Crytivo and Soda Den Studio are proud to unveil Roots of Pacha, an online co-op, farming, and life-simulation RPG set during the Stone Age. Grab your friends and some rocks (whichever is more useful) and start building the world’s first and finest farming village!

Watch Announcement Trailer



https://youtu.be/mYEhKvcDhsY

About the game

After roaming the prehistoric world, it’s time to settle down and build a village to stand for generations. Join with friends to develop technology, discover plants to farm, harvest crops, befriend and domesticate animals, and create a thriving stone age community. Find love, nurture relationships, and grow your community—and then celebrate and honor nature in glorious festivals!


Prehistoric ride sharing! Ride animals with your friends!

• Grow and harvest. Start your own farming revolution and invent the tools and techniques to build a prosperous village from nothing.
  
• 
  
• Explore an ancient world. A fertile, vibrant world awaits! Fish streams and rivers, discover unique flora and fauna, and mine the darkest caves for resources.
  
• 
  
• Join the clan. Work with the community, develop friendships, and even find love!
  
• 
  
• Grow your village. Help villagers develop ideas and discover new farming and crafting technology. Construct buildings, invite others into the clan, and transform your settlement into an agricultural marvel.
  
• 
  
• Play with friends. Invite up to 3 friends to join your village. Live with them (or keep your distance), share talents and resources, and celebrate festivals, where each player can contribute to communal dinners or compete in fishing contests!

How about taking your wolves out for an adventure?

Release: Early 2021
Platforms: Steam | Xbox | PS | Switch | Crytivo

Wishlist and Follow Roots of Pacha on Steam

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1245560/Roots_of_Pacha/


Join our official Roots of Pacha Discord server to participate in closed alpha tests, offer your feedback, and get some exciting sneak peeks at new content from the developers. We’d love to hear your thoughts from the reveal!





⭐⭐WIN NINTENDO SWITCH LITE⭐⭐



To celebrate the announcement of Roots of Pacha, we're giving away 2 Nintendo Switch Lites!

How to enter:

Twitter (1st Nintendo Switch Lite):

• Follow @Crytivo.
  
• Like and share this post.
  
• Tag a friend in comments.

Facebook (2nd Nintendo Switch Lite):

• Like the Crytivo Facebook page.
  
• Like and share this post.
  
• Tage a friend in comments.

Best of luck to everyone!
Tell your friends!

This game published by Crytivo

Welcome to March’s development update!

There’s much to discuss in this month’s devlog for Prehistoric Kingdom: featuring new progress shots, concept art, animations and audio previews!



Despite current conditions around the world, progress goes well. The team’s trying to stay as healthy as possible and work where we can on Prehistoric Kingdom.

In the background, our programmers have been working on optimization, paths, water painting and modular building. Providing better solidarity within the codebase is a considerable focus for performance at the moment in order to maximise efficiency and code structure.





One area the project has been lacking in is how we handle the in-game rendering of fur and fluffy feathers. As a side task to water painting, Seth spent a few days in March creating a highly flexible custom-built fur shader for our animals!

As you can see below, this has a huge impact on the final rendering result of creatures:






Yes, the fur moves in the wind!

This new geometry based shading has already been seamlessly integrated into our existing animal technology, offering great visual fidelity alongside fantastic optimization techniques to help keep framerates high. For lower-end hardware, we’ll add quality options to outright disable fur just in case!




Animals such as Smilodon will feature varying lengths of fur depending on which species have been bred, giving S. fatalis a longer coat, for example.

Mau continued work on the modular building system in March, bringing a lot of its most necessary functions to completion.

As described in prior development updates, players can select multiple wall or roof pieces and change their texture to a unified color or material. This feature is a huge gamechanger for the creative builders out there as it allows for rapid experimentation with various design combinations.



We’ve also been finishing up the remaining pieces of core functionality by implementing group merging and object duplication! Although they’re expected parts of a modular building system, it’s an area we hadn’t gotten around to yet.

