Welcome to April’s DevLog!

This month we had a heavy focus on the art side of Prehistoric Kingdom’s development – spending most of it on buildings, sounds, music, animals, animation, concept art, and designs for the remaining alternate skins. Some team members were busy with their personal lives, but in the end we pulled through just in time for another update – how about that?



Our tasks from last month will be carrying over into May as they’re quite large and will require a lot of time to be dedicated to them.





For the most part programming during this part of the development cycle is pretty boring. Unfortunately we’re going to have to wait until next month to start showing the terraforming in action as most of the work has been done in the back-end, but there’s still some things to talk about.

For starters, our new camera is feeling great! It’s more responsive, flexible, and overall feels way more polished. With our new camera system we’re aiming to make following animals feel way more dynamic and personal as well as respond better when building.



The artists in the team have been working madly this month to keep chipping away at all the art assets required for the game, both for buildings as well as animals. While we can’t show everything as it will spoil some pretty cool things that will be coming up Soon™, here’s a look at some of the best parts of April’s development.


The collection of buildings and structures of Prehistoric Kingdom continues to expand as we delve further into security, animal care, and guest amenities.



Food Stash

The Food Stash is a basic feeding structure that is suggested for small-medium animals. Don’t worry, however, as the food items going into the game will not be as large or odd as they are in the concept art – this is only to clearly illustrate the contents of each basket type. While most animals will be satisfied by basic plant feed or red meat, more specialised creatures may require fruits, fish, and insects!



Ranger Station

From the Ranger Station, trucks and cars can be dispatched to transport guests to the safety of protective bunkers, as well as carry staff to the last known location of an escapee. A small helicopter based atop the structure makes this building highly advised when wrangling dangerous animals who aren’t afraid to get a little defensive.



Fast Food Kiosk

With a customizable menu and pricing options for guests to choose from, the Fast Food Kiosk works perfectly on the side of a path or in the middle of a plaza due to its multiple entrances.



Emissive maps allow us to create lights, signs, and other objects that mimic their real world counterparts (not to mention it makes buildings look awesome at night). Speaking of which, check out all those illuminated screens and surfaces!


This month we took the time to begin animating our Edmontosaurus to experiment with new ideas and work on bringing our dinosaurs to life. A handful of other creatures also received a helping hand in learning how to walk but they’re not quite ready for their public debut. It’s still a work-in-progress, but please enjoy the first look at the walk and run cycles for our Edmontosaurus.

https://youtu.be/SQFFMpuLJRE
https://youtu.be/SLZQgDd07_Q
https://youtu.be/zNLLyTdNkks
https://youtu.be/mHTcrlNOx0Q

One of the other neat things we worked on was setting up a system that allows us to dynamically move the eyelids of an animal through animation or inside the game itself. This means that animals will feel just that little bit more alive by being able to close their eyes while sleeping, threatening, and blinking at random intervals. You can see this in action with a few of the animations above.




In our original August demo our status pointers for building resources looked something like this:



To better support the evolving complexity of Prehistoric Kingdom they’ve been revised to not only look better but also provide a quicker visual response to the player with colour information. While the icons themselves will be implemented in a way that doesn’t make them obstructing or annoying in-game they can be disabled from the options menu for players that are looking for less of a helping hand.




Continuing the theme of upgrading, revising, and overhauling, the three building toolboxes have gotten some much needed love. We experimented with a few different layouts to greatly improve upon the design featured in the demo, and we hope that you enjoy the first look at the new tools and building options coming in Prehistoric Kingdom. For us, we want customization, creativity, and flexibility to go hand-in-hand when building the park of your dreams.


Building icons are not representative of fence types. Sorry Timmy, but you can’t use toilets as fencing for your Tyrannosaurus.

Players can select objects to be placed on top of paths automatically through enabling the Path Objects window. From here you can pick between bins, seating, and even change the color of lighting that’s placed at a frequency determined by the player. We aren’t 100% on the design and layout yet, so don’t be surprised if it’s changed the next time you see it.

For those with a keen eye, you might have spotted some scary looking sliders to control how paths and fences are built. We’re going to go into a detailed breakdown of what they do once our spline-based fencing and path solution has been implemented, but the main thing to take away is that players will have an extremely precise amount of control in regards to the curvature, angles, and placement of both fences and paths.




Our sound designer has created the main soundsets for all 50 Early Access animals which includes our dinosaurs and mammals. While individual calls, roars, and grunts will be showcased in our upcoming animation previews, please enjoy this short soundscape that was designed using five of our animals! Can you guess what they are?

http://prehistorickingdom.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/PK_Soundscape-Example.mp3?_=1


This month our composer started working on some new themes that will reoccur throughout Prehistoric Kingdom’s soundtrack. Two other pieces were written in April, but enjoy the first look at one of the herbivore theme variants going into the game. It has more of a whimsical quality that is sure to compliment the player as they release their first large herbivore into its paddock!

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/gentle-giants-herbivore-theme




Most of April ended up being dedicated to pushing out the last of our alternate skin designs as well as setting up some ontogeny for a handful of animals. Before we get to them, however, say hello to Ouranosaurus nigeriensis, Oviraptor philoceratops, Miragaia longicollum, and our revamped Styracosaurus albertensis!







With a new batch of critters come their ever-adorable life stages! This month it’s a glimpse at a tiny crocodile, rhino, and… a duck?






We got through a lot of new skin designs this month. As we’d like to save some for the next DevLog, here’s half of the recent concept pieces done during April.











