Welcome to the February Development Update!
It’s almost been 65 million years since the last blogpost! Or has it? Thanks to your support, we’ve been releasing mini-status reports every Wednesday over on our Patreon. These reports include exclusive baby reveals, concept art and weekly information about what we’re working on. While some of the Patreon content will be shown in this Dev Diary, there’s still a few things that we won’t be showing here.
To touch on when we last spoke about our financial situation, we wanted to take a moment and thank you for your help. Your support on Patreon has not only helped us immensely, but shown us just how important our project is to this community. If you can help spread the word or afford to offer a donation, the team would appreciate it greatly.
For now though, Prehistoric Kingdom is not going extinct. ♥
Ontogeny Progress
It’s been all hands on deck this last month preparing Ontogeny for Update 14. In terms of art, around 40 of the 58 babies are in advanced stages of completion. Most of the remaining production time will be spent on finishing their skins, animations and sounds.
On the technical side, every day presents a new challenge to overcome. Since we change the physical proportions of our animals as they grow, this has a huge impact on various animations like sitting and walking around. Our amazing programmers have been developing new tech to help support our seamless growth systems, allowing us to:
- Correct limb IKs with age
- Reposition the vertical offset of young animals while resting, rolling and sleeping
- Reproject root motion to better sync movement speed to their new leg lengths
- Swap between navmesh sizes as animals get bigger
- Prevent animals from growing if a space is too small
- Swap locomotion and key animations as animals age up
We’ve also improved the way we handle animal selection with an optimized set of colliders that scale and stretch based on age. This lets us keep the selection accurate regardless of an animal’s current growth stage.
Thinking about all the implications that come with seamless growth, there’s a good reason why games haven’t really done this before! It has to scale, it has to react and it’s a big technical hurdle to solve. But, we’re giving it our best shot and are proud of the results thus far.
Free Patreon Post: Ontogeny Audio
If you’d like to learn about how we’re approaching audio for ontogeny, be sure to check out a free blog post we put up on our Patreon last month! It outlines the problems, requirements and the solutions needed to keep asset development and implementation scalable.
Update 14’s Release Window
Once we’ve gotten Update 14 in a more playable state, we’ll start to push early versions to the Public Testing Branch on Steam. While we’re not quite ready to begin this yet, you can expect to hear more next month as we get closer to Update 14’s release window in late April.
With how big this update is, we want to give ourselves some decent runway to ensure there aren’t any babies missing from the update. It’ll also be just in time for our Early Access anniversary!
Update 14
Baby Animals
This month, we’re pleased to unveil even more babies! These are but a handful of the animals already shown on Patreon, so if you can’t wait for Update 14, go check that out.
Up first is the massive Paraceratherium and its much smaller relative, Juxia. These little ones are almost like a baby rhino and tapir rolled into one with their prehensile lips and big ears.
Next up are the fan favourites Parasaurolophus and Charonosaurus. Each species has a unique pattern to help them transition into their adult coloration, making them quite distinct from one another. If you look close, you can even spot a tiny nub on their head!
Finally, the most scrungly one of all, Deinocheirus! We knew from the start that Deino simply had to have baby bird energy. Our artists looked at animals like juvenile pelicans, roseate spoonbills and flamingos to find the perfect level of freak. What a funky fellow!
With the baby Deinocheirus ready, one of our artists, Ida, was able to recreate her classic meme with PK flavoring.
If you’re looking for something really cute, though, we also shared the babies for the woolly rhino, Dilophosaurus, Dryosaurus and Velociraptor on our socials!
We’ve also refined the Megaloceros fawn since its reveal earlier in the month. There are some fur fixes that we stilll need to make, but it looks more like a young deer now. Thank you for your feedback!
To cap off this section, let’s take a look at some seamless growth! Please note that any stuttering is due to processing time steps since the increased speed is unrealistically fast. During normal gameplay, this effect is imperceptible.
Alt Species Changes
Thanks to recent tech advancements, we’re also taking the time to improve the visual differences of alternate species in Update 14. This means corrected proportions and more accurate shapes for many animals, such as the two Smilodon species.
Below, you can see that populator is much more robust than fatalis with its bulkier build. Fatalis is sleek with a skinnier face, limbs and reduced shoulders. We even gave it cheek ruffs from the original concept art!
We’ll be reducing the fur length on populator’s ears!
In the case of Camarasaurus, each species will have a different head shape and silhouette. From left to right, grandis is the skinniest species with a rounded head. Supremus almost resembles a Brachiosaur with a bulbous skull, short neck spines and a thick neck. Lentus maintains much of the current Camarasaurus, acting as a middleground between the three.
Of course, you can expect to see similar changes for all the other alt species like the Parasaurs, Pachyrhinosaurus and others. Some changes may be less extreme than others, but the team is excited to get these animals feeling more unique.
First Person Mode
Since we initially revealed the prototype last month, we’ve seen a lot of great comments about this feature. We’re happy to say that not only is first person mode now functionally complete, but we even had time to sneak in a few object interactions, too!
While running around the park, players will be able to sit on benches, swap between seats, look through binoculars and open/close gates to enter habitats. Any music that’s currently playing will also be given a radio-like effect!
Eventually we’d love to include some simple park management gameplay and make animals respond to the player in first person, but for Update 14 we think this is already a lovely little feature. It helps to appreciate a park from new perspectives!
Gameplay Changes
Rounding out our progress on U14, we’ve been making a few targeted gameplay adjustments now that ontogeny is coming to the game.
- Animal Creation Animals are now incubated asynchronously in the Animal Nursery. This means that rather than waiting for one after the other, all incubating animals will progress at the same time. We’ll likely lengthen adult incubation times a little to compensate, but it definitely feels better to have a group of animals be ready together.
- Animal Points The base appeal of an animal has been rebalanced so that it’s calculated on an animal’s current mass and perceived popularity. This will help make things a little more objective when it comes to balancing, as we previously made the numbers up based on vibe. As a side effect, base appeal now slightly varies for each individual due to their differences in mass. A small adult T. rex will be slightly less appealing than a large one, for example.
- Excavation System Widespread animals such as Edmontosaurus regalis and various mammals can now be found in multiple dig sites. Excavation progress will be carried between all the other dig sites a species is present in. We’re also looking to retune excavation costs and speeds to make them feel like more of a long term investment.
- Staff Dispatch Improvements The way staff are automatically assigned to tasks has been improved to hopefully make job completion more reliable. Back to work, slackers!
The Future
Paleobotany
To wrap up this Dev Diary, let’s take a look at some of the other paleo plants that’ve been worked on. As a reminder, don’t forget that paleobotany will be coming after Update 14!
Below, you’ll find a coastal biome conifer from throughout the Mesozoic, Elatides! This tree will come with a bunch of variations, including one that splits off into two trunks.
Next up are two scrubland plants from the Jurassic, Kimuriella and Korallipteris! We think these two go well together, giving off an arid yet somewhat alien vibe.
Finally, here’s a quick look at one of the oldest plants in the world, the cycad! This family has been around since the Permian, almost 300 million years ago. Despite this, many species can be found all over the world today.
Created by W3
Created by ASSASSINSPINO
Created by Emerson Hul (@ps_arts_official on Instagram)
Thank you for reading February's dev diary!
We’ll be back again at the end of March for our next dev diary. Each week until then though, we’ll continue posting to our Patreon to provide small status updates as work continues on Update 14.
- The PK Team