Another issue we’ve targeted over the past month has been performance and general optimization. With Seth helping out, we’re working on getting large FPS improvements across the board - searching for potentially troublesome areas under the hood that could use some code reworking or adjustments to speed up processing.

Part of this optimization process has been cleaning up the backend side of terraforming to make way for water painting. Since terrain editing has some existing APIs already built into the engine, part of our challenge is keeping those components performant whilst integrating our own methods within that. Now that we have an extra programmer to handle things like this, Matt and Mau are able to continue working on other parts of the project. Stay tuned for more water painting news!



Paraceratherium and Stegosaurus took the spotlight this month as some of the last animals to be revealed. With forty-seven down, there’s only three left to go!






For the past few months, a small part of the team’s been at work reorganising and cleaning up certain gameplay systems that felt bloated or messy, making areas of the game far clearer as a result.

From a visual standpoint, we noticed that our fence designs came across as inconsistent in how they scale against both security rating and the park’s aesthetic. Each fence material set now has three distinct height variants to work better with gameplay progression:

• Wood, stone and glass: 1m, 2.5m, 4m.
  
• Metal: 2.5m, 4m, 6m.

By putting more emphasis into materials, we’re able to squish security requirements and incorporate height as a reliable condition now that there’s consistency. With fewer fence assets to produce, we’re allowing players to recolor their fences from up to three presets per material type.

Please take a look at a handful of our new designs below!






Decorative fences will now be modular pieces due to these changes.

Taking things a step further, gates will now follow a homogenized style in order to fit in with the unified height measurements across fencing. This change reduces the workload for future additions and means we can create the assets at a much higher quality!




At launch, fences and amenities will be listed under the Modern theme - a unified style that defines Prehistoric Kingdom as a brand in-universe. Because of this, you’ll also be seeing improvements to various structure designs in the coming months.

Since the art team are handling these changes, it won’t be affecting the progress of the game as a whole, so there’s no need to worry about scheduling conflicts.

Wielding spiked-thumbs, Iguanodon was a bulky ornithopod found in the United Kingdom. Its enormous hands and stout hindlimbs make this herbivore a highly adaptive creature, switching between quadrupedal and bipedal locomotion when running.





Also known as the woolly rhino, Coelodonta is a distant relative to the Sumatran rhinoceros. This fluffy animal occupied most of Europe, grazing within a variety of climates such as tundras and grasslands.






Featuring uniquely deep booms and ruckles, the Allosaurus is one Jurassic predator you don’t want to meet! With a fearsome snarl and an even worse bite, Byron made sure to give this dinosaur some serious ferocity.



Previous sound updates can be found on Byron’s Soundcloud, here!



Having previously been one of the oldest models in the game, Stegosaurus received a well-deserved update after many years of living in eternal damnation. The entire model and sculpt have been overhauled with new skin designs to boot!

On a less drastic level, some smaller tweaks were made to the Paraceratherium to address some texture, anatomy and shape issues. Prehensile lips were added in addition to better limbs and skull shape, with both the sculpt and skins receiving a quality improvement.






...

Thank you for reading March’s Devlog!

We hope you’re all excited for upcoming content and reveals in future development updates. Keep an eye on our social media for any announcements or new information!

Until next time,

- The PK Team

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Discord
  
• Reddit
  
• YouTube

{LINK REMOVED}

Welcome to February’s development update!

Today, we’ll be diving into what the team’s been up to over the past month and introduce you to a new team member. Work behind the scenes has continued to grow more exciting by the day as we buckle down on features and content pipelines. Let's get into the discussion!


Joining the Prehistoric Kingdom team, we’d like you to introduce the project’s newest programmer, Seth! He’ll be overseeing developments such as water painting and assisting us where possible to spread the workload more evenly.

You’ll be seeing more progress from him in the coming months while we move onto new parts of the game!

One of our goals this month was to accelerate and optimize development tasks to better utilise the time left until Early Access as an opportunity to clean up a handful of features that aren’t essential to the core game at launch.

Because of this change, we’re ready to move onto the second phase of development! With Seth taking care of features like water painting, Matt and Mau are able to proceed with other aspects of the game. Our goal for 2020 is to provide a playable and polished alpha with a beta release following shortly after depending on player feedback.

