Jun 18, 2024

Paleo Pines News Roundup 🦖📰 Including Lucky Plushie Giveaway details!

Paleo Pines - Will | Paleo Pines Dev Team

What a Tuesday it's shaping up to be, ranchers! We've got some exciting competition news first and foremost, and some other good vibes coming your way!

🍀⏳ Lucky Plushie Giveaway running for 24 Hours! ⏳🍀
It's nearly ONE YEAR since we launched our Free Demo (it's still up!) and we want to say THANK YOU to this incredible community and offer you a chance to win an Original Lucky Plushie! These plushies were a limited run so there are only so many of them in the world- Here's another chance to make one your very own! Enter Here!
Entries are open until 5PM BST, Wednesday 19th of June- That's just over 24 hours, so get entering!
and a little dino told me there's an extra entry hiding in a recent devblog 👀
P.S. Apologies for the short notice on this one folks, we've had some short-staffing on the team due to sickness!

🌠 We Partnered With Make A Wish! 🌠
The Make A Wish Foundation approached us to ask us to be a part of their first Cosy Up For Wishes fundraising campaign, and we jumped at the chance! The absolutely amazing cosy gaming community raised over $43,000 for Make A Wish! 🌟 We are so immensely proud to have been a part of this fundraising effort! Without a doubt, the best side effect of making a game is getting to raise funds for incredible causes 🥰🥰🥰

🌈🦖 Sarcosuchus In Game and In Your Homes?! It's More Likely Than You Think! 🦖🌈
As I'm sure you've all seen, we have the gorgeous Sarcosuchus in game now! But that's not all- We've partnered with Makeship for their Pride campaign to make Marco the Sarco, Bi King, with a detachable Pride flag cape and his very own Wisdom stick! These guys are cute as anything, and only available to order until Tuesday the 2nd of July! And that's not all- Makeship is donating 10% of the sales to The Trevor Project, and we're donating an additional 5% to Outright International! (So far, Makeship's Pride campaign has raised over $60,000 for The Trevor Project, and we're absolutely thrilled to be a part of it!)
Order your very own Twilight Sarcosuchus plushie right here ➡ https://t.co/LcLPBsh597

And finally, if you can't get enough of Marco, Limited Edition Marco the Sarco Merch has dropped on our merch store!

Jun 12, 2024

Sarcosuchus DevBlog

Paleo Pines - Ellen | MaxEnt Brand Manager

The developers behind your favourite Dinosaur Ranching game are delighted to introduce the latest species to the herd! The Sarcosuchus has been an eagerly anticipated addition to the Valley and a firm favourite among many of our creative team since its initial conception back in 2020.

Initial concept of the Sarcosuchus by Jordan Bradley
In this Dev Diary, Animator Rachel Dixon is going to share her insights into building the character behind our dinos, the challenges she faced with this particular new species and how the Sarcosuchus has become her favourite dinosaur to animate to date!

How the Process begins

The key word that should be on every artist's mind when designing game assets is ‘efficiency’ and how we can implement optimization techniques across every aspect of the pipeline early in development. Designing, creating, rigging, animating and implementing almost 40 dinosaurs has been a real push on the creative pipeline to develop, maintain and evolve efficient practices across the board. And if you’re not familiar with the animation process you might wonder how an animator might implement efficient practices. Where a modelling department faces challenges of exploring ways to minimise polycount and efficient texture maps, surely a necessary animation has less room for cutting back?

Time is the biggest priority for an animator. Whether it's the timing of animations or the time we spend animating, efficiency is balanced around how we can achieve the best quality in the shortest time possible. And now with 39 dinosaurs in game with up to 50 animations assigned to some, timing really is everything. This is where thoughtful concept design comes into play. By designing some dinosaurs to be of similar proportions and scale, we can group our dino-friends into ‘family trees’. A great example of this are the Ceratops…

Concepts: Centrosaurus, Triceratops & Styracosaurus by Jordan Bradley
While each dinosaur has its own unique design and characteristics, the general scale and proportions are similar enough for our brilliant riggers to produce some versatile rigs that can be shared across a number of families. And the great thing about animating lots of the same rig? You can share animations across the lot! This means that for complicated animations such as walk or run cycles, we can completely utilise one dinosaur’s animation set as a reference and solid foundation for other similar dinosaurs, saving time on pacing, foot placement and animation clip length while allowing more time to focus on adding detail in weighting, stride and opportunity to focus on bespoke character based animations.

The Sarcosuchus

Occasionally, we are faced with dinosaurs who don’t share any similar components or traits to other dinosaurs in the game. Enter: the Sarcosuchus. For me, I love the feeling of being able to design a character’s personality from scratch. There's a massive opportunity for creative freedom but it’s definitely not without its challenges. While I would love to go wild with what I can animate, I still need to be cautious of the limitations and ensure everything is designed thoughtfully with gameplay in mind. In addition to that, animation style consistency is vital to maintain to ensure no character feels out of place. This can be challenging, especially when you are working with a character that is able to achieve some really creative expressions. Sometimes you just want to push it to its very limits but in doing so would run the risk of a character standing out negatively amongst the otherss. The same mindset works in reverse too. There are a handful of characters that can’t be animated just as easily for various reasons and it can be a challenge to ensure they are expressive enough to fit in with the rest of the world.

