Welcome to August’s development update!

The team’s been working around the clock all month in preparation for (you guessed it!) PAX West. Progress across the board has seen drastic improvements to all parts of the current game as well as some new additions, so buckle up, park managers! It’s going to be a long read!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA_xjsbthB4
It’s been a long time coming, but we’re proud to reveal our first pre-alpha trailer demonstrating some features and general presentation of the current game.

We’ve updated our screenshot gallery on both Steam and the Crytivo store to better reflect the current progress of the project, so make sure to sink your talons into the images below:






PAX West is currently underway! If you’re in the Seattle area and want to check us out, make sure to go visit the Crytivo booth and take a look at all the lovely projects on display. There are t-shirts, games and collectible pins (including our very own Triceratops!) available on the show floor.




One of the first photos taken with our animatronic dinosaur at PAX! Thanks to @Doubleunicorns and many others on Twitter, for sharing these moments! <3

Everyone’s worked extremely hard to get us to where we are today and we couldn’t have done it by ourselves. We’d like to give a massive thank you to our publisher Crytivo for their continued support and opportunities throughout development, as well as all of our Kickstarter backers who have been extremely patient and generous. You rock!

For those who couldn’t make it to PAX or simply want to catch up, Prehistoric Kingdom’s pre-alpha build from the convention will be played live with developer commentary on our Twitch channel on September 5th at 2 PM (PDT)!

If you’d like to come over and watch or simply ask us questions, most of the team will be making an appearance. We hope to see you all there!



With the convention underway and a playable build already in the hands of some lucky members of the public, we’re moving forward at a great pace!

Currently, we’ve got our eyes on feedback and suggestions from players in addition to finalising Pre-Alpha 1 in the coming months. With a lot of the bulk out of the way, the team is extremely eager to get started on new creative features such as elevated paths and brand new modular building tools.

Animals will be another focus point of ours. While we push onward with development we’ll be working on their basic behaviours, new animations, adding creatures and of course dozens upon dozens of micro-sounds to bring them to life. It’s going to be a lot of work but more than worth it in the end!





Coding wizard Matt brought improvements to animal locomotion with the addition of root motion, allowing us to greatly reduce sliding by controlling movement speeds through animation instead of code.



Animals don’t just path in a straight line, either. They can turn while standing still, walking, or running to create an organic and unpredictable look as creatures respond appropriately to the change in direction.

As a result, locomotion is beginning to look great! We’re extremely happy with how the system is turning out and can’t wait to bring further life to the animals with the addition of more complex behaviours and features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8qnKtlSiaI
After PAX we’ll be looking into introducing basic needs like eating and drinking as an early addition to the quickly approaching Pre-Alpha 2.

The fence/path system saw an enormous update thanks to the inclusion of arc curves instead of the original bezier lines we were using. Although more difficult to implement (thanks, maths!), curved fences now behave as expected while making the experience a billion times more user-friendly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eboIIDVQf4Q
As discussed previously, fences, paths and buildings feature an angle snapping toggle in order to allow for precise construction and building options. In the future, this system will be accompanied by a grid overlay to better visualise exact measurements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzVQn3DkERI

Terraforming received additional polish with some light height constraints implemented on smaller brush sizes to create a more realistic looking shape to hills and mountains.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssWjAHREkdY
While also available for building placement, demolition and fence/path placement, we’ve added an extremely handy toggle that locks the user's cursor to the centre of the screen whilst moving the camera with it. Since movement is entirely mouse-driven, terrain and foliage painting feel especially nice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjGcoYqvAlg
Next up for terraforming is to add in all the clutter objects and continue where we left off with water painting. Not too much longer and the entire terraforming suite will be complete!

To make the perfect exhibit creation even easier, we have included a way to view an enclosure's statistics and name. This can be accessed by either clicking a fence, effectively bringing up the area overlay shown below, or utilizing the terrain tools on an enclosed area.

This feature allows the player to check and create the right conditions without the limitations of continuously selecting animals, for a quicker and easier gameplay flow.



Buildings, fences and paths got a lovely shader overhaul this month in our efforts to make structures prettier and add new functionality for features such as emissive lighting at night and improved glass.




Paths got special attention with a new distance fade value that prevents ugly tiling and micro-detail showing up when the camera is far away. With this new inclusion, they’ll seamlessly blend into their detailed texture once the player is within range.



August saw the reveal of five new species spotlights featuring their various habitat statistics. Between the hell pig and chicken mimic, this month’s line up was quite diverse in shape and size.









Much to the approval of our fluffy mammoth friends, Nathan finished up the remaining Subpolar climate textures and foliage assets.






While we went back to optimise all foliage in the game, quite a few changes were made to the tropical wet plants to make them more visually diverse and interesting.



Now that all 64 plants and 32 terrain textures are in the game, we’ve had great results when mixing and matching the various climates to create a more diverse landscape. We invite creativity when building your paddocks and greatly await seeing the user made creations in the future.

Once we’re finished adding the clutter objects to the terraforming menu, exhibits will only become even more diverse in their detail and aesthetic.

In addition to 17 path textures of various shapes, materials and sizes, Nathan’s designed two unique pathways that’ll go a long way in theming your parks.

Featuring familiar patterns, the new ammonite and footprint paths let players show off their prehistoric pride throughout the park. Equipped with a new shader (thanks, Mau!), specularity shines through during the island’s warming sunsets to give paths a more polished look.





Amongst creating some new sounds for the Prenocephale as well as general game audio, Byron wrote a new piece specifically for the teaser trailer titled Building the Impossible. We hope you enjoy the track!

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/building-the-impossible



Cindy got to work on various odd jobs needed for PAX as well as updating the new two-foot turkey. With entirely new designs and a flashy display crest that physically moves up and down, our Velociraptor mongoliensis continues the trend of bringing new life to outdated animals.




Now that we’ve revealed its species spotlight and the skins are done, please enjoy a better look at our Gallimimus bullatus (if they’re willing to cooperate!).





Today we’ll be starting our deep dive into staff management in Prehistoric Kingdom. Essential to your park’s survival in the late game, your employees are an extremely valuable asset!

Whilst players can manually perform certain actions such as refilling food troughs and emptying trash cans themselves, workers will complete tasks based on their job to make zoo automation easier.



At launch, staff will be divided into three main jobs: Animal Keeper, Maintenance Worker and Park Ranger.

• Animal Keepers care for animals and their habitat: refilling feeders, cleaning poop and checking their health.
  
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• Maintenance Workers collect trash, repair broken structures and can improve the speed at which buildings are constructed.
  
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• Park Rangers act as the primary security division within the park. They can use lethal force or tranquilizers to subdue animals and are required for moving creatures across the park.

As staff members perform various jobs around the park, their skill level will begin to increase. Gradually doubling the speed at which tasks are completed, points will be added to one of three unique skill types depending on which duty they’re undertaking.

Skills are unique to each of the three main staff types and help to further differentiate them from each other.


Example of the three Animal Keeper skills and their speed increases based on proficiency.

Improving their skill level is a completely passive occurrence that doesn’t necessarily require input from the user. However, players are incentivised to keep staff safe and happy to increase the working speed of their employees. Treat staff poorly and you’re going to have trouble in no time!