This months gameplay discussion is more conceptual in its explanation as most of the art and mechanics behind it are yet to be complete. With that said, those of you that enjoy reading about our ideas and understanding the game will enjoy this one!


Large and infinite quantities of food is not something that just magically appears, right? Especially not on an island in the middle of the ocean or in an isolated part of a mainland continent. For an enormous zoo or theme park housing extinct animals that are a multitude of sizes you’re going to need to ensure that animal feed is shipped to your park on a near monthly basis (depending on how many creatures you own).



On an island, a Shipping Harbour is placed to transfer food from the mainland to your park. From here you can check the current food stock, order more, and check the remaining time until your shipment arrives. If a player is using the mainland to start their prehistoric zoo the same system applies but now with a Shipping Depot instead of the harbour. More trucks, less giant cargo ship.

By default the Shipping Harbour and Depot have storage facilities built into them, allowing for a small but suitable amount of feed to be kept inside to help out with the early game. With an ever expanding list of hungry creatures to be satisfied, however, any excess food is going to need to be stored in an external Storage Warehouse. For players on smaller and more challenging maps or those with a mass-overpopulation of animals, this provides an interesting balance of space, population, security, and money management that should be considered to efficiently run your park.




Food can be accessed by animals in two ways; placing feeders in their exhibit or by finding plants/carcasses in the world (let’s hope you have more plant life available in your park than corpses, yeah?).

By default feeders placed inside an exhibit by the player are empty. Instead, the food type is automatically assigned and filled based on the animal groups that are dropped into the paddock to cut down on the time needed to try and find a specific type of food dish. Pick a design that works best for the paddock, animal size, and aesthetic that you’re going for! If for whatever reason you don’t like the assigned food type it can be manually changed by selecting the feeder and editing its properties to closer fit what you had in mind.

All food dishes are refilled by keepers who must travel on foot or by vehicle to reach the exhibit. A keepers experience will directly tie into how an animal will react to their presence, so technology such as automated feeding cranes may be a wiser implementation when dealing with the more… ravenous bunch.

___

That’s a wrap! Thanks for reading April’s DevLog. Make sure to keep an eye out for our frequent Twitch streams, join our Discord, and follow our social media accounts to keep up to date with the game (links down below).

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Discord
  
• YouTube

___

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

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to this months development update!

The team has been busy working on new Early Access material and beginning the process of rebuilding our core systems and foundation to improve upon our user experience and ensure that Prehistoric Kingdom is ready for new features and content. Much love and effort is being put into crafting a unique gameplay experience that will feel challenging and rewarding for tycoon veterans and new fans of the genre.



On March 4 we released the Jurassic Patch to our pre-alpha demo and were simply blown away by the sheer creativity that our community has shown us! While there were issues reported on our Discord server and Steam forums, we took note and pushed out a hotfix as quickly as possible to address the majority of large issues that our players were experiencing with the AI and other things.

For our OSX community, we’re pleased to announce that the demo is available on Steam for you to play around with! We’ve learned a lot over the past few months, and we cannot wait to get the full game into everyone’s hands.





March was extremely successful as we managed to achieve everything that originally set in February. While certain components will be continued through the next few months, here’s a glimpse at what’s to come!






For the last two weeks our programmers have been working on Prehistoric Kingdom’s architecture to improve the game development process by redesigning all of our systems to be future proof. This entails things such as creating new user interface prefabs, loading systems, and making the addition of new buildings or animals to the game as easy as possible. By going through the laborious process of rebuilding old systems from the demo, we can greatly improve the functionality, performance, and feeling of the game.

This enhanced approach to our workflow means that programming conventions and general engine work within Unity should be far more comprehensive and welcoming to each team member when working with the game’s deep and complex systems.



During March we looked deeply at the game’s art style and aesthetics to recognise trouble spots regarding consistency and how we can make Prehistoric Kingdom both look great and run well. In the future, we have plans to redo some of our older creatures and art assets to bring them up to par with recent additions to our growing catalogue of models, textures, animations, sounds, and designs.


Something we’ve wanted to look into for a while now is a revamp of some of our custom shaders in Unity. While it’s certainly not finished, we’ve been testing out a decal system for body damage when an animal has been attacked or wounded. In conjunction with this change, our animals will look far more detailed than previously seen before.

It’s not perfect as we’re still experimenting, but so far the results have been promising:



Similar effects can be applied for to visually assist features like disease. We gave our Tyrannosaurus a quick skin inflammation to test it out:


Issues like skin inflammation will play a vital role in maintaining an animals health. More diseases will be revealed in the future!




Our resident level designer, programmer, and tree connoisseur, Victor, has been up to some ever so lovely things recently. Now that we’re looking to improve our art assets and quality wherever we can, here’s an early look at our Mediterranean Isle inside World Machine. It’s not quite ready to go in-engine yet as we won’t be touching maps for a while, but we can’t wait to see what it looks like once it’s there!



If you haven’t caught our daily streams (check out our Discord server for notifications, hint hint) Victor has also been growing a collection of our Tropical Wet plants, trees, and general foliage assets.




We recently added a concept artist to help out with building designs and realize our expansive list of structures that will be featured in the game. Here’s the first look at some of our buildings:


The Fast Food Kiosk is a small building for your guests to purchase meals and drinks set by the player. It’s been designed so that visitors can access cashiers from four different sides depending on path access, meaning that the kiosk can be placed both within a plaza or on the side of a pathway and still be fully functional.