What makes the Sarcosuchus so unique is its bulky body shape and long, strong tail. This character design really screams ‘sturdy’. Being of the crocodile family, this is the first of its kind in Paleo Pines and so that gave me lots of room to explore how we can turn one of the world’s deadliest creatures into a farming companion with the challenge of working around this very dense body shape.

The first thing I like to do with a fresh rig is stretch its limbs to see how far we can push the poses and figure out any unique properties. For example, this character's legs and joints have a unique placement outside of the body line. This could have an impact on how joint rotations work as well as how weight should be distributed to give a strong sense of the heaviness of this creature.

Screenshots of front & side view of 3D Sarcosuchus modelled by Abigail Gelston

If you have explored our various dinosaurs in the game, you might have noticed the impact many of the tails have on a character animation. A tail is a window into a personality and character type (they can also be very satisfying to animate). There is a thin line between bold, quick movements and how they can tell you if your dinosaur is happy or getting annoyed, much similar to how our real life pet companions use their tails to communicate their emotions. This Sarcosuchus tail however, has been designed and modelled to have a natural curve in its tail. Keeping that curve while also rotating the joints to have correct and fluid overlap proved to be a more surprising challenge than I had anticipated.

Sarcosuchus Happy animation by Rachel Dixon and character: The Fire Spirit, Frozen II

It didn’t take long for me to find out why I loved this rig. When tackling its happy animation I was pleasantly surprised by the rig’s flexibility and I was able to push for this lovely, playful pose. It was this animation that allowed me to see similarities in one of my favourite companion characters- The Fire Spirit, Frozen II. Despite its dense feel and the massive difference in scale, the Sarcosuchus rig allowed for a similar flexibility to that of the Fire Spirit, meaning that with some thoughtful animation tactics, I could tackle some usually bulky animations such as turns, to be a little more slick rather than clunky.

Challenges Beyond Animation

No matter how careful we try to be, with so many animations to keep track of and so many rigs to oversee, often some animation bugs get caught up and pushed into the game. More often than not, the animation bugs flagged are a result of accidental keys being keyframed (or not), transform channels that have been forgotten and are still hidden or exports not including all of the necessary animations. But sometimes it takes a little more brain power to figure out..

Animation bug: player coming out of harness

The animation team are all too familiar with this type of bug. Luckily for us, it doesn’t crop up too often. Unfortunately for us, it also can be caused by a variety of issues and rarely do we have one method to fix them all. In this scenario, the issue came down to the root motion of the player vs that of the dinosaur. And by this I really mean- how the two characters physically move forward within the 3D world. When animating the player on a dinosaur within Blender, my scene looks much like you see in game- where the dino goes, the player goes. We call this ‘parenting’ and the same process must be implemented by programmers when characters are exported into the game engine. In this scenario, my mistake lay in accidentally keyframing the player’s transform information (i.e. its position in the 3D space) and so when it came to baking out the actions, Blender documented that when the dinosaur moved forward for a walk or run cycle, the player did too. In theory this sounds right, but when adapted into Unity it works a little differently. In this software, parenting is already directing the player rig to follow the dinosaur, the then additional animation information of the player moving forward in space acts as something we call ‘double transforms’. In a nutshell, the character is being told to move in the same direction twice, resulting in them soaring into the distance.

Thank You!
Thank you for following along and I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek into some of the inner workings of my animation mind! Over and Out!

(PSST- if you’re looking for a secret code for a certain Lucky Plushie giveaway, try DEV058BLOG4)

May 29, 2024

Steam Patch Notes Version 1.4.3

Paleo Pines - Ellen | MaxEnt Brand Manager

BIG UPDATES

Added Sarcosuchus, along with two new dreamstones.
Freya can now craft sandstone walls when reaching ‘close friend’ with her.
More species are now eligible to spawn after the Triassea Picnic.

Additional Updates

Fixed small dinos lagging behind when following by spending too long looking for treasure after the player had moved on.
Fixed Lucky sometimes feeling sad after completing the main quest.
Fixed missing Triceratops saddle material.
Fixed timing of Desmatosuchus friend call notes.
Fixed Triassea Picnic spawns interfering with Valley Triceratops spawns.
You can no longer sell Avery’s hubs before completing the relevant quest. Missing hubs will be restored for free in existing saves.
Fixed loading older saves where items were dropped out of bounds and couldn’t be reached.
Fixed Coelophysis animation when interacting with a ball.
Fixed a soft lock when filling water using the medium pond.
Improved Troodon petting animation.
Fixed animation desyncs when riding Megalosaurus or Postosuchus.
Fixed harvest quantity/quality boost icons when mounted - these icons now appear to indicate that the boosts are active when harvesting using a dino.
Memory optimizations, particularly when building pens.
Fixed stats incorrectly displaying 6 total Poppins rather than 5.
Fixed the yellow Ariacotta cushion requiring red cloth to craft.
Reduced recipe cook chance when adding the correct quantities of all required ingredients, but also extra ingredients which aren’t part of the recipe. This fixes recipes which extend another recipe, such as Pasta Carnotaura.
Fixed dinos freezing when harvesting wild collectables with less than 15 stamina.