Tune in to September’s update for the next instalment of staff management; specialisation! The team’s very excited to reveal more about our future plans and can’t wait to get working on them in Pre-Alpha 2.

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Thank you for reading August’s Devlog!

We hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s look into development. Don’t forget that we’ll be live streaming on September 5th at 2 PM (PDT), so set a reminder, buy some snacks and get ready for fun. Until next time,

- The PK Team

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Welcome to July’s development update!

Progress is going better than ever behind the scenes, with some much-needed mechanics finally starting to take shape, making the current iteration of Prehistoric Kingdom feel more like the game we all expect. Last month we mentioned we might not have as many news due to the higher volume of work, but there are still many exciting things to uncover, so bear with us!



In case you’ve missed the last few updates, we’ll be attending PAX West from August 30th to September 2nd in Seattle with our publisher, Crytivo! As the opening day gets closer (tickets available here), Crytivo’s been sharing pictures of some of the merch and booth elements that’ll be found on the show floor; how exciting!




PAX attendees can expect to play a short slice of introductory gameplay designed to familiarise players with some of Prehistoric Kingdom’s exhibit creation tools.

Taking the helm as the new park manager of an almost operational island, it’s your job to follow requests from the Board of Directors to successfully populate the park with a happy and healthy herd of Edmontosaurus.



As this is an exhibit-focused build and the first playable iteration with our current features, certain building categories will be disabled for the sake of streamlining the user experience at the convention.

Alongside continuing previously scheduled work, our programmers have been focused on completing specific requirements for PAX that also go towards meeting development milestones we set for future playable builds.

July oversaw the biggest development leaps with the management interface, but also animal locomotion and pathfinding, which are a massive upgrade from the respective demo’s systems.

As you also might notice in the graphic below, the "Pre-Alpha 2: Management" box got its color updated this month, as we worked on some of the management systems needed for the future.





As you have probably gathered by now, much of this month’s development time was put into making our animals move around. Matt has always been vocal about updating the locomotion system of the demo, and he’s finally got a chance to shine - he laid the foundations for an all-around superior locomotion.

He implemented IK’s for both the animal’s limbs and heads, not only virtually removing any sort of sliding or shifting to the feet once in movement, but also allowing for a more believable ground adaptation. Moreover, animals can dynamically move their heads around points of interest, further adding to a life-like appearance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stCF87zvA74

While there is obviously much more work to be put into locomotion and overall AI, we hope you’ll enjoy this sample of what we’ve been doing. Even as a work in progress, this trumps anything we’ve done in the past on the matter.

In charge of the core gameplay progression, Mau spent time working on some of the features needed for August’s PAX build - inbox and offers.

These are some of the first management features we started working on ahead of time, as they are vital to a park’s natural growth and spice the gameplay up with that extra edge of challenge. We have shown concept graphics for offers in the past, but now we managed to actually lay down the framework necessary to craft any kind of contract or offer in the future, in a very dynamic and customizable way.



Equally as important, an inbox system allows the park owner to receive many kinds of notifications, ranging from the aforementioned offers, to dig results, forecast alerts, financial reports, and even rating increases. While not incredibly flashy in its current state, the system we built also allows for simple further implementation of different message types in the future.




Nearly 22 weeks since we began our species spotlights all of the 1-2 star creatures have been shown! Leading the next set of creatures with Ceratosaurus, the team hopes you’ve enjoyed the weekly journey so far.








The tropical dry climate is home to some iconic plant species that are going to make quite a few of your Jurassic animals always feel at home.



Taking inspiration from the world’s great dry plains, we are sure you will recognize imposing trees such as the Acacia and the Baobab.





Finishing off our structure list for Pre-Alpha 1, Nathan created the next observation-based attraction. Providing an elevated position for your guests to survey your park, the Lookout Tower provides a unique vantage point.



Similarly, the Viewing Platform’s texture set was updated to better unify the two viewing attractions and conserve memory. Those with keen eyes may even spot the unique ammonite floor tiling!





This month Byron began work on creature sound redesigns, beginning with Edmontosaurus. With a completely reworked sound set, we can’t help but love the new sounds of our weird Hell Creek behemoth.

Every so often we’ll be uploading small sound updates to our Facebook and Twitter accounts to show a selection of audio from a featured animal. Any reveals throughout the month will be recapped here, so don’t worry if you miss one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGzgTW8lQUI



With few feathers ruffled, Cindy finished up the redux of our Oviraptor philoceratops! Featuring pronounced sexual dimorphism across males and females, this alleged “egg thief” (not guilty!) is a must-have for any startup park with its uniquely bird-like looks and movement.



Huge improvements were brought to the new Oviraptor model with drastic alterations to the skull and its feathers thanks to our new technique. Out of all the enhanced creatures shown so far, we personally feel that this is by far the most improved.



In the same vein, Gallimimus bullatus also received a much-needed update. As one of the earliest animals to be modelled, this fluffy ratite-like theropod underwent several upgrades across the project’s history. With our recent wave of animal updates, we thought it would be a good idea to give it one last revision, and with what results! Our beloved ‘chicken mimic’ got a brand new coat of feathers, and looks better than ever!



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Thank you for reading July’s Devlog!

August is going to be the month we show the world (although, on a more limited scale) one of the very first playable versions of what is eventually going to become the full build, so we have reasons to be both very excited and incredibly horrified (it’s gonna be fine, right?).

- The PK Team

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Welcome to June’s development update!

We’re back again with another monthly development blog post. The team’s eagerly been working on more behind the scenes planning and content in preparation for a certain convention in the US, so perhaps it’s time to reveal more about it. Tune in below, park builders!






After using our previous logo design for almost five years, we felt it was time to update the game’s identity and bring it closer to modern zoos with a simpler, more readable aesthetic. Showcasing our new iconographic sauropod, Crowny, she’s quickly become a fan favourite on our Discord server.

This logo will be present in all future media (both in-game and promotional), so with in-game environments taking on an inviting and colorful aesthetic, the updated logo better compliments the extended periods of relaxed park building gameplay amongst the island’s atmosphere and cheery music.




Thanks to our lovely friends at Crytivo, Prehistoric Kingdom is heading to PAX West this August!

Featuring a small playable build of the current game at Crytivo’s booth, attendees will be able to snag some physical goodies and meet our very own animal texture artist, Cindy! Tickets are running out quick so make sure to grab them while you still can!


To keep it brief, we finally fixed our issues with Unity and are now continuing to prepare our show floor demo for PAX. Please understand that all of our focus will be on PAX itself, so upcoming devlogs may not feature animation reels and lengthy content reports. Without our supporters and Crytivo, we wouldn’t be able to take on such massive conventions and we’re extremely grateful to receive offers like this because of that.

Not a whole lot has changed since last month from our milestone chart so we won’t show an updated graphic due to redundancy. However, basic animal AI is currently getting worked on, so please look forward to some early tests of the creatures walking around soon!




The continued implementation of animals in-engine was furthered with the introduction of basic animal selection, animation states, sound cues and particle effects!

