Welcome to the January Development Update!
Happy New Year, everyone! We hope you all had a lovely holiday season with plenty of gifts and giving to go around. This blog post will be focused on what’s to come in 2024, looking at the upcoming Update 10 as well as some rather exciting additions coming throughout the year. Let’s jump right into it!
Last month in December, we released Update 9 featuring the Grassland biome and a selection of fan-favorite animals like Spinosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus. The reception to this update was really positive, and we quickly wanted to thank everyone who tuned in to play the game again.
Both Update 8 and 9 have been our first major steps into making our animals feel more organic and alive thanks to the overhauled locomotion and brain systems. This year, we’re going to continue this trend with adding more AI behaviors, animations, and the long-awaited introduction of baby animals.
As a start, we’ve been tackling a long standing community request; animal avoidance. Borrowing much of the technology currently used on guests, our goal is to give the animals a similar implementation, dynamically pathing around any incoming creatures in a nice and performant way. Take a look at the work in progress version below that’ll be coming in Update 10!
Once Update 10 releases, players will be able to see a dramatic decrease on animals walking directly through the middle of each other. While there will still be some clipping with heads and tails (hard to get rid of without having oversized avoidance ranges on the animals), this will be a massive improvement across the board.
Update 10: Coming Soon
In mid-late February, players will be able to explore the frozen wilds of the Canadian Rockies in Update 10, building your park with a brand new modular theme and resurrecting extinct species straight out of the ice age.
New Species
Joining the roster is none other than the Siberian unicorn, Elasmotherium! This large species of rhinoceros is best known for what is typically depicted as an exceptionally large horn. In recent years, however, its exact size has become the topic of debate.
When cloning Elasmotherium, our scientists were fortunate enough to find a variety of horn shapes and sizes depending on the genetic skin that they selected. Very convenient!
That’s not the only rhino joining us for Update 10, however! Found in east Asian fossil deposits, Sinotherium was a hairless ancestor to what would later become Elasmotherium. Available in-game as an alternate species, Sinotherium is the perfect option for park managers that want another grassland-based mammal.
In total, this makes two species of rhino and two species of cave lion coming to the game in February. The team looks forward to seeing all of your gorgeous screenshots once Update 10 releases!
Stone Age Theme
The Stone Age theme is a new collection of styles and building pieces inspired by paleolithic and neolithic architecture. With items based on caves, early living and budding civilization, we think this theme will truly make your park feel like a Prehistoric Kingdom.
Of course, a new building theme wouldn’t be complete without new fences, too! We look forward to seeing what habitats you build with these palisade and stone fences in Update 10.
New Map
Finally, we’ve arrived in the mountains of Canada. This map boasts gorgeous, snowy views with a variety of foliage from the boreal, coastal and grassland biomes.
At night, players will be greeted to a stunning lightshow from the… aurora borealis?! At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your kingdom?! Yes! Please stay tuned for the release of Update 10 in mid-late February!
The Future
So, Update 10 is looking pretty cool, but what does the year look like for the game? We have a few major pillars that are in development behind the scenes, and our aim is to deliver them throughout 2024.
As these pillars are quite the undertaking, we will continue to release more art-centric updates (e.g. Update 10) to help prevent content droughts while we work on them in the background. There were a number of months last year when the game did not receive support while we developed Update 8, and that’s something we do not want to repeat.
So, grab your reading glasses and a drink because we’re about to see a lot of text!
Staff & Logistics
Staff are going to be the heart of Prehistoric Kingdom’s management. They are the connection to your park, your guests and your animals. Beyond simply hiring the right people, it will be your job to ensure the park’s layout is designed efficiently so that supplies for both guests and animals can be moved quickly.
In terms of development, we’ve started laying the groundwork for staff in the codebase. We’ve done a lot of design work figuring out what exactly they should bring to the game and how that relates to our upcoming logistics management systems. While we’ll be getting into exact gameplay details in a future post, we’d like to start by sharing our vision for the various staff types in Prehistoric Kingdom and what they offer.
GENERALIST STAFF
Generalist staff primarily interact with the guest and backend side of your park. Taking up the role of cashier, janitor or logistics, these are the people who ensure everything runs smoothly.
- Cashier: tends to visitors at kiosks and stores
- Janitor: cleans toilets, trash and delivers garbage to dumpsters
- Logistics: delivers shipments from loading bays to various storage units around the park (goods storage, animal feed warehouses)
What makes generalists unique, however, is that these roles aren’t rigid! If an urgent task appears and there’s an idle staff member nearby, they’ll complete it as long as it’s a generalist job. For example:
If a cashier is waiting vacantly with no customers to tend to, they might decide to quickly go clean up a pile of trash (janitor job) or restock some merchandise shelves (logistics job) if they have nothing else to do. Once complete, the cashier would return to their original job.