A Restroom is required for when your guests need to, you know… go. The internal trash can and recycling bin mounted to the outer wall along with solar panels attached to the roof makes this building worthwhile even when alongside its larger counterpart.


The Animal Nursery is the birthplace for all of your prehistoric animals before moving them out into the park. We felt that the original design didn’t quite fit its purpose and opted for a larger modern aesthetic. Additional foliage and greenery will be added in-engine.


The Thermic Modulator alters the temperature of an exhibit while retaining the chosen climate. To keep its design relatively hidden from guests, its outer texture adapts to the ground texture beneath it.

Buildings are something that the team has wanted to see for the longest time and we hope that you’re just as excited as we are to reveal new building types each month. Remember to supply your structures with sufficient water and electricity, or else you might just find yourself in a predicament!




While not strictly linked to the graphic design side of development, our UI designer has been working with our programmers to ensure that the future of Prehistoric Kingdom is as nice to play with as it is to look at. A smattering of concepts were created during March to compliment the on-going game plan and feature design, as well. The interface for selection, demolition, animal selection, and terraforming have been finalized along with some tweaks to existing sets to name but a few.


Expanding upon our previous two state cursors from the demo to cover a wide range of activities!

Besides a handful of other improvements such as new mouse cursor states and button feedback/responsiveness, we’ve added a collection of charming phrases during the loading screen to make waiting just that little bit less tedious. We might even throw a few easter eggs in there – who knows?


Loading screen backgrounds will change depending on the map. All 50 Early Access animals can be viewable as the animated creature based on chance.


A small sample of the 20+ game-related phrases and easter eggs. Revolutionary? Nah. Neat? Definitely.




That’s right – even more animals to show! These critters might not come as a surprise to those who have been following the live streams but here are the new creatures (and alternate skins) of March. Say hello to Ankylosaurus magniventris, Baryonyx walkeri, Carnotaurus sastrei, and Edmontosaurus regalis!










Last month we showed off our Pachyrhinosaurus. Today we’re revealing its two alternate skins; Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis and perotorum!



Alternate skin designs for Carnotaurus, Deinonychus, Edmontosaurus, and Styracosaurus:






And finally; artwork for Prenocephale and all the remaining mammals!





With the conclusion of our last livestream, the remaining Early Access base meshes have been completed! All of our beautiful animals will be moving onto sculpting, texturing, rigging, and animation over the coming months.





Terraforming is a key part of any great zoo building game which is why we’re looking into completely overhauling the system currently implemented within the pre-alpha demo. The details provided here may be altered as development continues, but here’s the general idea of what we’re looking at.

Terrain Editing

With the user interface getting an extreme makeover, we would like to focus our terraforming systems around voxels due to the hundreds of creative possibilities that can be accomplished with them.



Up to three different water colours can be chosen (“salt”, “fresh”, or “muddy”) when painting water into a paddock. This is complimentary feature the main tools – raising, lowering, flattening, and smoothing the terrain.

We’ll do our best in researching and implementing a voxel terrain system due to the ability to freely sculpt caves, arches, and overhangs from the terrain. The creative power that comes with something like this has the potential to be truly amazing, so we’ll be sure to report back on our progress in the next few DevLog’s.

Climate Painting

Climate painting in Prehistoric Kingdom offers deep customization for hardcore builders as well as simple tools for players who would rather not get into the detailed side of exhibit design.



Players will have the option to paint both ground textures and make use of the ‘Quick Design’ tool simultaneously, enabling or disabling the automatic placement of rocks, ground clutter, and foliage during the painting process. Rocks and trees can be individually placed by lowering the brush size to its minimum value or painted directly onto your terrain through increasing the size and intensity of your brush.

Overall, terraforming will feel far more integrated into the game. Some of you may recall having to use a separate foliage removal tool instead of demolition when experimenting with the demo. Not only will trees, rocks, and clutter behave like the rest of the structures and objects in the game, but their functionality will be, too. Clicking painted objects will activate the editing gizmo – allowing for a more streamlined exhibit building experience.

___

And that concludes March’s DevLog!



We will be continuing our daily streams as well as posting a few more times a month on our social media pages so there’s less of a content drought in between blog posts. With that said, we hope you enjoyed reading and we shall see everyone in April!

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Discord
  
• YouTube

___

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

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to this months development update!

The team has been busy working on new Early Access material and beginning the process of rebuilding our core systems and foundation to improve upon our user experience and ensure that Prehistoric Kingdom is ready for new features and content. Much love and effort is being put into crafting a unique gameplay experience that will feel challenging and rewarding for tycoon veterans and new fans of the genre.



On March 4 we released the Jurassic Patch to our pre-alpha demo and were simply blown away by the sheer creativity that our community has shown us! While there were issues reported on our Discord server and Steam forums, we took note and pushed out a hotfix as quickly as possible to address the majority of large issues that our players were experiencing with the AI and other things.

For our OSX community, we’re pleased to announce that the demo is available on Steam for you to play around with! We’ve learned a lot over the past few months, and we cannot wait to get the full game into everyone’s hands.





March was extremely successful as we managed to achieve everything that originally set in February. While certain components will be continued through the next few months, here’s a glimpse at what’s to come!






For the last two weeks our programmers have been working on Prehistoric Kingdom’s architecture to improve the game development process by redesigning all of our systems to be future proof. This entails things such as creating new user interface prefabs, loading systems, and making the addition of new buildings or animals to the game as easy as possible. By going through the laborious process of rebuilding old systems from the demo, we can greatly improve the functionality, performance, and feeling of the game.