Below is a quick test for a key behavior many of our animals are going to display – broadcasting. This is going to be employed as an effective warning/alert call, usually by the alpha member of a group. Bear in mind the effects and sounds are still WIP, and will be replaced with time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuVr1Uy3onw

This month we have started laying the ground work for animal locomotion – making sure AI navigation is not only realistic in the way it chooses its walking paths, but also looks good doing so. In order to be able to accomplish that, we have started looking into Inverse Kinematics systems (IKs for short) for our animals’ limbs, which should considerably reduce jitter while walking and running. While these developments aren’t ready to be showcased yet, you can be sure we’ll show more in the following months, as the AI and pathing progress.

Preparing not only for the PAX preview, but also for the first pre-alpha build, we started implementing some of the animals you’ll be able to play with. Here’s a preview of just 3 of them:





This month saw the reveal of four brand new species spotlights featuring unique habitat specifications. From the woodland dwelling Bos to the tight family packs of Yutyrannus – which one is your favourite?









Due to this month’s heavy workload when it comes to engine work and animation, we weren’t able to put much focus on map creation. Even so, we have readied all the assets needed for the 7th climate of Prehistoric Kingdom, the Temperate Oceanic climate. As one of the game’s most ancient looking climates, its foliage includes classic staples such as the towering redwoods and ground-dwelling ferns. Even the mightiest of sauropods are dwarfed beneath these trees!



Placed together, these vegetation assets make for great scenic environments, fit for the majority of your prehistoric exhibit needs!







Animation galore! We’ve got two brand new previews to show off this month featuring our slow rocky friend and a slightly more hairy critter. As with all of our animation showcases not every animation is shown so please don’t be alarmed to see things missing; they’ll definitely be there!

Kicking off with the promised preview from May’s DevLog, Mau finished up our Ankylosaur rig! Decorated with shoulder spikes and bony osteoderms, Sauropelta’s defensive nature allows it to ward off oncoming threats. Adapted to its heavy and tank-like build, this nodosaur is a formidable foe to any hungry carnivore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUJ7Fsfu784

Through June, Nathan got to work on the elephant rig using a variety of real-world references. Arguably the most well-known of the ice age creatures, Mammuthus primigenius or the Woolly Mammoth, is a true titan of the Pleistocene epoch. Featuring sturdy tusks and an elegant trunk, this is one five star attraction that time didn’t leave behind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_SZN7PEX-M




Proceeding with the feathers and hair overhaul, the Bos received a huge update to its anatomy to provide a correct restoration of the animal. In addition to the long-horned bison, the Mammuthus received some new shampoo and conditioner to tidy up the various body to alpha transitions and present a much nicer look!





Building across various islands around the world, it’s expected to come across some unfavourable conditions. Weather pushes the player to prepare for their environment by affecting the way the park responds due to changes in animal and guest behaviours.


Each island comes equipped with its own unique set of dynamic weather conditions. Naturally, normal weather events aren’t particularly damaging to the park but can alter the effectiveness of resource production, which plays into park management and layout e.g. solar panels are better suited to long sunny days than rain or fog. At the same time, wind turbines function better under windy conditions.




At launch, two natural disasters will be available: hurricanes and blizzards. These two events are all around pretty similar, but because they are based on varying temperature, they diverge the most when it comes to visuals. Regardless, these disasters pose a great threat for your park as they render it more inhospitable, scaring animals, exponentially slowing transportation, and putting power production to a halt.

Later on, we plan to expand our disaster roster across maps, with 2 new disasters: tornadoes and earthquakes. Once again, these are map specific (as there can only be one disaster type for each map). While shorter in duration than hurricanes and blizzards, these two extreme cataclysms have the opportunity to be more destructive, as they directly affect your buildings and fences.


Note that until the latter 2 disaster make it into the game, the existing maps are gonna use the first 2 disasters.


Reading this, you are probably left wondering: “What can I do to prevent my dear Scruffy Rex from being obliterated by a tornado?” While we want to fill the player with a sense of urgency during these events, we don’t want to render them as complete deal breakers, given the proper insight and preparation. We plan to include researchable items that can upgrade buildings, services and animals alike to shield them from especially bad weather. At the same time, smart park layout can be employed, assuring a constant input of energy by placing varying power options.

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Thank you for reading June’s Devlog!

Like mentioned above, July and August are going to be incredibly busy months for us as a team, as we have to prepare what is perhaps going to be the first playable version of the game, for a larger public. We might not as be as consistent with updates, but that shouldn’t take away from summer’s excitement! Until next time!

– The PK Team

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Welcome to May’s development update!

Featuring new content and previews for what’s currently in the pipeline, the team has prepared a variety of goodies to sink your ravenous teeth into. There’s much to come in the next few months, so let’s get straight into the discussion.



May brought a new host of exciting opportunities and development obstacles to overcome. Due to asset limitations of the Unity engine, we had to delegate time to finding solutions before being able to create new development builds. This was unfortunately a large and unforeseen issue, so efforts had to go into figuring that out if we wanted to be able to play the game outside of the engine.

Apart from looking into our main issue above, the crew’s had their own oddities and life to attend to during the month which is to be expected. We’re set to begin working on something pretty cool that’ll come to fruition in a few months, so we hope you’re looking forward to seeing that. There’s a lot of big things coming up and the team couldn’t be more excited!






Placed right in the middle of the temperature scale, the temperate continental island offers a generous amount of flat terrain around its centralized mountain range. With accents of color dotted around the map thanks to the native foliage of the climate – what better place to build your Prehistoric Kingdom?








During May we got started on basic visitor implementation ahead of the Management schedule for reasons we’ll reveal at a later date (wow, secrets!).

As a way to bring diversity and life to a park’s guest population, the randomization system is working extremely well to produce various results from an assortment of age demographics, body weight, height, ethnicities, and clothing options. Since this is our first pass on guests in the game, please understand that they’re very much a work in progress and aren’t completely representative of how they’ll look further in development.



In a few months we’ll start the next step of giving visitors basic AI navigation before they inevitably get their own needs during Pre-Alpha 2.


Big fidelity improvements were brought to animals this month with the development of a new animal shader. Scaly or feathered; this is the best the creatures of Prehistoric Kingdom have ever looked in-game.




Beyond the expected visual improvements, new support has been added for body wetness, reflective eyes, body translucency, and more.



Random skin colouring makes a return from the demo with individuals possessing variation in the darkness of their body when compared to other members of their species! This simple feature allows large herds of creatures to feel more individualised and helps to break up the monotony (in addition to random sizes between fully-grown creatures).



Over time we plan to add new features to the shader such as disease overlays, damage wounds, and battle scars.



Another month, another species spotlight! Showcasing the diversity of our climates, each animal has their own unique exhibit personality and requirements to meet.










Holding many familiar trees found all across the world, temperate continental includes common foliage such as bamboo, magnolias, oaks, and willow trees.



We can’t wait to see what parks and paddocks players create with these contemporary staples!


Although not initially planned (what were we thinking?!), we’ve added hedges to the game with two variants: tall and short.



Along with the green trimmings above, Nathan built two more asset variants for creative players to make use of: the rope fence!




During May, we weren’t able to get the Ankylosaur rig finished in time for this blog post. To put it simply, we were unable to complete the animation reel due to the time we’ve spent trying to fix the Unity asset bundle problems and complete additional work on other parts of the game. Instead of delivering a rushed and unpolished rig preview, we’ll be revealing the animation reel featuring Sauropelta during June.

