Welcome to November’s development update!
Getting closer to the holiday season, the team’s been busy conceptualising, revising and creating new ideas and assets for the project.
New Hire!
This month we welcomed a new member to the team - Lis! As an additional skin design artist, she’ll be taking on a variety of roles such as finalising VIP backer skins and creating new animal designs for future post-launch content.
Examples of her past community-made content.
We’re grateful to have her on-board as a helping hand and can’t wait to see more excellent creations!
Development Progress
Last month we talked about having to update our engine in order to utilise some of its newer features and fixes. While the mechanics were mostly untouched by the upgrade, visuals and a number of asset packages broke themselves in a rather severe fashion.
Because of this, we sadly weren’t able to work on new features for the better part of the month and had to delegate programming time to fix areas of the game that were affected.
In the meantime, the team’s been able to sit down and revise a handful of mechanics not yet implemented that felt too bloated or unfocused in their design. As a small team, it’s important to remain realistic and push things to the back burner if they aren’t absolutely essential to the core, playable experience.
Modular Building System Update
Pieces, pieces and pieces! There are around 66 unique shapes for roof and wall pieces per texture. Curved walls, rounded slopes, slanted roofs, gables, eaves, height variants, slope variants - all the expected building blocks are here as well as some nice additions such as roof-end pieces and flat eaves.
Not all pieces have been added at this time, but these overview shots should offer a solid look at the different components that are available for construction (even if they currently have a beautiful temporary development texture!).
Next month we’ll be moving onto developing the UI for texture selection, advanced editing and adding a handful of props to the game.
This month’s species spotlight features a range of unique body types and fan favourites. Finishing up the four-star animals with Megatherium, we will be revealing the five-star creatures every two weeks!
Modular Theme Concept Art
Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of wall and roof pieces in Prehistoric Kingdom, each with their own textures like wood, stone and metal. We’ve created a handful of design sheets to act as a guide for piece designs, and today we’ll be sharing some of that artwork.
4x4 Glass Designs.
Included as part of the Modern theme, a translucent glass set helps to cover all your basic viewing and window needs! Basic, divided, patterned and embellished glass designs assist in shaping the feel of your park and opens up new options for player theming.
Since it is a Prehistoric Kingdom, our ancestors need some kind of representation, right? Gathering resources and references inspired by Paleolithic and Neolithic architecture, a modular Stone Age theme is being planned for launch.
4x4 Designs.
These pieces differ from the regular walls by including unique meshes with bumps, extrusions, and wooden poles to better capture a truly prehistoric feel.
Animation
Mau began working on the locomotion animations for Carnotaurus in November. As an Abelisaur, we wanted to give it its own rig for the purpose of making an already strange dinosaur more unique.
Sound Design
What’s small, elegant, and absolutely adorable? Not this creature! With large teeth and an interesting body plan, Daeodon is one of the more unique mammals in Prehistoric Kingdom.
Based on a number of large ungulates, it was important to go beyond the traditional stock pig sounds found in most restorations - something grumblier, weirder and… chuffier?
Animal Redux
Our Lambeosaurus, Woolly Rhino and Giant Ground Sloth were redone with major changes to their anatomy. Most skin designs are retained however tweaks were made to better resemble the original concept art or new artwork (e.g. Lambeosaurus). If you’d like to see more of Cindy’s portfolio, check out her ArtStation for a better look at some of the animals!
A Special Guest Appears...
As a surprise announcement, we were lucky enough to have a special guest redesign our one and only ferocious feline before its model revamp in the coming months. Working with our good friend and fantastic paleoartist Fred Wierum, we are proud to showcase the new skin variants for Smilodon!
We can’t thank Fred enough for helping out with this animal. You can find more of his work here!
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Thank you for reading November’s Devlog!
Although a shorter one, the team hopes you enjoyed a look at some of the new artwork and revamps coming to the game. Thank you for all of your patience as we continue to improve our own skills and the end product.
- The PK Team
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