Welcome to January’s development update!
We hope everyone had a lovely New Year’s Eve and 2019 so far. Like always the team’s been super busy working on the game and we’ve even managed to get a few short live-streams out in the meantime.
For January we prioritized the integration of pre-alpha content and worked closely together on our tasks. After many laughs and frequent cheer, the future is bright and the team has never been more excited about the project!
As detailed in the following post, we’ve made great progress on core systems and are incredibly eager to get even more into the engine in early 2019.
On a different note, however, we’re happy to confirm that all eligible backers have been included in the credits! There’s a lot of names but we’re quite confident that everyone’s in there.
As we mentioned, this month we put considerably more work into the game’s core mechanics and visuals, as opposed to past months, so we are incredibly happy to be able to include such a lengthy programming section in this post. Get ready for a read and the occasional eye-candy!
Level Design
We can finally say: “I own an island”! The flat, small, square test terrain was bound to get old so we decided to put our focus into creating our first island: complete with smooth and rocky shores, mountain chains and flat plateaus to build on!
While the level itself isn’t completely finished as we still have to fully figure out plant and water placement, we felt that we’ve brought the game’s graphics to a complete enough stage to be showcased in the devlog.
Please note that position of foliage is temporary! We’ll be increasing the vegetation variety as well as fine tuning its displacement across the island.
Not to mention our brand new water shader actually looks like water and runs incredibly well.
Lighting Overhaul
To coincide with our brand new island and terrain shader we’ve also overhauled the ambient lighting system by incorporating volumetric lighting, clouds and fog into the game.
Our colours for day and night are far more dynamic and transition well together (unlike a certain demo!) – not to mention how deliciously fluffy our clouds look.
Fencing Showcase
En garde! Our spectacular systems programmer Matt has been working super hard on our fencing system and we’re blown away by the results!
To provide players with maximum creative flexibility we’re offering three placement modes; Freeform, Curved and Arc. Combined with the additional development efforts of Mau, Nathan and Byron to add polish, new fences and sounds, we’re very pleased with the outcome. Please note that trees have been disabled for clearer presentation purposes. Enjoy!
https://youtu.be/wBudkthijhs
Terraforming Showcase
Terraforming is finally here! Super performant and incredibly smooth, we’ve finally come to a solution that ultimately works better for the game as a whole.
https://youtu.be/_1VE4aIT6II
As you might have noticed, we’ve decided to not integrate a voxel terrain system into Prehistoric Kingdom. Beyond the creation of caves and arches, there was no guarantee that pathfinding would have been able to navigate successfully nor did it significantly impact gameplay beyond the tools that are available to players now.
Our new terrain system is far more performant and ideal for the game we’re making, so we hope that you understand our choice.
Animal Shader
Between our busy programming development we managed to briefly begin work on our new animal shader.
There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in order to fit our requirements, but we’re pleased with the results so far. Ensuring that our animals look as good as they should is one our priorities!
Building Showcase
A lot of our time this month has been spent getting assets into Unity and making them both look, feel and sound polished. Some temporary but rather lovely looking shaders help give structures so much more life and fidelity than what was last seen in the demo.
Overall we’ve added 16 new structures to the game in January – complete with LODs, foundations, personalized sounds/music and even animations for specific structures like the Gift Shop and Ranger Station.
https://youtu.be/PbDKReFvCuw
They’re not quite ready to be shown off yet, but Matt is also making some great strides with setting up the monorails, too. The track, pillar, and train assets will be updated in the future to meet a higher graphical standard.
Even though it’s still a work in progress, all these little things have started to really come together; the perfect park is almost within our reach!
Building Models
For the past month Nathan has focused on creating new structure assets, as well as revamp old, outdated ones for an overall higher quality.
The wooden stable is a large, basic shelter designed to hold a variety of animal sizes.
Perfect for the modern zoo aesthetic, the iron bar fence takes cues from a handful of city zoos to help make any park look more refined.