Below you’ll find our new monthly development report. Since it’s difficult to quantify an adaptive development cycle via percentages, each month we’ll display cards listing what we’ve been up to. Those marked with a love heart represent a bespoke piece of development that we want to highlight!




Allosaurus served as our new benchmark for animal testing during February, introducing a few changes for creatures going forward.

One of the items on our list is a new blend system! Each animal has its own set of additive fidgets that layer on top of animations to create more interest when moving. You can check out the work-in-progress below:




Another important step we took this month was adding support for eye movement in our rigs! Instead of a dead glassy stare, the animals will subtly dart their eyes around with supplementary squinting and blinking depending on the animation.


Eye Movement Test

It’s a small change with big implications for personality and character. Without this, it’d be almost impossible to effectively portray the gaze of certain mammals like felines and bears.

The modular building system continues to receive new functionality and polish thanks to the collaboration between Mau and Nathan. Pieces can be automatically stacked on top of each other or aligned directly to a surface - available for use with any object type, even walls!




In February we also added recolourable plaster, wood and glass sets to test how scalable our workflow is for creating new material pieces in a timely manner. As expected, a good foundation makes adding new texture sets fairly easy within a short amount of time.



With this in mind, we've been able to start making more interesting builds!







Viewers with keen eyes may have noticed an update to our user interface format! The new HUD shows more placeable objects onscreen at once whilst retaining our existing aesthetic. We took this opportunity to make the menu resizable for ease of use - a long-requested feature from the dev team!



There’s something missing from our world… atmospherics! We’ve added distant atmospherics and height fog to provide our levels with greater visual depth across all times of day.




February’s species spotlight revealed two classic dinosaurs, Allosaurus and Triceratops. Grumpy in every way, both critters require a large amount of space and strict habitat preferences to be successfully contained.





Using its large claws to hunt for fish, Baryonyx is a staple of the UK’s prehistoric history. Housing an array of conical teeth, its specialised diet is a common trait amongst spinosaurids.




Always willing to share a picnic basket, the cave bear carries many resemblances to extant species. Found across Europe and Asia, this creature is smaller than the famous short-faced bear.





Fan favourite dinosaurs Allosaurus and Triceratops received touchups and alterations for their in-game debut courtesy of Cindy. Lis helped out on both species, designing new looks for A. europaeus and T. prorsus respectively.







Be sure to check out the Allosaurus and Triceratops on Cindy’s ArtStation for a better look!

...

Thank you for reading February’s Devlog!

As the project moves into the second phase of development we thank everyone deeply for their patience and outgoing support for Prehistoric Kingdom. There are many great things on the horizon with many surprises still to come. What will they be? Only time will tell!

- The PK Team

{LINK REMOVED}

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Discord
  
• Reddit
  
• YouTube

Welcome to January’s development update!

This Devlog marks the beginning of our second year of hands-on development, following 2018’s year of pre-production and planning. It might seem like a long time, but we managed to accomplish a lot of great things during the past twelve months. 2020 is going to be filled with a lot of milestones for Prehistoric Kingdom, so the most exciting news is yet ahead, park builders!



Over the past month, we’ve been searching for a potential candidate to join the programming team on Prehistoric Kingdom. Finalising a lengthy interview process, the newest team member will be joining us shortly to help develop additional gameplay systems.

Assisting with the weight of development, Matt’s been working on automating animal setup as much as possible. Since the dinosaurs and mammals are such an integral part of the game’s experience, an automated pipeline will greatly assist in providing templates where possible to avoid wasting time with manual setup.

January also allowed us to plan milestones and alpha-related content deadlines to hit certain marketing opportunities. With our eyes on releasing alpha at an unspecified date this year, it’s important to put production deadlines in place.



Park managers looking to stay up-to-date with the project can sign up for the Crytivo Club! It's totally free and provides exclusive access to giveaways, promotions and even the occasional game. Sign up today!

In addition to the Crytivo Club, don't forget to Wishlist us on Steam!