Until then, thank you for understanding and we hope you look forward to having two animation reels next month!




In addition to developing new sounds for the Sauropelta, Byron began work on a new ambient piece! You can listen to a short excerpt of the work in progress below:

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/preview-ambient-05

Since our posts leave little room for surprises in the final game, we’ve decided to keep future music track reveals to previews only. There’s a lot of content going into Prehistoric Kingdom, so we’d like to at least keep some of it a surprise!




Continuing the trend set by other feathered creatures like the Yutyrannus and Guanlong, Cindy revamped the textures for Thescelosaurus and Nothronychus! These herbivorous dinosaurs are appropriately fluffy and look far better than their original counterparts.






As a reward for providing proper care towards your prehistoric creatures, animals can be awarded with additional star ratings! More popular and attractive to guests, prestige is hard to attain but can be highly rewarding.


Prestige is earned by successfully keeping a creature’s mood above 90% for an extended period of gameplay.

Acting as a passive background reward, each additional star will multiply an animal’s popularity with guests and in turn help contribute more to your overall park rating. By introducing prestige, it allows early game animals such as Dryosaurus and Psittacosaurus to not become totally redundant with time as long as they’re highly satisfied with their conditions.


To qualify for prestige stars, the player must ensure that the animal has a high exhibit satisfaction and that all needs have been met. If these two conditions are reached, the animal will begin the gradual process of earning an additional five stars over time.



Every animal has its own internal stats behind the scenes that we use to fine-tune its effectiveness in the park, so no, a five star Coelophysis will not have equal worth to a five star Tyrannosaurus.


On the flipside, prehistoric attractions can lose their star rating at the hands of poor management. In the event of… “visitor casualties,” the critter responsible for killing a guest will immediately accumulate negative prestige – reducing the number of guests that actively view the paddock containing the animal.



The longer an animal is left ill with disease or escaped from their exhibit, all additional stars will begin to disappear entirely. Some diseases and weather conditions are prone to freaking out dinosaurs and mammals alike, so be sure to research vaccines and check the weather forecast!

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If you would like to check out our previous blogs, you can head to the official one here!

Welcome to April’s development update!

We’re back with another DevLog showcase to discuss recent ongoings and everything that the team’s been up to! Without further delay, let’s get right into it.



Contrary to other months, April was mainly spent working behind the scenes on necessary parts of the game such as automatically setting visual quality on initial startup and ensuring that things like terraforming work as intended in the built game. Whilst we started adding the backend support for animals, the team also got their hands on a fresh new development build!

For this reason, we partly focused on documenting potential quality of life improvements from our internal testing to minimise issues early on. From here on, we assessed the next focus areas of development to bring new usability improvements to the game.






Whilst not as hot as last month’s island, the team thinks our next map is pretty cool! Packed with trees and exceptionally long in its terrain, the boreal environment is the second coldest climate in the game.









From the towering peaks to the flat, gravel-filled shorelines, this map allows for a variety of ways to build your park on its sloped, diverse terrain.


Working alongside Byron to implement one of the most important pieces of UI in the game, Mau painstakingly developed the Nursery during April. With a fresh look and visual-functionality that completely blows the demo’s design out of the water, this is by far the most complex menu currently implemented in the game due to all of its functions under the hood.



When an animal is selected we showcase an animated 3D model that corresponds to the skin that’s been chosen for the creature (yes, you can still spin it around!). This area in particular has become far more visual than the demo and is something we’re quite proud of.



Adding new animals and their skins to the Nursery is a breeze thanks to the dynamic nature of Mau’s system. Climates, habitat statistics, and skins are easily defined while all animals can be sorted into five specific filtering options; clade, climate, period, diet and rating! If you’re extra stuck or want to get specific, we’ve included a search bar at the top to find exactly what you’re looking for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGD3TgbAU_Q


In regards to animal growth, the new ontogeny system is roughly halfway done. This time we’re taking performance into account to try and reduce issues from the demo such as distance “popping” when moving away from a creature.



The new system allows us to set growth and size changes across animals and skins, meaning that alt. species can have a different physical appearance and drastic changes to sizing.


On the technical side of the game, our best boy Matt has been working hard polishing and reworking aspects of the game to improve both performance and the visual fidelity.

To achieve this we’ve began implementing impostors for many of our high poly in-game objects. Unlike traditional billboards, impostors use a series of images from multiple angles in order to create the illusion of a 3D model. It looks great, runs great, and becomes virtually indistinguishable from actual geometry at a certain distance. Don’t believe us? Check out our “hotels” in the video below!



(high quality version: https://gfycat.com/oddoccasionalirishwolfhound )

This technique carries over into the foliage, too! Distant trees will always appear full and fluffy in order to provide players with constant eye candy; no more weird shadows and shading!



The game’s grass received some love for the first time in a while! This newer iteration offers neat visualization for grass height blending between climates along with smooth transitions to other textures like sand, dirt and rock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un5SNx4X4zQ

In addition to all of the above, certain buildings requiring the water’s edge will snap directly to the shoreline when placing them.



(high quality version: https://gfycat.com/poorevergreenhyena )


The team spent a lot of time with the game in April: building, creating and trying to find trouble spots within what we have so far. Thankfully for us, it’s going well! With some requests and changes from developers noted, we all greatly enjoyed building basic parks across the four Early Access maps.





Created by Mau.





Created by Nathan.



April flew by as we revealed another four of our creatures’ requirements. Including our first few tropical wet and dry animals as well as the showing of our first in-game feathered creature, we hope you enjoy this month’s species spotlights.









Beneath the peaks of our snowy mountains sit a variety of pines and bushes – the classic selection of a colder boreal environment.




Over the past few months we’ve been adding brand new climates with relative ease; so much so that we’ve changed our minds! With the original four climates now finished, the team is happy to announce that all eight climates will be coming to Prehistoric Kingdom at launch!

It’s important to understand that this change will not increase development time beyond our internal schedule. The addition of four new climates has very little impact on our workload and would open up even greater design opportunities for our players.



Now including 8 islands, 32 paintable terrain textures, and 64 unique plants at release, we’re sure that there’s enough here to satiate your creative desires.


Like other buildings from past DevLogs, the Gift Shop got a quality enhancement to its model and textures.




During April, Nathan prepared the Small Ornithischian rig for a highly adorable … cactus… thing.

Measuring in at just over 2.5 meters, Prenocephale is one of the smallest creatures found within the roster. With a uniquely fruit-filled diet, this prickly dinosaur is equipped with a signature dome-shaped skull.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k03kmv5HMjs




Apart from adding alarm and broadcast calls to the original Prenocephale soundset, Byron remixed the game’s audio levels to achieve a better sound balance. Everything’s far more accurate to where it should be and we’re glad to have done this early on before introducing even more audio files.


Chicken Mimics is a new animal introduction track that’s used for a variety of small-medium herbivorous dinosaurs. Creatures like the Prenocephale and Psittacosaurus will use the light version of the music (heard in this animation reel), whilst larger animals will get the full mix.

