.
We currently have an active team of around a dozen people all in different roles, with some of our core members voluntarily taking staggered or reduced payment to keep us moving forward. This isn’t sustainable, and is why we’re looking to Patreon.
By opening a Patreon, we’re hoping to help ensure that development remains stable throughout the remainder of Early Access. As of this Dev Diary, we have 7 major updates left to complete before we can consider the game ready to leave Early Access.
Beyond keeping the game alive, the main benefit of becoming a patron will be access to exclusive polls, sneak peeks and our weekly development summaries that provide an informal look at what we’ve been up to. Our monthly Dev Diaries won’t be going anywhere, but certain things from the Patreon will be kept exclusive.
If you are in a position to help support the longevity of Prehistoric Kingdom through Patreon, we would be incredibly grateful. We appreciate everything the community has helped us build over the years, whether it was Kickstarter, buying our game during Early Access or even cheering us on from the sideline. You helped us get this far. Thank you!
Artbook & OST Available on Patreon
As a final note, Volume 1 of the Artbook and Soundtrack are now available to purchase as standalone products on Patreon if you don’t use Steam. They’re also included in certain Patreon membership levels!
Assuming we’re able to secure more funding, we’ve updated our roadmap to Early Access release with an emphasis on animals. It can’t come all at once, but step by step we plan to incrementally improve the animals until they are properly completed. This begins with Ontogeny, coming in Update 14.
Update 14
Ontogeny
Update 14 will feature the first iteration of ontogeny, bringing baby animals to Prehistoric Kingdom. Using an age slider in the Animal Nursery, players will be able to preview the growth of a species and create animals at a specific age. When placed in the park, they’ll grow from a baby to an adult!
Here’s a sped-up demonstration of how growth works, using the Mammoth as an example. Note how there are no model swaps or sharp transitions! Instead, its proportions, shape and skin seamlessly change over time.
We’re still working on the little guy, but here’s an upclose look at the current baby Mammoth. They’re certainly different without their massive tusks!
To make babies extra cute, they’ll have their own locomotion to make them bouncier and more wobbly than the adults. It definitely makes the T. rex much less intimidating!
Babies like those of the cave lion are especially adorable! We love how these little kittens came out with their soft faces and massive paws. We bet they just can’t wait to be king.
On a technical level, we’re implementing ontogeny so that upcoming behaviors such as sociality and combat can factor it in from the start. It also allows us to observe how babies fit into the gameplay loop before more advanced features such as breeding are added at the end of Early Access.
As mentioned in a previous diary, one of the benefits of this approach is enhanced sexual dimorphism. For things like mammoths, we can stop their growth early to give females shorter tusks. It’ll certainly make herds look even more diverse!
First Person Mode
This highly requested feature will let players explore their park from the eyes of a human: walking, running and jumping their way around the zoo!
We’d really like for players to be able to interact with attractions such as binoculars and in a later update, incorporate basic managerial tasks such as refilling feeders or cleaning dung in exchange for an upfront cost. We feel this would not only increase the sense of Prehistoric Kingdom being your zoo, but provide a more active way for players to engage with the park itself alongside staff.
The Future
Sociality and Herding
Most of sociality will revolve around herding and how animals respond to each other. Depending on things like competitiveness or the territoriality of an animal, this can result in social behavior like friendly communication, scaring off competing herds and running away from threats.
Long term, we want to focus on the herd structure and how animals move up/down the ranks. Seeing herd leaders challenged in competitive species, or animals playfully chasing each other in more social ones.
MIXED HERDS
“Mixed herds” is a concept where small species would essentially magnetize to larger ones, as long as they’re compatible. They’re still totally independent social groups, but it mimics the commensalism that you’d find in the real world.
SOCIAL BEHAVIOR OR… SOCIAL ANIMATION?
A question we often see is if Prehistoric Kingdom will have “social animations”. This refers to the idea of a highly choreographed/synced animation between two animals, usually showcasing some sort of “canned” physical interaction.
At this stage, we will be focusing on social behavior (animal AI) instead. Not only are social animations out of our current budget, but they have problems with seamless ontogeny and individual size variation that can only be solved with a heavy tech investment. Regardless of those circumstances, we view social animations as more of the “cherry on top” and should not form the basis for sociality in Prehistoric Kingdom.
Combat and Hostility
Above animations are triggered manually to test how threaten behaviors could look!
Combat is being designed as a dynamic system, making use of triggerable attacks and additive animations. This would allow animals to injure each other while moving around and perform actions such as biting or horn stabs.
It’s important for us to prioritize not only the scalability of aggressive interactions across species, but to consider the size of our team, too. Going dynamic means we can build something that’s variable and potentially more reactive for a lower cost, rather than something built around hundreds of cinematic but ultimately predetermined animations.