The reinforced metal fence is the most secure way to enclose large animals in Prehistoric Kingdom. Enormous in both size and electrical consumption, this fence is capable of holding most sauropods.
Holding up to 1000 visitors, the Grand Hotel is the largest building in Prehistoric Kingdom. Its design is sharp and modern, including a tennis court, decking and a pool.
Building Redux
In order to get old assets up to scratch with recent additions, Nathan has provided some fantastic updates for us!
The Gazebo Shelter received some big changes to its colour and materials, making the overall structure feel way more rustic and grounded in the park.
The Restroom was remade with a new mesh that allows for a far more detailed appearance along with crisp textures and additional signage.
The Fast Food Kiosk was altered to encompass a slightly larger area, fit more detail into its texture and change some of the materials of the building. Its unique blue roof provides great contrast to other structures in the park!
Initially appearing quite similar to the original Ranger Station, the building was retextured to make better use of the available space. With an additional animated antenna on the tower, the Ranger Station is one of our favourite structures!
Animation
As you might have noticed, a much larger amount of work has been put into the gameplay side of the game this month compared to previous months, which leaves less time to art, in contrast. Due to this, this month’s animation reel comes as a result of a joint effort between our two animators (Mau & Nathan), who have been taking turns at giving our ceratopsian rig its much needed attention. A 5 star attraction, Triceratops moves with surprising agility for its majestic and imposing nature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70TSsSVvDo4
Along with producing a variety of new interaction and environmental SFX (over 50 unique sounds across all placement modes!), Byron’s been busy composing new tracks for the game.
Music
Genesis is a new ambient track that’s quickly become one of our favourites amongst the team. Contextually we think it’s going to work great as a calm background piece to play amongst your dinosaurs and we hope that you agree!
https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/genesis
Defenders is the fifth introduction track to be revealed – this time for our large armored and horned dinosaurs such as Triceratops and Ankylosaurus.
https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/defenders
New Skins
Cindy started our year off strong with the completion of some familiarly long-necked creatures. Please enjoy a look at the new skins for Plateosaurus engelhardti, Diplodocus carnegii, Brachiosaurus altithorax and Argentinosaurus huinculensis.
Now that our gentlest of titans have their alternate skins done we think it’s only appropriate to show off our Sauropodomorpha in all their glory:
Next stop; theropods!
European and African dig sites in Early Access include a handful of classic animals from the Mesozoic.
With an incredibly large list of animal species ready to be available at launch, we’re posed with the interesting conundrum of handling the early game roster in challenge mode.
Picking the Animals
Animal selection is performed at the very start of a new challenge game via the world map. Sharing the same appearance as our Fossil Hunting menu, it is here that players will select up to four species from any digsite to begin their park with.
Creatures with a rating above three stars are unavailable in the starting roster when playing on Normal or Hard difficulty settings.
Why Do This?
Prehistoric Kingdom is a game with an extremely large roster of animals that lend themselves to an extended variety of park designs and exhibits. For us, we didn’t like the idea of having preset animals or randomising them without the option of player input. The beginning of a game can greatly impact the choices a player might make when building their park so it was only natural that we try to lean into that when designing the system.
Technically, yes, providing choice may create an easier or unbalanced experience depending on what creatures are chosen. Despite this, we feel that this was the right choice for our Challenge Mode and we hope to make the early game as balanced as possible over time.
Star Ratings
Star ratings determine the popularity of an animal and often reflects its pricing within the Nursery. To create an even-scale between all creatures, our choices were developed under the following criteria:
- Size.
- Appearance.
- In-universe popularity (not real world) with vague pop-culture influence.
- Gameplay balance.
Animals affected by albinism will automatically gain an additional star.
Thank you for reading January’s Devlog!
2018 has been one hell of a year and we are ever so hopeful that 2019 has got great things in store for the community! Personally we believe that we’re off to a great start and cannot wait to continue delivering content for all of our backers and fans!
- The PK Team
If you would like to check out our past blog posts, you can head to the official one here!