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/chicken-mimics-herbivore-theme




Over this past month, Cindy was tasked with altering our feathered animals with a new technique in order to get even better results. We’re incredibly happy with how these new iterations have come out and we’re sure that you’ll agree. With some proper fluff and feathering, take a look at Guanlong wucaii and Yutyrannus huali!




For anyone who’s played our old demo, you’re probably familiar with the “gorgeous” Dryosaurus. Like other old critters, Mau’s given our long-legged friend an adjusted model and brand new designs based off the older skins. Thanks to Cindy’s handy work, the team is delighted to reveal our revamped Dryosaurus altus.



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Thank you for reading April’s Devlog!

This has been an incredibly fulfilling month, bringing every system a step closer to being finished. In the upcoming months we are going to look into implementing the first animals in the game, and getting some basic AI going! Exciting stuff!

– The PK Team

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If you would like to check out our previous blogs, you can head to the official one here!

Welcome to March’s development update!

The Prehistoric Kingdom team have been working consistently this past month to continue making our game the best it can be. With some revitalised energy, let’s get into one of the chunkiest updates yet.



March was a great month of consistent work that ultimately allowed us to make fantastic strides with implementing new assets, improve visual fidelity and tidy up the existing systems.

At this point in the time, we’re working on getting fences and terraforming (water/tree painting) completely polished. Ensuring that the process of building exhibits is a great user experience is one of our biggest priorities for the project.

Over the coming weeks, Matt will be developing advanced path and monorail systems while Mau adds in functionality for the Nursery in addition to a pretty new main menu. Once everything regarding creation itself is out of the way, we’ll be moving onto the animals in order to get them moving, roaring and needing!






We don’t like to gloat, but the next map is pretty hot. Roughly half the size of Tropical Wet, our Semi-Arid island is currently the smallest map in Prehistoric Kingdom. Despite this, there’s still a lot of space to build freely! We’re sure that players who enjoy a challenge will find the more limited size appealing to work around, not to mention the sunsets are gorgeous.










Moving onto further functionality, Matt polished up the vegetation painting so that it works across all climates and feels great to work with.



As a base, each climate comes standard with 8 types of paintable vegetation that can be individually placed or grouped together to quickly paint a large forest. It’s super easy to use and the ability to change brush intensity for placement and removal makes perfecting your landscapes just that little bit easier.

https://youtu.be/R0EojkEQzvw


Much to the delight of our Baryonyx and wetland lovers everywhere, water painting is here! Equipped with fidelity and three paintable types of water in addition to editable depth; what’s not to love?



The addition of water painting opens up an entirely new realm of creative possibilities for exhibit design that we cannot wait to see played with by the community. Keep in mind that it’s a work in progress, but to “wet” your appetite, here’s a little preview:

https://youtu.be/k1OV7IjRRLA


After getting pushed back for a while due to more important programming matters, selection and demolition finally progressed further towards their completion. While removing fences and paths will come once they’re finished, Mau’s gotten buildings to function as intended.

https://youtu.be/s2NUTmP0nAw


Throughout March, we continued to tweak and refine various parts of the game’s visual fidelity. As you can see in the comparison between now and last month, we’ve made great strides in improving the shadows, foliage rendering and terrain shader!




With the combined efforts of Nathan’s modelling, Mau’s programming and Byron’s sound design, the Shipping Harbor is in the game! This is by far the largest building in Prehistoric Kingdom and rightfully one of the most detailed.

You can preview the cargo unloading effect below, currently just a simple visual effect that is eventually going to be linked up to shipping management mechanics.

https://youtu.be/WfvYg3lEKoA

For additional detailing, Nathan’s buildings and plant pots received their various shrubs, bushes and trees from selection of our climates so far. Although slight, the greenery amongst the structures is a definite welcome.





If you’re already following us on Facebook, Twitter, or Discord, you’ll be familiar with our recent species spotlights that are released once every Thursday (EST).

These infographics feature the animals inside their respective climate alongside the in-game environmental needs of the presented species. With four down and another forty-six to go, please enjoy this menagerie of some of our Semi-Arid and Mediterranean creatures!









With the implementation of feeders in the game, Nathan has whipped up some new habitation assets that’ll certainly be of interest to all players. If there’s one thing that you won’t run out of, it’s fences!



Basic yet durable, the wooden chain link fence is a staple of any park tycoon’s first exhibits. Although suitable for quite a few creatures, we recommend upgrading along the way.



The concrete wall is a great tool for designing private exhibits and fleshing out your general park environment with alleys and walls. Including a glass panel variant, this wall is great for more skittish creatures, however its skinny nature might prove difficult in containing larger behemoths.



With three different texture variants (brick, sandstone, cobblestone), the stone wall is a thick and sturdy ally for a secure park builder. As a bonus perk, we’ve found it to perfectly suit our semi-arid island.



A classic staple of any modern zoo, the electric steel pole fence is perfect for containing medium and large animals due to its electrified cables.



Although animals can drink from painted water in their exhibits, the small water dish and artificial watering holes are ideal for small enclosure designs and a necessity for creatures that aren’t too fond of having water in their paddocks.



As the second of a few vehicles coming to Prehistoric Kingdom, the Ranger Chopper is essential in tracking down and subduing escaped creatures.


During March, Mau worked on animating the tall sauropod rig. Due to its colossal size, it was important to capture the sheer weight and enormity of these creatures.

As a true titan of the Jurassic, Brachiosaurus is one of the largest animals in Prehistoric Kingdom. With a neck that cranes along the tallest trees, this is truly a five star specimen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=froV0uFdt6Q



In terms of sound design, Byron primarily worked with Mau to integrate new sound effects and variations for both the demolition system and vegetation placement. Since the demo, we’ve developed a heavy emphasis on including feedback and interaction sounds for the player’s input and interaction with the world.


In addition to more feedback sounds, we began implementing ambience for all maps and climates. Thanks to a lot of nifty programming from Matt, the game is able to recognize dense foliage and play the forest sound of a painted climate if it’s thick enough! Areas close to the ocean will of course sound like an ocean (now with 100% less seagulls) and a flat prairie will sound as expected.

https://youtu.be/ESGp5gE9bQw


Presenting the player to the creatures of Prehistoric Kingdom, Creation was written specifically for the animal selection menu that appears right before entering the island in challenge mode. What kind of park will you create? The choice is yours.

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/creation




Cindy painted up a handful of the last new skins for our more toothy bestiary; theropods! There’s some still additional creatures to go after this month, but please enjoy Ceratosaurus nasicornis, Carnotaurus sastrei and Acrocanthosaurus atokensis.





In addition to its larger cousins, Dilophosaurus received a much needed update to its default skin and model!





Home to most of Prehistoric Kingdom’s bestiary, North America holds a total of 31 different creatures (including alt. species). From terrible tyrants to longhorn bison, this continent is the go-to place for dinosaurs and mammals.





Since we’ve last spoke about animal habitation and enclosures, quite a lot has changed! Whilst everything here can be disabled in sandbox, it’s important to consider the environmental conditions of a given species within Challenge mode.




To begin, every component of animal habitation makes up an individual’s total exhibit satisfaction. By doing this we can ensure that purposely ignoring something like foliage density for the sake of paddock design will not cause an animal to rampage by itself but will contribute to lowering the mood of the creature.