With that in mind, here are some mockup images using our current library of prototype animations. They depict an incoming attack, bite and hit reaction.
Below is a short animation test demonstrating how a threaten pose could be combined with locomotion and various attacks to create the appearance of an angry animal. Keep in mind that combat is in such early pre-production that we’re not worrying about polish or making it overly sophisticated yet. We just need animations to test with!
There’s a lot to research, trial and develop before we find a definitive path forward that’s achievable for us, so we ask to keep your expectations for combat and hunting measured.
Paleobotany
It may not surprise you, but a lot of prehistoric plants are only known from leaves! We’ve been working with Tom Parker (scientific illustrator and author, worked on Saurian!) to ensure that our interpretations are scientifically plausible. For many species, Prehistoric Kingdom will be the first time some of these plants have been recreated in 3D.
All 8 in-game biomes will offer paleobotany, though the majority of species will be going towards scrubland, tropical, wetland and coastal.
Paleobotany is currently planned to feature around 30 extinct species of foliage when it’s finished, including fan favorites such as Araucaria (monkey puzzle), Kimeriella (Zamites), and Gingkos. Below, you can see some of our first assets created for the Coastal biome.
For the Ginkgo trees, we have two different species: one from the Jurassic (Ginkgo yimaensis) and one from the Cretaceous (Ginkgo adiantoides). It’s incredible to think that Ginkgo’s date all the way back to the Carboniferous, before the dinosaurs!
We decided to give them unique growth habits to better align them to the Coastal and Temperate biomes, with the added benefit of increasing their visual diversity.
In terms of gameplay, we plan to create unique dig sites specifically for paleobotany. They’d be scattered across the world, much like our animals are. Placing compatible paleobotany within a habitat would not only provide enrichment for the animals, but increase their Animal Points rating, too. We will continue to show more plants coming with paleobotany as the year progresses!
Terrariums
Terrariums are an upcoming set of modules that will replace the existing Mini-Exhibit system, acting as a rebrand of sorts. Like before, these facilities will house simplified versions of animals that would be otherwise difficult to include in regular habitats, typically due to their size, unique locomotion or ontogeny requirements.
Our goal with terrariums is to better integrate them into regular gameplay, expand their customization options and revisit their pipeline so it’s easier to setup new species.
CONFIGURATIONS
Terrariums will have 3 configurations to switch between: amphibious, arboreal and terrestrial. Each configuration will change the inside of the tank, making it more comfortable for your chosen species.
Amphibious
Features a shallow pool and terrain for semi-aquatic animalsArboreal
Features a set of trees for arboreal animals to perch on or jump betweenTerrestrial
Features elavated terrain with viewable burrows for animals to hide in
Each of these configurations will have a small (4x8) and a large (8x12) version to replace the current Mini-Aviary. The small version will be especially great for custom reptile houses or adding little installations throughout the zoo.
Very early mockup, not the final design!
Players will need to set terrariums to use the right substrate, climate setting and provide enrichment in order to satisfy their terrarium animals. Beyond these few options, we’re planning to keep the insides sparse so that players can go crazy adding their own foliage and create dedicated terrarium prefabs. There will also be null styling for further flexibility, allowing players to visually “combine” multiple terrariums or sink them into the ground.
In terms of management, Keepers will need to supply terrariums with food and clean them in order to keep your animals happy and healthy. When disease is added, terrarium animals would get sick, too.
TERRARIUM ANIMALS
Regarding animals, Archaeopteryx and Microraptor will be joined by Compsognathus, Tiktaalik and Yi, with more being revealed later in the year. Since these critters are being rebranded to terrarium animals, it certainly opens the door for some larger species!
Flat Rides
Inspired by real world zoos and fun fairs, we’ve begun looking into potential flat rides to add to Prehistoric Kingdom. These researchable modules would add a significant amount of Attraction Points to the park rating, giving guests something to do when they’re not watching animals behind fences.
In particular, we’ve been considering a Ferris Wheel, Theater and a Hot Air Balloon that would float straight up to give guests a good view of the park. If you had any suggestions that would fit the game’s tone, we’d love to hear them!
Creative Commons Reference Photos (with authors)
Created by Green Godzilla
Created by W.B.
Created by Roundtable
Thank you for reading January’s dev diary!
As you can see, there’s a lot of great stuff in the works but the future of Prehistoric Kingdom is uncertain. Any extra support we can get would be extremely appreciated to keep the game going. In the mean time, we will be releasing progress summaries on Patreon, with the next Dev Diary releasing at the end of February. Thank you again for all of your support thus far.
Until next time,
- The PK Team
