Hey, there has been some silence from communication but this is not because of abandoning development! The development has been focused on getting things ready to leave the Early Access during August. Here is a sneak peek of things coming in the final version.
12 New animals
There will be the full list of the promised 30 animals, so that’s 12 more than the current version. Not all of them will have a fancy new mechanic but there are some coming including ghost that can move through walls and fire elemental that sets fires around it. Of course the fire elemental would be alone without covering the other 3 basic elements of the fire, earth, water and air system, so they will be added too. Currently there are no tundra animals but the 1.0 update will include Yeti, Direwolf and Jotun to fill this emptiness.
New stuff for guests
In the previous update guests got a lot of new buildings. In the next update they will get some more. There will be new toilets and stalls. New toilets come in new sizes, so you won’t have to only build tons of outhouses, maybe a couple of magical toilets will do the job. New stalls will include a special Potion stall, this stall will sell potions with magical effects. Guests can now forget all the animals they saw and explore the zoo completely new with a Potion of Forgetting or maybe they just buy a basic health potion as a drink.
Old stalls with each appearance will be combined into a slightly simpler system where each stall type has 4 different buildings, 1 for each material. Then each stall can select the colour appearance of textures of wood and stone with a new style selector. This greatly reduces the amount of different building buttons in the stall menu. As a side effect old saves using the old stalls not load all of the stalls, so be prepared to start a new save with new version.
Environments
The lake environment is missing most of the props currently. This will be fixed with new assets for trees, rocks and water plants in the next update. Also other environments will have new stuff like volcanic and graveyard environments.
Addressing things that wont be in 1.0
There are tons of things that won’t be coming in the final version that players suggested but wont be included for various reasons.
Breeding of animals. Implementing this with the current resources is sadly not viable, most animals would require both female and male variants in addition of the child variant. Instead the development has been trying to focus on getting more different and interesting animals out.
Campaign mode. The challenge system is meant to be the simple way to give goals and guide the player. In a campaign mode there could be more story elements included and maybe some special limits/effects included. Maybe in a possible future expansion/update something like this could be added.
Variety of guests. There was an early plan for guest “classes” as in D&D, etc. Some rogue guests could steal gold or brave warriors would attack escaped animals. This was scrapped to focus on the current features and expanding them, (plus the AI is buggy enough as it is)
Modding support. This is a thing that will be seriously looked into after the release. Technically the game systems might allow for easy addition of buildable things into the game.
That is all for now, if you have any small suggestion or feedback don’t leave them in comments or in the Steam forums!