Every animal species has its own minimum recommended paddock size. Within the UI, players can also see the enclosure’s population – a percentage that fills up as creatures of different sizes are added into the paddock. If the player exceeds 100%, the exhibit will be deemed too small and its inhabitants will try to escape to find more space given enough time.


Foliage and water density allows us to better represent an animal’s unique environment or living conditions despite sharing its climate with the modern world. From a gameplay perspective, it’s the difference between a swampy mediterranean for Baryonyx and the drier, coastal mediterranean of Plateosaurus. As developers it allows us to present a unique challenge to players for every creature whilst still offering creative flexibility in designing the paddock.

Within the context of the game, an exhibit’s foliage and water density will always be calculated in direct relation to the size of the paddock; something that’s visible to players while terraforming.




The social group of an animal corresponds directly to its own species, nothing else within the paddock. If an enclosure is larger than its base value, the social group tolerance of a species will scale alongside it to compensate – meaning that groups will retain their original herd size regardless of exhibit space.



Juveniles/offspring are not included in the social group until they reach sexual maturity or need to counted in order to satisfy the group needs of a lone adult.


To calculate privacy, an exhibit accounts for the fence types used and any attractions that may be placed in, alongside, or through the paddock. If a player builds their enclosure with a highly visible fence and includes an attraction such as a safari tour, they’ll need to satisfy the independent privacy value of an animal with sufficient shelter coverage, better fencing or intelligent attraction placement.



Placing an elevated path over a paddock will also lower the privacy within an exhibit.


If an animal’s security recommendation is less than or equal to a fence’s security value, it’ll be able to escape the paddock when rampaging or stressed. Always consider the materials you’re building with to ensure the safety of your park.


Thermal Modulators are a minimalist range-based enrichment object that can be placed to raise or lower a paddock’s temperature to better match the preferred climate of any creatures within the enclosure. By default, an exhibit’s temperature is set by the climate of the map the player uses, meaning that the more extreme a map is the more challenging it’ll become to maintain upkeep from Thermal Modulators.

Animals are able to live within a temperature range from their preferred climate that’s visualised by a thermal falloff in the UI.



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Thank you for reading March’s Devlog!

We all worked incredibly hard this month, but there’s no time to rest: we look forward to polishing existing features throughout April, as well as adding ulterior functionality to paths and monorails. Stay tuned!

– The PK Team

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If you would like to check out our previous blogs, you can head to the official one here!

Welcome to February’s development update!

While this devlog isn’t as gameplay-filled as last month’s, we still have a lot of in-game goodies to keep everyone hooked! Ready to dig in?



February saw the celebration of Prehistoric Kingdom’s 5th birthday anniversary; something that seemingly came out of nowhere!



The team and project alike have changed greatly since its inception in 2014, altering and evolving to get us to our current goals and work environment. The love and support of our fans, backers and oldest prehistoric veterans means a lot to us, so thank you for sticking with us along the way.

Behind the scenes we’ve mainly been working on polishing up currently implemented features and continuing to improve the user experience but of course there’s always more to that!






Since finalizing most of our Tropical Wet island, Mau started work on the next climate; Mediterranean!

This time around there’s dozens of tiny archipelagos to the north of the island, with sloping hills and flat terrain across the main surface. With a few buildings placed around the park it’s easy to see how much building space there is!



Once we get the game into your hands, our Greek archipelago is sure to lend itself to some creative monorail tracks and park layouts!








Seeing a bit of development love from our coding wizard Matt, the path system is currently in its early days. There’s still much to do in the way of polishing and making them look nicer with borders, however, it’s a good start!




Like we did last month for the terraforming and fences, we’ll be sharing a demonstration video once we’ve made them nicer to use. Stay tuned!


Much to our composer’s delight, ambient tracks will now morph between full or light versions of a given piece depending on the time of day. Thanks, Mau!

https://youtu.be/wxGVclkCheA

Due to the length of month cycles and music frequency in testing, we’ve had some amazing sunrises accompanied by our own swelling orchestra. Since this system is so flexible, we plan to give the same functionality to animal introductions and breakout music.




Although there weren’t a whole lot of new structures this month, our shipping harbour got a total makeover to better suit the quality of recent buildings using Nathan’s excellent workflow techniques. Cleaner and sharper than ever, we’re greatly looking forward to creating its in-game animations and UI!




The Visitor Dock received some extra love with higher quality textures, more detail and an adjusted mesh that now includes lights and benches!





Since the release of SpeedTree 8 we’ve been able to get a hold of some excellent tropical and mediterranean foliage assets to populate our islands with. Big palms, little palms – we got ‘em!

Tropical Wet Foliage






Mediterranean Foliage






Some climates like the Tropical Wet will naturally include ferns on their grass surfaces to better match their real world counterparts and get auto-generated when terrain painting with the right texture.


Like last month, Mau and Nathan both worked in unison to successfully create the animations for the dromaeosaur rig. With its intimidating size and large sickle claws, Utahraptor has quickly become one of the most fascinating species in the animal roster.

Cunning and full of bird-like influence, we hope you enjoy February’s animation reel!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP7h6e3XwCY



In the sound department, Byron’s been working on brand new sounds for our Utahraptor in addition to new tracks for various parts of the game. Across all title pieces, ambient tracks and event cues, the game is going to have quite a bit of music!


Straight from our last animation video, Chaos Theory is a new track that will play (and loop) during an animal breakout! Loaded with percussion and some feisty brass, your guests will be running in no time.

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/chaos-theory

Bronto Burgers is another of our bespoke looping pieces written specifically for a building in the park. As the title suggests, this funky food theme can be heard from Fast Food Kiosks while they’re active.

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/bronto-burgers-extra




Before jumping into the last handful of theropods and oddities, Cindy prepared the remaining alt skins for our defensive Thyreophorans; Miragaia longicollum, Edmontonia rugosidensis, Sauropelta edwardsorum and Ankylosaurus magniventris.






In addition to the thyreophorans, Utahraptor received its final skin from September’s DevLog!





With the second largest number of dig sites available on a single continent in Early Access, Asia features a diverse range of extinct fauna from the Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene, and Quaternary.





The inbox is where you’ll find all your incoming messages from the outside world and get a monthly summary of how your park’s operating.


Offers make a return from tycoons of the past as a way for players to complete optional objectives and earn rewards for their accomplishments.

Organisations, museums and other eager entities may approach your park with requests to see certain animals or different objectives completed in order to present the player with a variety of benefits like money, science points and even positive park reputation.



Some excavation teams and museums can even offer their excess findings in favour of adding living, breathing specimens to the park!




Once a dig team has finished, their findings from an active site will be sent to the player’s inbox.




In addition to an on-screen popup, the park rating recap shows all new unlocks and available research.



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Thank you for reading February’s Devlog!

March will oversee the near completion of one of the first large builds of the game, one we’re gonna make sure to showcase as soon as it becomes available.

– The PK Team

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If you would like to check out our past blog posts, you can head to the official one here!

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!


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.





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.


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 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.


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!


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!






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.


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!


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.


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




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.


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.




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 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.