This enhanced approach to our workflow means that programming conventions and general engine work within Unity should be far more comprehensive and welcoming to each team member when working with the game’s deep and complex systems.



During March we looked deeply at the game’s art style and aesthetics to recognise trouble spots regarding consistency and how we can make Prehistoric Kingdom both look great and run well. In the future, we have plans to redo some of our older creatures and art assets to bring them up to par with recent additions to our growing catalogue of models, textures, animations, sounds, and designs.


Something we’ve wanted to look into for a while now is a revamp of some of our custom shaders in Unity. While it’s certainly not finished, we’ve been testing out a decal system for body damage when an animal has been attacked or wounded. In conjunction with this change, our animals will look far more detailed than previously seen before.

It’s not perfect as we’re still experimenting, but so far the results have been promising:



Similar effects can be applied for to visually assist features like disease. We gave our Tyrannosaurus a quick skin inflammation to test it out:


Issues like skin inflammation will play a vital role in maintaining an animals health. More diseases will be revealed in the future!




Our resident level designer, programmer, and tree connoisseur, Victor, has been up to some ever so lovely things recently. Now that we’re looking to improve our art assets and quality wherever we can, here’s an early look at our Mediterranean Isle inside World Machine. It’s not quite ready to go in-engine yet as we won’t be touching maps for a while, but we can’t wait to see what it looks like once it’s there!



If you haven’t caught our daily streams (check out our Discord server for notifications, hint hint) Victor has also been growing a collection of our Tropical Wet plants, trees, and general foliage assets.




We recently added a concept artist to help out with building designs and realize our expansive list of structures that will be featured in the game. Here’s the first look at some of our buildings:


The Fast Food Kiosk is a small building for your guests to purchase meals and drinks set by the player. It’s been designed so that visitors can access cashiers from four different sides depending on path access, meaning that the kiosk can be placed both within a plaza or on the side of a pathway and still be fully functional.


A Restroom is required for when your guests need to, you know… go. The internal trash can and recycling bin mounted to the outer wall along with solar panels attached to the roof makes this building worthwhile even when alongside its larger counterpart.


The Animal Nursery is the birthplace for all of your prehistoric animals before moving them out into the park. We felt that the original design didn’t quite fit its purpose and opted for a larger modern aesthetic. Additional foliage and greenery will be added in-engine.


The Thermic Modulator alters the temperature of an exhibit while retaining the chosen climate. To keep its design relatively hidden from guests, its outer texture adapts to the ground texture beneath it.

Buildings are something that the team has wanted to see for the longest time and we hope that you’re just as excited as we are to reveal new building types each month. Remember to supply your structures with sufficient water and electricity, or else you might just find yourself in a predicament!




While not strictly linked to the graphic design side of development, our UI designer has been working with our programmers to ensure that the future of Prehistoric Kingdom is as nice to play with as it is to look at. A smattering of concepts were created during March to compliment the on-going game plan and feature design, as well. The interface for selection, demolition, animal selection, and terraforming have been finalized along with some tweaks to existing sets to name but a few.


Expanding upon our previous two state cursors from the demo to cover a wide range of activities!

Besides a handful of other improvements such as new mouse cursor states and button feedback/responsiveness, we’ve added a collection of charming phrases during the loading screen to make waiting just that little bit less tedious. We might even throw a few easter eggs in there – who knows?


Loading screen backgrounds will change depending on the map. All 50 Early Access animals can be viewable as the animated creature based on chance.


A small sample of the 20+ game-related phrases and easter eggs. Revolutionary? Nah. Neat? Definitely.




That’s right – even more animals to show! These critters might not come as a surprise to those who have been following the live streams but here are the new creatures (and alternate skins) of March. Say hello to Ankylosaurus magniventris, Baryonyx walkeri, Carnotaurus sastrei, and Edmontosaurus regalis!










Last month we showed off our Pachyrhinosaurus. Today we’re revealing its two alternate skins; Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis and perotorum!



Alternate skin designs for Carnotaurus, Deinonychus, Edmontosaurus, and Styracosaurus:






And finally; artwork for Prenocephale and all the remaining mammals!





With the conclusion of our last livestream, the remaining Early Access base meshes have been completed! All of our beautiful animals will be moving onto sculpting, texturing, rigging, and animation over the coming months.





Terraforming is a key part of any great zoo building game which is why we’re looking into completely overhauling the system currently implemented within the pre-alpha demo. The details provided here may be altered as development continues, but here’s the general idea of what we’re looking at.

Terrain Editing

With the user interface getting an extreme makeover, we would like to focus our terraforming systems around voxels due to the hundreds of creative possibilities that can be accomplished with them.



Up to three different water colours can be chosen (“salt”, “fresh”, or “muddy”) when painting water into a paddock. This is complimentary feature the main tools – raising, lowering, flattening, and smoothing the terrain.

We’ll do our best in researching and implementing a voxel terrain system due to the ability to freely sculpt caves, arches, and overhangs from the terrain. The creative power that comes with something like this has the potential to be truly amazing, so we’ll be sure to report back on our progress in the next few DevLog’s.

Climate Painting

Climate painting in Prehistoric Kingdom offers deep customization for hardcore builders as well as simple tools for players who would rather not get into the detailed side of exhibit design.



Players will have the option to paint both ground textures and make use of the ‘Quick Design’ tool simultaneously, enabling or disabling the automatic placement of rocks, ground clutter, and foliage during the painting process. Rocks and trees can be individually placed by lowering the brush size to its minimum value or painted directly onto your terrain through increasing the size and intensity of your brush.

