Hi everyone. It's Denis here from Curious Foxes. And in our fourth monthly devlog, we will talk about the animals in Zooconomy. Let’s get started.
Animals
Animals in the game are closely based on real animals and their properties. But some properties can be changed to make gameplay better (we talked about it earlier). To uniquely describe each animal we have a set of properties.
Let’s take a look at Jake - american black bear. It’s male, at the age of 22, born in Asuncion with approximately 22 years left to live. It occupies the enclosure and right now is healthy. And it generates 55$ per month as income.
Some properties have no effect on gameplay itself, like latin name of specie or animal nickname and birth place. Other properties can be divided into two groups: static properties and dynamic.
Static properties
Static properties are properties which stay constant each time you play. Like housing, mating period, conservation status, grown up age. They are usually used as border values, like a mating period which will allow animals to get pregnant at specific months. Grown up age will mark animal as adult and it will be also available for breeding. Conservation status of specie is used to get rating of the zoo (more endangered animals -> higher rating) and etc.
Let’s again take a look at american black bear, but in this case we will check it in the zoopedia. We can see latin name, animal class, life expectancy, grown up age. Each time these values will be the same.
Note: we continue to work on zoopedia to include more useful properties.
Dynamic properties
Also animals have dynamic properties. Some of them are based on predefined values. Like exchange rate or income. Each game session these properties will be different. Young male lion will have a bigger exchange rate than ill male lion. But they are still somewhere around predefined values. Like when an animal is pregnant and ready for birth - maximum number of cubs will be used to generate the final number of offspring from this pregnancy. And so on.
Additionally we have temporary dynamic properties, like already mentioned above Illness, travel and escape. They are all randomized and will be assigned due to in-game events. Illness itself can influence other dynamic properties (sick animal will get less rating during exchange).
On the screen you can see that lion Duli is ill. We need to put him into quarantine or it will die soon. To cure him we will not only need time, but money as well. To do that we just need to press the “Add to Quarantine” button. After some time, our lion will be healthy again.
And on this screen you can see that roe deer Arlo is travelling to our zoo after a successful exchange. While it is traveling we can only rename him and wait for his arrival. During travel, animals can’t get pregnant or be exchanged.
Here our grey wolf Roise has escaped its enclosure and is wandering somewhere in the city. We can only wait, when it will be caught and be delivered back to our zoo.
Note: work on UI continues and final look may vary.
Finances
On some properties we can influence via the finances menu. For example, we can spend more money on maintenance, hence fewer animals will escape their enclosure.
Or we can spend more money on medical checkups and other health activities for animals. As a result, our animals will get ill less frequently.
In both cases we will spend more money per month, but in the end economical benefits will be higher (especially when we have a lot of animals).
Next time we will talk about random events in the game. That’s it for today, thank you for reading and see you next time.
You can follow our progress in twitter, you can join our discord, add Zooconomy to your wishlist on steam or play free demo on Itch.