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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

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If you would like to check out our past blog posts, you can head to the official one here!

Welcome to the 12th devlog for Prehistoric Kingdom, officially marking one year from the release of the first content-filled, monthly progress blog post! Coinciding with this festive period, this post will celebrate our successes and accomplishments as a project, while also serving as a reminder of what’s yet to come.

Since this is a special month, we decided to skip over the ‘State of Development’ chart, replacing it with a year-round inclusive review of what has been done so far, right towards the end of this post.

That being said, we hope you’ll enjoy seeing more gameplay than post months. We are ready to start talking progress!




This month we put a lot of focus into making our building system feel and sound polished. Our second SFX designer (Byron) worked closely with our gameplay programmer (Mau) to ensure that every piece of player interaction had some sort of feedback for the player.

https://youtu.be/Q_Q-Cuxw2uM

Compared to the demo, we put a lot more into making Prehistoric Kingdom feel responsive and sound great. Through many revisions, we are super happy with how the core elements are shaping up.


It’s hard to believe that we first created our scaffolding system all the way back in October of 2016! A lot has happened since then so it’s only natural for us to try and overhaul its performance and aesthetic.

https://youtu.be/b6_VQ7LTHDY

This system had a lot of unsolvable issues which led to some pretty hefty performance hits whilst also not looking all that great, either. To remedy past problems our team looked at small real world construction sites to create brand new assets and find a much less taxing way of implementing a runtime scaffolding effect. Below is the result we found most satisfactory, please keep in mind the ground is part of a simpler test level.

https://youtu.be/9NWwlRsQygQ


In Early Access we’ll be introducing a simple and easy way to select multiple objects. To achieve this, simply hold the left mouse button down and drag the selection box over all structures and decorations that you might to move, duplicate, or delete.



Additional items can be added to the selection by holding shift and clicking on the desired building. Think of it like manipulating files on your desktop; pretty easy, right?




What good is any business without clientele? To top October off, we continued producing assets for our visitors, with the middle age group in mind this time. The adults will serve as the ‘mainstream’ category in Prehistoric Kingdom, being the most common guests in the park with the most well-rounded needs of any group.




To respect the tradition set last month, Nathan has been hard at work producing wholly new animations for the medium-sized theropod rig. While the showcase video features Allosaurus in particular, you can expect these animation to apply to animals such as Yutyrannus and Ceratosaurus, albeit slightly changed in order to better fit the target animal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLUIkHL8CGc




Much like what’s been done for our dinosaurs, mammals will also be getting their own introduction tracks. Primigenius has a larger emphasis on drums, winds and horns than what is usually found in our music.

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/primigenius-mammal-theme

In addition to this, Byron also finished up an old breakout piece; Tantrum-o-saurus rex. Filled to the brim with familiar orchestration and Prehistoric Kingdom motifs, this track is sure to set in some nostalgia and panic as a hungry theropod runs rampant through your park.

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/tantrum-o-saurus-rex




Small access buttons on the corner of the screen offer a handful of various tools and shortcuts for important management views in addition to features like screenshot mode or the park map.



A global list of all recently bred animals is also accessible so that players don’t need to head back to the Nursery when populating their park.




This month we started working on our notification popups – something that we’d like to be mostly out of the way and provide clear contextual information. Certain actions like unlocking new animals will be a bit more exciting, however, as seen in our work in progress animation below.





All popups can be disabled in the options menu.


As a fitting departure to 2018, our animal and building information panels have reached a final pass before moving onto UI implementation within the game itself.



All UI elements and icons will have tooltips when hovered over.



After a long process of iteration, it’s satisfying for us to finally put down the concept stage for these elements and say “This is it. This is the one.”


Screenshot mode got some pretty major reworks to allow for a far greater degree of flexibility when trying to get that perfect shot. We considered implementing the Ansel tool but decided on creating our own system due to compatibility issues with AMD cards in addition to some new features like time of day and fog settings.



We’ve opted for a vertical redesign reminiscent of third party solutions that’ll be more out of the way than what we had previously.




The end of the year brings a bunch of new fully realised alternate skins to life. As our holiday treat, please enjoy the finished alt skin sets for Edmontosaurus regalis, Parasaurolophus walkeri, Iguanodon bernissartensis, Allosaurus fragilis and Megaloceros giganteus!











In addition to the other three creatures, our Tyrannosaurus has received remakes of the Blackbeard and Ginger designs. To better fit a more contemporary feathering on T. rex, we’ve adjusted the location of feathers on the Ginger skin to remove excess fluff.







In the past we have talked about our plans for the general fossil system, but since so much time has passed since then, we felt it was a good idea to revisit our design in more detail, helping you visualize it with even more interface art.


Fossil formations are located all around the world, featuring dozens of unique extinct fauna. Like in past games, this is where players will find the remains of 50 different prehistoric creatures at launch.

South America, for example, features the Ensenada, Huincul, and La Colonia formations:



Example of our South American sites at launch.




Once a team has been assigned to a dig site they’ll send their findings back to the player at the end of each designated site’s digging timer.

However, if waiting around isn’t your cup of tea-rex, the Fossil Market is perfect for you! Donated from private collections, auctions and museums alike, the catalogue refreshes every month with new animals and specimens each yielding varying degrees of DNA.



It’s a little pricier than traditional digging though it offers the benefit of hand picking creatures and instantly adding to their total DNA viability.


Once a creature has reached 50% of its true genome it can be bred within the Animal Nursery. It’s important to note that anything created in this state will have a weaker immune system and lower fertility chance.

Despite this, additional coloration and physical alterations still need to be unlocked by acquiring 100% of the DNA. Certain creatures like Thescelosaurus and Tyrannosaurus can even have their integument changed depending on which genetic skin has been unlocked.



Alternate skins are unlocked in challenge mode by completing genetic milestones for each animal.



2018 was a big year for us as a team; a colossal year. Between planning, drafting, designing, redesigning, and working on different facets of the game, it’s been a huge year.


This year began with the strong partnership between Shadow Raven Studios and our publisher Crytivo. With them we’ve been given many new opportunities such as convention showcases and access to additional resources like the lovely Martin Fyris who helped conceptualise many of our buildings during production.

Officially, we started development on Prehistoric Kingdom in late March of this year after releasing the Jurassic Patch for our public demo. We would’ve liked to have started sooner but were held back by the short term nature of the codebase and implementation of new features like better AI and implementing new assets including animals and fences.


Even before Kickstarter, we had a very clear idea of where the project should head and what its direction would entail for our creative process. We knew we wanted to approach production through the aid of 3 well-defined development stages, delineating the progress of the game clearly: creation, management, and progression. In the 9 months since we started working on what is eventually going to be the released game, we were able to create an enormous quantity of art assets needed for all 3 phases. Never in the history of the project have we had so many ‘props’ to fill our game world with, and we are incredibly proud of that.