Overall, terraforming will feel far more integrated into the game. Some of you may recall having to use a separate foliage removal tool instead of demolition when experimenting with the demo. Not only will trees, rocks, and clutter behave like the rest of the structures and objects in the game, but their functionality will be, too. Clicking painted objects will activate the editing gizmo – allowing for a more streamlined exhibit building experience.

___

And that concludes March’s DevLog!



We will be continuing our daily streams as well as posting a few more times a month on our social media pages so there’s less of a content drought in between blog posts. With that said, we hope you enjoyed reading and we shall see everyone in April!

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Discord
  
• YouTube

___

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

Last week's release of the Jurassic Patch was extremely well taken, and we were humbled by it. Everyone showed off their limitless creativity by building magnificent parks and reserves, and watching the new and old animals alike wander around and display their behaviors.

However, we do acknowledge that it wasn't without fault. To this extent, we took some time to fix some of the more immersion-breaking bugs to make the whole experience that much more enjoyable during the wait for Early Access. Furthermore, we polished some of the new behaviors and added that little extra detail on top of them.

Patch notes are as follows:
Audio

• Eating sounds for carnivores have been added
  
• Drinking sounds for all dinosaurs have been added
  
• Fleeing dinosaurs now vocalize to the herd
  
• Reduced volume range for Camarasaurus vocalizations
  
• Volume pitch for infants adjusted

AI

• Dinosaurs will no longer teleport out of their enclosures
  
• Dinosaurs will now react to threats even if they are eating/drinking/resting
  
• Dinosaurs will now sleep. This is a separate need from resting and will slow down hunger/thirst while increasing health and energy
  
• Dinosaurs should no longer get stuck in a state until they die
  
• Dinosaurs should no longer get stuck turning
  
• Dinosaurs should now react better to vehicles
  
• Dinosaurs should no longer glitch into the air
  
• Moving a dinosaur will now reset its state in case it does happen to get stuck
  
• Carnivore aggression has been toned down
  
• Carnivores should have an easier time grabbing infants
  
• Dinosaurs will now look around and vocalize while resting
  
• Dinosaurs can no longer be placed where there is no navmesh. They will now appear red until moved somewhere valid
  
• Various other improvements to AI and related systems

Animation

• Animals will sometimes yawn when resting
  
• Animals will shake after exiting water
  
• Animation stutter has been reduced
  
• Attack animation syncing has been improved somewhat
  
• Animals don't reset when time is paused anymore

Building

• Gate bug where gate cannot be deleted is fixed
  
• Various bugs that prevent placement of new buildings have been fixed
  
• Paths no longer affect the navmesh. Dinosaurs can now walk on paths
  
• Rocks will now affect the navmesh so that animals will path around them
  
• Reduced game lag when placing a building
  
• Fixed bug when moving an animal after deleting the nursery it spawned from
  
• Fixed various bugs that could result in being unable to place or click on buildings

Dinosaurs

• Allosaurus body size has been modified
  
• Camarasaurus has learned to swim
  
• Camarasaurus now has significantly more health
  
• Camarasaurus now has additional attacks
  
• Camarasaurus can now properly deal damage with its tail
  
• Camarasaurus can now threaten predators
  
• Camarasaurus body size has been modified
  
• Dryosaurus can now graze
  
• Gallimimus can now preen themselves
  
• Gallimimus can now graze
  
• Stegosaurus can now graze
  
• Stegosaurus should now properly use its tail for self-defense
  
• Triceratops can now graze
  
• Tyrannosaurus now pants when low on energy
  
• Tyrannosaurus has a new random idle animation
  
• Velociraptor can now dust bathe when resting
  
• Velociraptor can now preen themselves

Misc.

• Camera will no longer fall below terrain
  
• Vehicles will now properly collide with trees
  
• Improved overall game performance significantly for CPU bound machines
  
• Reduced game hiccups when loading a dinosaur or building for the first time
  
• Pathfinding improvements
  
• To better support trackpad users, Zoom In (R) and Zoom Out (F) keys are now incremental zoom instead of absolute. To mimic old functionality and snap to the closest zoom press Shift+R, to the furthest zoom press Shift+F.

UI

• Animal counter will now properly reflect animal count and exclude dead animals
  
• Animal statistics (i.e. body weight) are now correct

The AI is still being fine-tuned and is not perfect, and as such there are still a few small issues which we may or may not address in a small, final bugfix patch. Some of the known issues are:

• animals can glitch in and out of the ground when filling their needs
  
• turning animations aren't always perfectly synced with the object
  
• carnivores can be overly aggressive when in packs, resulting in unnecessary herbivore slaughter, though to much lesser extent than previously

That said, we hope you'll keep enjoying the game, and as always, have a great time with the new build!

Last week's release of the Jurassic Patch was extremely well taken, and we were humbled by it. Everyone showed off their limitless creativity by building magnificent parks and reserves, and watching the new and old animals alike wander around and display their behaviors.

However, we do acknowledge that it wasn't without fault. To this extent, we took some time to fix some of the more immersion-breaking bugs to make the whole experience that much more enjoyable during the wait for Early Access. Furthermore, we polished some of the new behaviors and added that little extra detail on top of them.

