Hi everyone,
Over the past few weeks we’ve been working on a bunch of stuff. With our recently overhauled AI, we are able to explore and implement several new elements that would further improve the game. So this is going to be a lengthy post.
The first element that we’ve been working on are active abilities. Active abilities are abilities that players can use during combat or to boost your survival capabilities.
Over the course of developing the game these past few weeks we have successfully implemented several of them, from the one that will boost the player’s attack and movement speed, to the one that gives armor, etc. Here is an example of the “Cause Fear” ability that players can use in the game.
The Cause Fear ability makes opponents run away for a short period of time, this ability really shines when the player is facing multiple enemies, giving the player the ability to control the flow of combat and be given a fighting chance.
Unlike skills, active abilities would need to be unlocked, and this ties in with our second element that we’ve been working on, and that is unique AIs.
For those of you who have followed us since the beginning you may remember that we’ve previously implemented and discarded unique AIs. In general Unique AIs are extremely rare variants of AIs in the game, they have a unique look compared to their native counterparts while also being more powerful.
Native Acrocanthosaurus
Unique Acrocanthosaurus
Unique AIs are tied with active abilities as they are part of the requirement to unlock an ability. Because of this players would need to either hunt or acquire resources guarded by them to unlock an ability.
We have also made several changes compared to how we previously implement unique AIs. Unlike before where unique AIs can be found roaming the map, this time they can only be found in a specific region special to them. These “Lairs” are scattered throughout the main map and players would need to explore the main map in order to find them. We have also made some of these lairs look different compared to the biomes in the main map, giving them that unique and special look.
The picture above shows an in engine render of unique Acrocanthosaurus in its Lair which is a semi mountainous grassland.
We do this to not only make exploration more interesting and rewarding, but also to make unique AIs feel more like mini bosses in the game.
Aside from active abilities and unique AIs, we’ve also wanted to increase the variety of rewards players would be able to achieve from overcoming challenges. Which is why we have implemented trait based skins for our dinosaurs, in particularly for our campaign dinosaurs.
Trait based skins are skins that players can unlock when a dinosaur’s instinct has reached 100%. These skins are for cosmetic purposes only and does not affect the dinosaur’s ability in any way. These skins can be assigned in the character selection. Here is a comparison between the different skins for our Tyrannosaurus.
Native Tyrannosaurus
Hunter Tyrannosaurus
Scavenger Tyrannosaurus
While in the topic of skins, we’ve also successfully developed a new method to texturing our dinosaurs.
This method has allowed us to not only decrease the amount of time to texture our dinosaur, but to also make details of our dinosaurs more visible without having to significantly increase our texture size, making them having more details in a relatively low file size. Doubling down on this we’ve also implemented micro details to our normal map, which in turn makes the skin look less smooth and more realistic. Here is a comparison between our old texture and new textures for our Tyrannosaurus.
Tyrannosaurus using Old texturing method
Tyrannosaurus using New texturing method
We’re using Marmoset Toolbag to capture these images so that the details would be vividly shown.
That’s currently it for this devlog. Aside from the things mentioned in this devlog, we’re also working on plenty of other things from fixing our animations, sound and sound synchronization, UI layout and optimization, game balancing, etc. All in all we’re focusing our effort to wrapping up all of these features so that we could deliver this in our next update. If all goes well the next update should go live on late of next month or early January, and we can certainly say that this update will be a huge one.
More updates coming soon.
