Demo Feedback Update

Prehistorians! Good morning!

Tim here again,

Okay, just going to quickly drop this post here to keep all you guys in the loop with your demo feedback.

First of all, though, I know this is buttering you all up, but can I just say the amount of good constructive feedback we have received has been unbelievable.
I say the word constructive deliberately because that's exactly what this has been. In the gaming space, you can see some nasty stuff out there. Yet that has not been the bulk of our experience today.
While a small trove of new bugs has been encountered and people have had issues with the demo, we have received so much support, words of encouragement and kindness in the last 24 hours that I had to say something.
And that is simply - Thank you.

If this is the community we have, then we hit the jackpot.

So, onto the feedback! This is just some of our priorities and movements but not all. We are listening :)
We are a small team, but we are reading every comment. We will get back to as well, it just takes us a bit as we are working on resolving the issues and feedback.

Okay, Firstly: The Save Game Bug

As a lot of you have encountered, after our update yesterday, people returned to find their progress had reset, some gates had closed again and so on. This is a big issue and i just want to say sorry to all of you that had to restart the demo in order to progress. Its not cool.
This got past us, because during testing we have traditionally started fresh saves for each version to test the demo from start to finish.
For us, the bug seems to lie in the update process itself and we are working on identifying the cause atm.
We will do our best to get this out asap, but i have not ETA yet.
To the best of our knowledge, it is caused by rolling out the update, so if you are planning to play through the demo you should be fine.
Again, if you have experienced this and have anything you want to share, let us know below. It helps us :)

Secondly, Autosave - we are working on this

Heard this one loud and clear, we are going to implement an autosave feature for the single player mode.
We already have a checkpoint feature in co-op so we are now in the midst of adapting a similar system into SP. Again, thanks to you all for the feedback on this one.

Thirdly, the park is too dark in areas

We are paying attention to this. While the full game is both day and night, we want the night sections to be nerve racking and thrilling - but not frustrating. Essentially, the solution for us here is to take each area and assess how we can improve the overall lighting level. We can lift the darkness overall in the engine, however that would diminish some experiences where darkness is required.
Leave this with us, and I'll update you all in a future post with our plan.

Forthly! Dino Interactivity and AI

This one is a bit more varied but worth mentioning here. We are always working on improving our dino Ai and there are some behaviors we are looking to add, particularly with the herbivores. I won't give it away just yet, but some of these have been in the pipeline for a while as they are part of tourist mode.
We are simply going to enable those behaviors in the Campaign mode too.

Discussions about the kind of interactions we want to see are important. We think about them all the time and if they make a good fit.
Fun fact - all the dino have a built-in hunger system that we ultimately disabled after internal feedback was, they are too passive. The system was straight forward - If a carnivore is hungry, it will hunt you. If it is not, they will ignore you and go about their business. This worked great in our other mode, The Wilds, yet, in the Prehistoria mode, it meant you could encounter Reaper, one of our T-Rexes and he might just walk on by and the player is left wondering if the Ai was broken. It was a balancing nightmare.

I share that story, just to let you know that all feedback is on the table if it improves the game experience. Being a small team has some advantages - we are adaptable. And making this game feel good to play and provide the experience we all hope for is really important to us.

Fithly (im sure it's a word.) - Crouching and Stealth options.

This one had been a hot debate for us before the demo released. There has been a lot of Feeback on players want the ability to crouch and sneak.
I won't over promise right now, however, rest assured, this is well on our radar. And we are looking at the full game experience and want to make sure that it will improve it overall before we pull the trigger :)

Sixthly -Ambient Noise - the park is too quiet.

This one is simple; we made our audio in some areas too quiet. We are going to adjust this. We are also looking into how to improve the ambient noise overall and will give this system an overhaul.
You guys had some awesome suggestions about this, so we will get on it.

Seventhly - Dino spawning

We've seen two main points here: Some dinos are showing up in places they shouldn't (like a stegosaur working in the information booth for example) and that the dinos are respawning when the player reloads the save and the player gets swarmed.

Both of these are being addressed. Again, thanks to all of you for pointing this one out.


So, I'll leave this here for now. Again, thanks to you all for being so supportive. Words can't express the gratitude we have for you.

If you have any points you want to discuss, jump in the below and let us know

Thanks everyone

Tim

Flatrock Games