Patch notes are as follows:
Audio

• Eating sounds for carnivores have been added
  
• Drinking sounds for all dinosaurs have been added
  
• Fleeing dinosaurs now vocalize to the herd
  
• Reduced volume range for Camarasaurus vocalizations
  
• Volume pitch for infants adjusted

AI

• Dinosaurs will no longer teleport out of their enclosures
  
• Dinosaurs will now react to threats even if they are eating/drinking/resting
  
• Dinosaurs will now sleep. This is a separate need from resting and will slow down hunger/thirst while increasing health and energy
  
• Dinosaurs should no longer get stuck in a state until they die
  
• Dinosaurs should no longer get stuck turning
  
• Dinosaurs should now react better to vehicles
  
• Dinosaurs should no longer glitch into the air
  
• Moving a dinosaur will now reset its state in case it does happen to get stuck
  
• Carnivore aggression has been toned down
  
• Carnivores should have an easier time grabbing infants
  
• Dinosaurs will now look around and vocalize while resting
  
• Dinosaurs can no longer be placed where there is no navmesh. They will now appear red until moved somewhere valid
  
• Various other improvements to AI and related systems

Animation

• Animals will sometimes yawn when resting
  
• Animals will shake after exiting water
  
• Animation stutter has been reduced
  
• Attack animation syncing has been improved somewhat
  
• Animals don't reset when time is paused anymore

Building

• Gate bug where gate cannot be deleted is fixed
  
• Various bugs that prevent placement of new buildings have been fixed
  
• Paths no longer affect the navmesh. Dinosaurs can now walk on paths
  
• Rocks will now affect the navmesh so that animals will path around them
  
• Reduced game lag when placing a building
  
• Fixed bug when moving an animal after deleting the nursery it spawned from
  
• Fixed various bugs that could result in being unable to place or click on buildings

Dinosaurs

• Allosaurus body size has been modified
  
• Camarasaurus has learned to swim
  
• Camarasaurus now has significantly more health
  
• Camarasaurus now has additional attacks
  
• Camarasaurus can now properly deal damage with its tail
  
• Camarasaurus can now threaten predators
  
• Camarasaurus body size has been modified
  
• Dryosaurus can now graze
  
• Gallimimus can now preen themselves
  
• Gallimimus can now graze
  
• Stegosaurus can now graze
  
• Stegosaurus should now properly use its tail for self-defense
  
• Triceratops can now graze
  
• Tyrannosaurus now pants when low on energy
  
• Tyrannosaurus has a new random idle animation
  
• Velociraptor can now dust bathe when resting
  
• Velociraptor can now preen themselves

Misc.

• Camera will no longer fall below terrain
  
• Vehicles will now properly collide with trees
  
• Improved overall game performance significantly for CPU bound machines
  
• Reduced game hiccups when loading a dinosaur or building for the first time
  
• Pathfinding improvements
  
• To better support trackpad users, Zoom In (R) and Zoom Out (F) keys are now incremental zoom instead of absolute. To mimic old functionality and snap to the closest zoom press Shift+R, to the furthest zoom press Shift+F.

UI

• Animal counter will now properly reflect animal count and exclude dead animals
  
• Animal statistics (i.e. body weight) are now correct

The AI is still being fine-tuned and is not perfect, and as such there are still a few small issues which we may or may not address in a small, final bugfix patch. Some of the known issues are:

• animals can glitch in and out of the ground when filling their needs
  
• turning animations aren't always perfectly synced with the object
  
• carnivores can be overly aggressive when in packs, resulting in unnecessary herbivore slaughter, though to much lesser extent than previously

That said, we hope you'll keep enjoying the game, and as always, have a great time with the new build!

It’s here! The Jurassic Patch is the final big update to the free pre-alpha demo and we are excited to finally be able to release it!

We have to start off by apologizing for the unusually long wait: as many of you might know, we ran a stressful (but very successful, thanks to you!) Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2017. Coupled with logistical hiccups, it sure had its toll on the development process. To quote our last devlog (in reference to the patch): "It’s not quite as grandiose as we initially expected it to be, and in an ideal world we would have liked the AI to be more polished and bug free. We’ve unfortunately had to disable the saving system as its issues were plentiful, and simply were not worth continuing with in the demo."

That being said, we did add 4 new animals, as well as more buildings, decorations, and visual overhauls. As such, we firmly believe you will be having some more fun with this early version of the game while we move forward with development. We can't wait to see what you create. To share it with the community, make sure to join our discord server!



The change-log is as follows:

ADDED:
Several new structures:

• Added short stone fence.
  
• Added woven horse fence.
  
• Added elephant fence.
  
• Added high metal fence.
  
• Added sauropod feeder.
  
• Added bright herringbone path.
  
• Added simple asphalt path.
  
• Added dark asphalt path.
  
  
• Added 5 logs and sticks as decorations.
  
• Added 3 more boulders as decorations.
  
  
• Added the 8 Mediterranean trees as decorations.

Revamped the UI graphics:

• Remade the main menu.
  
• Remade the new game configuration menu.
  
• Added additional UI colors.
  
• Revamped the nursery menu.
  
• Changed loading screen image.
  
• Revamped animal selection menus and functionality.
  
• Added time state UI.
  
• Revamped path icons.
  
• Expanded upon the building information panel.

Four new dinosaurs:

• Allosaurus fragilis.
  
• Stegosaurus stenops.
  
• Dryosaurus altus.
  
• Camarasaurus grandis.

New AI behaviors:
Perhaps the largest aspect of this patch is the new improved AI. As aforementioned, it's not quite as bug-free as we might have hoped, so it's hit and miss. However, when it does work as intended, it gives in for quite interesting behaviors worth witnessing.

