Dev Diary: March 2025
Welcome to the March Development Diary!
This month, we released our trailer for Update 14, showing off a variety of baby animals coming to the game. This update will be arriving April 24th, with the Public Testing Branch (PTB) version coming to Steam on April 2nd.
As always, the PTB version is intended to catch various issues and get feedback on new features. Not all animals will have ontogeny and the content itself will be in various stages of completion, lacking sounds, animations, skins and other things.
It’s officially 24 days until Update 14 is properly released and yet all of the features are effectively done! For the next few weeks, it’s a matter of finishing the content, polishing, bug fixing and making various tweaks to get this update exactly where we want it.
While there’s a list of changes we’ll be working on until release, one of our favorites is an expansion to our animal thumbnails, with an aim to include renders for babies, sexual dimorphism and genetic mutations. Especially with ontogeny, this is going to make it a lot easier to find specific animals! It also works for the Animal Holder, so you’ll know if you have an albino before it’s even in the park.
Update 14
Baby Animals
It’s a new month, so it must be time to show off more baby animals. Today, we’ll be sharing a bunch from our Discord, starting with the highly requested Spinosaurus! These tiny croco-saurs lack many of the features found in the adult versions, such as their tall crests and giant sails.
Adorably, they even move around with their tails raised, demonstrating how much more nimble the young ones are.
The sauropodlets of Camarasaurus grandis, however, are what you might expect! With proportionally shorter necks and softer features, these babies sport similar coloration to the adults with banded faces and more abundant patterning.
Next, Ankylosaurus has to be one of our favorites! Despite their size, these grumbles are still miniature tanks, though that iconic tail club hasn’t grown in yet. This is also one of the few species that we’d like to create a baby-specific sculpt for, removing various wrinkles and smoothing out their osteoderms. Keep an eye out for that in the future!
Plateosaurus gracilis is another favorite of ours. With the adult having clown-like face colors, we wanted to make the juveniles equally bold. Their cookies and creme patterning evokes a similar vibe to the adult, while making us slightly hungry, too!
Finally, here’s a look at our Sinotherium! Like their modern relatives, the horn on this baby rhino is yet to grow in, leaving a small protrusion on its head.
Animal Herding & Social Groups
That’s right, animal herding is coming to Update 14 - surprise!!! You thought it was the next update, but we actually snuck it in for this one.
So, how does it work? Animals that are adolescents or older will be eligible to join a social group. At random, the game will pick a group leader, allowing them to decide where the herd will go or what they’ll do. For example, if the group leader decides to rest or drink, herd members will follow and attempt to do the same thing.
This level of herd cohesion is something that we can vary per species, making animals like Dryosaurus very tight knit, while a pair of T. rex are more independent from each other.
To check if your animals are in a social group, we’ve added a new tab to the animal information panel! Here, you can find the group leader, group members and see how many babies are associated with this group.
Adoptive Parenting
Rather than taking up slots in a social group, baby animals are instead adopted by adults, creating a more realistic herd structure. Within these new family units, babies will follow their parents until reaching adolescence, eventually disbanding to find a proper social group. While growing up, though, they’ll do their best to stick near an adult. It’s pretty cute watching them cluster up!
Non-final thumbnail renders!
In the case that babies cannot find an adult (oh no), they’ll cleverly form their own clutch, following a leader much like a regular social group.
Animal Awareness & Socialization
Finally, we’ve implemented the first version of animal awareness. In this update, animals will be able to speak to one another, offering a call and response. They’ll prioritise group members, but can occasionally call to other species or animals outside of their group. This behavior can only happen if the animals can see or hear each other.
Animals will also use sad calls when they have unmet needs, or if their welfare is really low, let out an angry bellow. For our fearsome Leaellynasaura, it’s more like an angry rat.
In the future, we want to introduce look-targets/head IK that would allows animals to look at each other, making it more obvious who they’re talking to. We also want to reuse the sad and angry calls as a way for animals to react to each other e.g. “get away from my herd!”
All Together Now!
You probably want to see all this in action, so we’ve prepared a short video showcasing a couple of species and different scenarios. In this video you can also catch a glimpse of animal locomotion V3, an update focused on smoothing out movement and adding a trot animation for every animal! It’s still very much work in progress, so we’re hoping to improve it more by April 24.
Update 15 (The Next, Next Update)
So, since we managed to sneak herding into Update 14, what’s the plan for 15? Well, while we can’t get too specific just yet, our goal is to further enhance the animals with new behaviors and animations to make them even more lively.
Notably, this includes expanding the social and herding behaviors to feature a more dynamic social hierarchy with things like threat displays. There’s a lot that we can do, and we’re excited to finally begin exploring this side of Prehistoric Kingdom. With that said…
New Species
There’s a new species on the horizon and they’re, uh, flocking this way. It’s everyone’s favorite chicken mimic, the Gallimimus!
Although the first ornithomimid in Early Access may have been Deinocheirus, Gallimimus has had an even longer history with Prehistoric Kingdom, namely being part of our first two demos ever! It’s certainly been a while, but we’re overjoyed to see Gallimimus finally come home. We’ve missed you!
Paleobotany
Let’s take a look at even more paleobotany arriving in Update 15! Below, you’ll find the last few foliage species coming to the Scrubland biome. This includes a relative to the modern monkey puzzle tree, araucaria!
When you combine all the Scrubland plants together, you get a pretty cool environment! All that’s missing is a Stegosaurus hiding amongst the cycads.
With Scrubland out of the way, our attention turns to a different type of land, the Wetland! For this biome, we have a lot of plants that are intended to sit in shallow waters or on top of the water’s surface.
In addition to the water-based plants above, we’re also going to have giant horsetails! This plant is quite a bit larger than its modern counterpart that’s currently in the game. Think somewhere between reeds and bamboo.
This brings us to our final plant for today and it’s a peculiar one! It’s not a palm nor a mangrove, but actually a fern. We especially love this one and hope you will, too!
Update 16 (The Next, Next… Next Update)
New Terrarium Species
To close out this Dev Diary, we have a new terrarium species to share with you! Meet the adorable Simosuchus, a tiny crocodilian from the Late Cretaceous. This armored pug is believed to have been herbivorous due to its short snout and unique teeth! We’d still suggest keeping your hands away from its mouth, though, they’re quite nippy.
Created by W3
Created by ASSASSINSPINO
Created by W3
Created by Alkhan
Thank you for reading March’s dev diary!
To recap, Update 14’s PTB is on April 2nd while the actual update comes out April 24th. We hope you’re excited to finally play it and await your feedback!
Until next time,
- The PK Team