When it comes to gameplay, there’s been the expected ups and downs. While we have revamped every creative aspect present in our 2017 demo, effectively putting our past work to shame, we also had to depend to some extent on third party assets that would improve upon the engine we are using, allowing us to truly create the product we wish to publish. As such, we weren’t yet able to complete the first phase we set, but considering the work put in it thus far and the technical complexity that comes with it, we definitely feel like we’re on the right track, albeit slowly so. On a practical standpoint, we have the following:




Celebrating our accomplishments for this year, we realize that it’s also time to think about the future. 2019 is the year we’re gonna start seeing true, substantial leaps in progress, with one or more phases of our alpha plan possibly seeing completion during this time-frame. As we stated in past blog posts, our top priority right now is bringing the ‘creation’ phase up to speed by developing all the tools necessary to unleash every player’s creative potential.

Early on in the year, we are gonna make it a point to complete our level design so that we can start bringing all our systems together to create polished and user-friendly builds. We are going to finish our fence and path systems, and delve into fleshing out our animals, from the animation system, to the AI that drives all their actions.

Sounds complicated? That’s because it is, quality takes time. With that in mind, we think that at this pace the other 2 phases should take far less development time. One way or another, we will definitely have something to show for our work in the year to come, and we know you are gonna love it!

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Thank you for reading December’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!

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If you would like to check out our past blog posts, you can head to the official one here!

November’s Devlog is here!

For our eleventh (yes, eleven already!) monthly progress post, we prepared some more in-game sneak peeks, as well as long awaited reveals, so let’s just jump straight into it!



Keeping on the trend started last month, we’re going to present charts expressing development progress for each respective month. In November, our programmers got more involved in furthering the important systems needed to complete the ‘creation’ phase of the game.

Not only did we begin polishing our building system and create the necessary interface layouts for it, but we also started cracking down on more complex construction features, such as fences and paths, which we are going to show more for in the months to come. Our intent for this late part of the year and the early part of next year, is to keep developing and polishing our creation mechanics in sight of the first pre-alpha build completion.






Like we mentioned earlier, all our programmers got more involved in the game-making process, resulting in an increased progress pace all across the board. While we still have a long way to go before our creation systems are completely finished, here’s a sneak peek at our early building system. In the near future, we would like to add more visual indication of building placement; you can count on particle effects and even construction site effects. Moreover, the building models themselves will get more love: plants, custom path foundation and even their own animations (e.g. a full restaurant would be buzzing with guests).

Please keep in mind these clips were recorded on a test level and are NOT representative of final graphics.

http://prehistorickingdom.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/BuildingTest.mp4?_=1

Obviously the building system wouldn’t be much without proper demolition and selection, so here’s a reminder of the mechanic vision we’re going for when it comes to these two features. In the next couple of months our 3 programmers are going to be busy with bringing these concepts to life, dividing their workload in 3 main tasks: fence/path making (Matt), building, selection, demolition and assorted visuals (Mau) and finally level design and shader work (Victor).




As we explain in more detail in the ‘Audio’ section of this blog post, we have gone great lengths into adding audio features to the growing game. Here’s a short video to illustrate:

http://prehistorickingdom.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/RestaurantSoundscape-1.mp4?_=2


Our gameplay programmer has finally gone ahead and turn all those lovely GUI concepts into actual, functional game interface. It might not look like much progress from the demo, but the quality increase is definitely there, compare and contrast.

http://prehistorickingdom.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/UISFX.mp4?_=3



As always, our art staff has been super busy with asset creation. It’s actually kinda scary how quickly they are cycling through their assignments: soon enough, we’re gonna run out of cool things to show.


This month would oversee the completion of 67% of the buildings bound to appear in the Early Access release. As such, we are excited to show more of the park’s future scenery, as well as some fences and other important structures.


A variety of lamps and light posts can be used to decorate your pathways during storms and night time.


A classic staple of any zoo, players can use tables to create their own parks and sitting areas.


Sturdy and tall, the electrified metal fence is great for containing some of your most precarious creations.


The wooden cable fence is used to contain small animals and is recommended for exhibits with moats or trenches. Whilst functional, some unhappy creatures may find it easy to escape if not cared for correctly.


Akin to designs found on farms, this fence provides high visibility at the cost of lower security.


Security cameras are used to monitor and notify Park Rangers of escaped animals. Players should be conscious of their directional properties as the small security camera can only see one perspective.




The Visitor Dock allows guests to enter the park via ferry transport across the ocean. One way in and one way out – what could possibly go wrong?




Thriving with entertainment and hungry patrons, the restaurant serves as a place to eat for guests of all ages. Squint and you might just catch some easter eggs inside the top floor!


We are excited to reveal the first in a series of animation showcases, the Edmontosaurus using the Hadrosaur rig! We have been hard at work creating the base animations that are gonna help outline the animal’s future behaviour in the game, making sure the movements match not only the animal’s look, but also its size and presence. Keep in mind most of these animations will be used again for the other hadrosaurs in Prehistoric Kingdom, albeit with slight variations and adjustments. Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/7mJp70Snc6w




This month was unusual for our musical composition, as we experimented more with the game’s music pieces that add to the soundscape, but aren’t ultimately part of the main soundtrack, persay. The restaurant needed some love, so Byron thought of composing two jazzy tracks to complement the structure’s atmosphere. They are the kind of music you would expect in restaurant, lobbies, and assorted fancy places (such as elevators, they are undeniably fancy). We had a lot of fun with this experiment especially, since it allowed us to play with variations of our main theme that would otherwise not see the light of day.

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/a-merry-little-kingdom

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/jurassic-jazz


On the sound design front, we have been making progress with general SFX, preparing sound files for every part of the first alpha build. When it comes to environment, we have been breaking audio queues to fit the different climates we have, as opposed to the broader sea-plain-forest system we were using. Following comes a taste of the tropical wet sound design. Keep in mind we would like our in-game system to feature different sound zones depending on the current climate implemented.

http://prehistorickingdom.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/PK_DevLogAmbientScape.mp3



Last month saw the last of our Early Access receive their default skins. Seeing as how that means we have no more modelled animals to reveal, we will be focusing instead on each species’ alt skins, infant skins, and genetic variations.


We have shown the new Trike designs last month, and since, our animal texture artist has been hard at work bringing those renditions to life through the revamped Triceratops! Enjoy all the 4 skins, 2 for each species!







With that in mind, we decided to give our other ceratopsians some well deserved love. Welcome the remaining alt skins for Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus, as well as a reworked 3rd alt skin for Styracosaurus!







All this new content gave us a great opportunity to take a family picture, for no less than the ceratopsian family and relatives! Enjoy Prehistoric Kingdom’s Marginocephalia!




It’s time! Like we announced in our previous blog post, we would be revealing the design for the first confirmed animal to make it into Prehistoric Kingdom after the initial 50 animals, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus! While we won’t actually start production for this animal until soon after the initial release, we are excited to present our take on this large carnivore’s design, hoping that you’ll be as fond of it as we are, and hoping that it may put some curiosities to rest.

Check its Artstation presentation for a better look at the lit and flat colored versions of the concept.


The peculiarly short-legged Spinosaurus will make for a fine addition to any park it is put in.

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Thank you for reading November’s development update!

We’re gonna continue working towards meeting all the internally set goals for our first pre-alpha over the coming months, effectively making this our #1 priority. The creation part of the game is the most challenging by a large margin, but each month we get closer and closer to the expected results. Stay tuned!
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If you would like to check out our past blog posts, you can head to the official one here!