• Animals will make herds, flocks, and packs of varying sizes depending on the species.
  
• Animals will now look at objects and creatures around them.
  
• Infants will hide behind adults during combat.
  
• Carnivores now hunt animals that are comparable to their own size or smaller.
  
• Pack hunting.
  
• Large carnivores can eat small babies whole.
  
• Herbivores will defend themselves using defensive stances, attacks, or flee.
  
• Threat displays.
  
• Injured animals will begin to limp and attempt to escape.

REMOVED:

• Saving system (due to issues with new features and systems).

CHANGED:

• Terraforming now works under animals and decorations.
  
• Updated large palm model and texture.
  
• Updated small palm model and texture.
  
• Decreased random wait time for next track play.
  
• Brightened sky.
  
• Reduced max bloom values.
  
• Randomized wind turbine rotor rotation.
  
• Turbines auto-rotate to face wind direction.
  
• Increased dinosaur growth speed.
  
• Restore position option in vehicle depot menu is now always enabled.
  
• Enabled path building under structures.
  
• Tweaked vehicle controls responsiveness.
  
• Updated Brick Wall Fence.
  
• Updated conflicting building descriptions.
  
• Merged the 'Dirts' and 'Natural' path sections.
  
• Added pointer arrow to the water pump.
  
• Adjusted night and overcast graphics.
  
• Improved game post effects.

FIXED:

• Fixed Velociraptor eating and drinking.
  
• Option menu disappearing labels have been fixed.
  
• Fixed gate placement bug.
  
• Fixed dinosaur size jumpiness in nursery menu.
  
• Fixed weight issues in Tyrannosaurus eating animation.
  
• Fixed animation reset after pause in animals.
  
• Palisade fences now have their own description.
  
• Fixed short fence selection hitboxes.
  
• Fixed night time red sky shader bug.
  
• Nursery scale has been aligned with the animal previews.

OPTIMIZATION:

• Optimized vehicles and depots, allowing for far more depots built at once than before.
  
• Optimized building state pointers.
  
• Optimized resource system.

It’s here! The Jurassic Patch is the final big update to the free pre-alpha demo and we are excited to finally be able to release it!

We have to start off by apologizing for the unusually long wait: as many of you might know, we ran a stressful (but very successful, thanks to you!) Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2017. Coupled with logistical hiccups, it sure had its toll on the development process. To quote our last devlog (in reference to the patch): "It’s not quite as grandiose as we initially expected it to be, and in an ideal world we would have liked the AI to be more polished and bug free. We’ve unfortunately had to disable the saving system as its issues were plentiful, and simply were not worth continuing with in the demo."

That being said, we did add 4 new animals, as well as more buildings, decorations, and visual overhauls. As such, we firmly believe you will be having some more fun with this early version of the game while we move forward with development. We can't wait to see what you create. To share it with the community, make sure to join our discord server!



The change-log is as follows:

ADDED:
Several new structures:

• Added short stone fence.
  
• Added woven horse fence.
  
• Added elephant fence.
  
• Added high metal fence.
  
• Added sauropod feeder.
  
• Added bright herringbone path.
  
• Added simple asphalt path.
  
• Added dark asphalt path.
  
  
• Added 5 logs and sticks as decorations.
  
• Added 3 more boulders as decorations.
  
  
• Added the 8 Mediterranean trees as decorations.

Revamped the UI graphics:

• Remade the main menu.
  
• Remade the new game configuration menu.
  
• Added additional UI colors.
  
• Revamped the nursery menu.
  
• Changed loading screen image.
  
• Revamped animal selection menus and functionality.
  
• Added time state UI.
  
• Revamped path icons.
  
• Expanded upon the building information panel.

Four new dinosaurs:

• Allosaurus fragilis.
  
• Stegosaurus stenops.
  
• Dryosaurus altus.
  
• Camarasaurus grandis.

New AI behaviors:
Perhaps the largest aspect of this patch is the new improved AI. As aforementioned, it's not quite as bug-free as we might have hoped, so it's hit and miss. However, when it does work as intended, it gives in for quite interesting behaviors worth witnessing.

• Animals will make herds, flocks, and packs of varying sizes depending on the species.
  
• Animals will now look at objects and creatures around them.
  
• Infants will hide behind adults during combat.
  
• Carnivores now hunt animals that are comparable to their own size or smaller.
  
• Pack hunting.
  
• Large carnivores can eat small babies whole.
  
• Herbivores will defend themselves using defensive stances, attacks, or flee.
  
• Threat displays.
  
• Injured animals will begin to limp and attempt to escape.

REMOVED:

• Saving system (due to issues with new features and systems).

CHANGED:

• Terraforming now works under animals and decorations.
  
• Updated large palm model and texture.
  
• Updated small palm model and texture.
  
• Decreased random wait time for next track play.
  
• Brightened sky.
  
• Reduced max bloom values.
  
• Randomized wind turbine rotor rotation.
  
• Turbines auto-rotate to face wind direction.
  
• Increased dinosaur growth speed.
  
• Restore position option in vehicle depot menu is now always enabled.
  
• Enabled path building under structures.
  
• Tweaked vehicle controls responsiveness.
  
• Updated Brick Wall Fence.
  
• Updated conflicting building descriptions.
  
• Merged the 'Dirts' and 'Natural' path sections.
  
• Added pointer arrow to the water pump.
  
• Adjusted night and overcast graphics.
  
• Improved game post effects.

FIXED:

• Fixed Velociraptor eating and drinking.
  