Our goal here is to maximise the utility of your generalist staff, so if the park’s demand raises slightly higher than your current workforce numbers, the player has a built-in safety net. Of course if the demand continues to rise and trash gets out of control for example, the best move would be to hire more janitors.
SPECIALIST STAFF
Specialist staff interact with specific parts of the park management experience. Unlike generalists, their roles are fixed and can’t be done by other staff types.
- Keeper: restocks animal feeders and enrichment, cleans habitats and delivers dung to compost heaps
- Veterinarian: monitors habitats for sick, injured or pregnant animals, can provide feeder supplements and medication
- Engineer: repairs damaged fences, modules and builds high security fencing
- Security: accompanies staff into dangerous habitats and protects guests in the event of an emergency
WHEN CAN WE HEAR MORE?
There’s a lot to cover with staff and logistics gameplay, so we will be doing a more in-depth blog post when we have more in-game content to show.
This is going to fundamentally change and set the direction for Challenge mode going forward, so we’ll likely run some early feedback builds on the Public Testing Branch once we get to that stage. If you’ve been waiting for Prehistoric Kingdom to get more meat on its management bones before jumping in, please stay tuned to these dev diaries because we’ll be wanting your feedback in a few months.
Ontogeny
This year, the team will be adding the process of ontogeny to Prehistoric Kingdom. In real time, you’ll be able to watch your animals seamlessly grow from tiny babies to gangly adolescents and of course, into the fully grown adults you’ve already been incubating in the park.
These are not just simply scaled down adults, either! Our baby animals will have softer appearances, smoother skin, different bone proportions and make the most adorable of squeaks. You can see an early test of our Edmontosaurs above, showcasing stubbier snouts, a lack of spinal ornaments, and their baby skin patterning!
HOW WILL THIS WORK?
Over time, the animals will seamlessly blend between their life stages, growing into their mature silhouettes and fading into their adult coloration. If you got to play or have seen footage from our old demo in 2017, you’ll know exactly how this works.
HOW MANY BABY SKINS WILL THERE BE?
For both technical reasons and memory constraints, we will be limiting baby skin patterns to 1 per animal. This means that regardless of the skin you’ve chosen, all designs for a given animal (e.g. Edmontosaurus) will appear the same at birth and eventually grow into their selected skin color. There may be a few exceptions to this as development continues, but generally the rule is 1 baby skin per animal.
We should note that like adults, however, baby animals will have individual color variation. Each little hatchling, calf or kitten will look slightly different from another.
HOW WILL PLAYERS CREATE BABY ANIMALS?
In Sandbox, players will be able to pick the age of an animal when creating them in the Nursery. In Challenge mode, however, we are planning to make that part of the research tree. If players want adult specimens at the beginning of their Challenge game, they’ll have to go through different means to acquire them (ooh, future mechanics!).
More info on revised animal creation and acquisition gameplay will be coming in the future.
BREEDING?
Breeding is something that a lot of people have been requesting and we agree that it feels like the next step for ontogeny in Prehistoric Kingdom. With that said, we are focused on delivering the core experience first (animals growing up) before expanding with additional gameplay (breeding).
Update 12: New Species
Arriving later this year in Update 12 is the much beloved gentle giant, Apatosaurus. This enormous creature is the first dinosaur included in Prehistoric Kingdom to be part of the superfamily known as Diplodocoidea, a group of sauropods best recognized for their immense length and whip-like tails.
We’re still working on this animal of course, painting the other skins, animating, etc. but the team really wanted to start 2024 off with an early look at one of the biggest creatures coming this year.
Coming alongside Apatosaurus, however, is an alternate species with a household name and much dubious fame.
We hope you enjoy the concept art for what will eventually become the mighty thunder lizard, Brontosaurus! Adorned with “bronto smash” neck spikes and a cluster of lethal spines at the tip of its tail, this classic from the Jurassic has never looked so good.
10 Years of Prehistory
Grab your digging tools and call us a fossil, because on February 14th, Prehistoric Kingdom will have existed for 10 years.
When this project was first created all the way back in 2014, we were teenagers, high school students, and young adults in college. This project, iteration upon iteration, has been us learning, growing and meeting amazing like minded individuals who share a passionate love for not just this genre but prehistoric life as a whole.
It took a number of years before Prehistoric Kingdom started to go anywhere, and we’re still not as fast as the big studios making games like this, but we love our baby and we couldn’t be more grateful for having the opportunity to develop this game.
To our team, families, backers, Crytivo, players and fans; thank you.
Created by ASSASSINSPINO
Created by Hex-MSMB
Created by Incog
Thank you for reading January’s dev diary!
We hope this post has gotten you excited for the year ahead (those babies look so cute!) and that everyone is looking forward to Update 10’s arrival in February.
- The PK Team