• Option menu disappearing labels have been fixed.
  
• Fixed gate placement bug.
  
• Fixed dinosaur size jumpiness in nursery menu.
  
• Fixed weight issues in Tyrannosaurus eating animation.
  
• Fixed animation reset after pause in animals.
  
• Palisade fences now have their own description.
  
• Fixed short fence selection hitboxes.
  
• Fixed night time red sky shader bug.
  
• Nursery scale has been aligned with the animal previews.

OPTIMIZATION:

• Optimized vehicles and depots, allowing for far more depots built at once than before.
  
• Optimized building state pointers.
  
• Optimized resource system.

Happy holiday's from the Prehistoric Kingdom team! We've had a great year, and we hope that you enjoy our brand new Megaloceros to celebrate.



Your support as a community has been amazing, and we appreciate all the backers and 20,000+ demo players who are working together to make our game a reality. As a project that was originally created back in 2014, we couldn't have asked for a better group of people to lead us into the home stretch.

The Jurassic Patch is still getting worked on - improving the overall graphical quality of the game and it's AI. Animals now feel like proper animals and are far more interesting to look at while they go about their business! While we're still improving combat, creatures can herd, flock, threaten, hunt, look at other animals/their environment, and more.




We've added a handful of new fences and objects to play with, as well as introducing advanced editing for all the trees in the game so that players can move, rotate, and scale foliage just like the rocks!



Speaking of foliage, here's a look at the brand new palms and colour grading! One of the complaints that we saw a lot of was people how overly bright and saturated the public demo looks. Now that we've changed them - we agree! While we'll strive to keep the game vibrant and colourful, we feel that this is a step in the right direction.



Because of this, we've also edited the textures and foliage of the Mediterranean Isle to - shockingly - look more Mediterranean.





Oh. And the Tyrannosaurus has learned how to close her mouth properly. There's still some work to be done, but we hope to get the Jurassic Patch out to you all as quickly as possible!

As of this post, our Kickstarter campaign is at a steady 76%, with a numerous amount of updates having been posted over the last month.



If you enjoy the game and want to see it become a reality, we urge you to help support us!

Thank you all for supporting the game! While our Steam updates can be sporadic, our social media accounts are frequently updated if you want to see more. <3

Facebook
Twitter
Discord

Happy holiday's from the Prehistoric Kingdom team! We've had a great year, and we hope that you enjoy our brand new Megaloceros to celebrate.



Your support as a community has been amazing, and we appreciate all the backers and 20,000+ demo players who are working together to make our game a reality. As a project that was originally created back in 2014, we couldn't have asked for a better group of people to lead us into the home stretch.

The Jurassic Patch is still getting worked on - improving the overall graphical quality of the game and it's AI. Animals now feel like proper animals and are far more interesting to look at while they go about their business! While we're still improving combat, creatures can herd, flock, threaten, hunt, look at other animals/their environment, and more.




We've added a handful of new fences and objects to play with, as well as introducing advanced editing for all the trees in the game so that players can move, rotate, and scale foliage just like the rocks!



Speaking of foliage, here's a look at the brand new palms and colour grading! One of the complaints that we saw a lot of was people how overly bright and saturated the public demo looks. Now that we've changed them - we agree! While we'll strive to keep the game vibrant and colourful, we feel that this is a step in the right direction.



Because of this, we've also edited the textures and foliage of the Mediterranean Isle to - shockingly - look more Mediterranean.





Oh. And the Tyrannosaurus has learned how to close her mouth properly. There's still some work to be done, but we hope to get the Jurassic Patch out to you all as quickly as possible!

As of this post, our Kickstarter campaign is at a steady 76%, with a numerous amount of updates having been posted over the last month.



If you enjoy the game and want to see it become a reality, we urge you to help support us!

Thank you all for supporting the game! While our Steam updates can be sporadic, our social media accounts are frequently updated if you want to see more. <3

Facebook
Twitter
Discord

Hello everyone, back to a blog post for some incredibly exciting news!

As most of you already know, we have been working on the project completely unfunded for around 3 years now. In this time we went from iteration to iteration, progressively bettering both the project and ourselves. After having launched a working demo (to which we'll still provide support, more on that later in the post) we believe it's finally time to 'up our game' (no pun intended)!

Our project is now live on Kickstarter! You can find our page HERE.

Kickstarter allows us to do just that, as it gives us the necessary funding to spend more time on development and work more efficiently. As such we'll be able to present a product sooner rather than later. Here's where we need your help! Consider donating to the project and telling all your friends and family about it! Even small donations help, and the more people that can check the project out, the better! This holiday season you have the chance to help make this game a reality, resting assured that we all greatly appreciate your love and support!



The campaign page itself is jam-packed with never-seen-before new content in the form of concepts, in-game screenshots, gifs, and videos! Those with a keen eye will be able to find sneak peeks of the upcoming Jurassic Patch! These past few weeks we've been busy setting the campaign page up, but that doesn't mean we've forgotten about the game itself! Not only have we added the new 4 animals in their entirety (Camarasaurus, Allosaurus, Dryosaurus and Stegosaurus), but we've also improved on the AI system and some interface graphics. It's all still very much WIP, which is why we want to spend some more time on polishing before launching it, but some great looking results are already popping up!

Dryo Flock Video
Stego Herd Video
Allo Pack Run Video
Rex Pack Charge Video

Ending this blog post with much excitement, we want to remind everyone that we'll be doing frequent updates throughout and after the campaign, so stay tuned!
We are also streaming right now, come join us here!