Modular pieces can now be selected and moved around! While it may sound simple in concept, the system needed to be robust enough to work with multiple pieces at once with the added functionality of moving across a grid at varying scales with no room for error.

With selection developed, we’ve integrated an outline when placing objects to ensure that players can see the location of their piece at all times regardless of obstructions.



Based on the concept art from last month, Mau is almost done with the functionality for recoloring roof and wall pieces.

Each material type comes with its own bank of recent colors that can be easily transferred to another texture by copy and pasting its hex values. The default setting can be returned to by dismissing its small color preview on the material button.


Ugly development textures and all!

With user experience always a priority, there’s been a handful of technical challenges to overcome with designing a system like this. Nevertheless, the team’s continued to find solutions where it matters in an attempt to evolve the usability of modular building systems in the genre.



Two popular Cenozoic icons were shown off in-game this month with their new designs revealed to the public. Opposing each other with drastically different temperature requirements, the Smilodon and Woolly Mammoth are essential beasts in Prehistoric Kingdom’s roster.






Once roaming the lush forests of ancient North America, Acrocanthosaurus prowls with a menacing stature. With a unique shape courtesy of its infamous raised spine, Mau’s animation helps to bring this shy carnivorous giant to life.




Coexisting with ferocious predators, Camarasaurus is a staple sauropod of the Morrison Formation. Known from three distinct species, this animal is far more nimble than its larger relatives!






As a blast from the past, we’d like to show you the updated vocals for Camarasaurus. Introduced to our community all the way back in the Jurassic Patch, Byron’s done a complete overhaul on its sound set to better convey this dinosaur’s enormous scale.



Sounds sourced from seals, walruses, spider monkeys, manatees and even more animals were used to create the new sounds for this sauropod.

Without good implementation, even the best sound design can fall flat when integrated into a game environment. By using audio middleware like FMOD, the sound team can create custom sequences and parameters accessible by programmers in order to deliver on a far more detailed soundscape with better user interactivity.

We’re only experimenting at this stage but so far the results have been promising. Things like distant carnivores roaring with the appropriate reverb falloff, footstep weight increasing as animals age and a more dynamic ambient soundscape are all areas Byron’s managed to create using the toolset.

The team looks to begin integrating this new audio system shortly!


One of our many experiments for an age-based footstep event.



With their anatomy vastly improved, Cindy continues to show off her skill with the newest sculpts and textures for Smilodon and Mammuthus. Staples of the Ice Age aesthetic, the updated iterations of these creatures have a far greater resemblance to what we know the prehistoric beasts looked like.







If you’d like to see more renders, check out Cindy’s ArtStation for a better look at the animals!

...

Thank you for reading January’s Devlog!

There are some good surprises in store for the community in the following months that we can’t quite talk about yet, but we promise they’ll be worth the wait. Make sure to tune into the following development updates for even more gameplay news!

Until next time,

- The PK Team

...

Sign up to get notified!

Wishlist on Steam today!

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Discord
  
• Reddit
  
• YouTube

Welcome to December’s development update!

Though the holiday season has now just passed there are quite a few goodies to discuss and showcase in this month’s DevLog! With a handful of artistic treats and programming gifts, the team's been hard at work spreading festive joy to all the good little critters of Prehistoric Kingdom in time for the new year.



The team’s been up to a lot of great stuff during December whilst tackling the usual engine headaches. Apart from addressing issues with the modular grid, support for new materials has begun to work its way into the game thanks to Mau’s automated setup procedures and Nathan’s exceptional patience in texturing new pieces.

In terms of keeping the community up to date, we’re looking to overhaul our milestones chart soon to better reflect what’s being worked on and where development priorities sit in a more fluid manner - something that the previous design failed to reflect. We hope to have more news on that available soon, so stay tuned!



Still a work in progress, Matt’s been developing new functionality for the path system; elevation! Slopes galore, elevated paths take your guests to discover your park from a new perspective.


Work in progress.

Continuing with polish and eventually finishing elevated paths, they’ll receive support for edge railings to make them appear more grounded. Once a raised path hits a certain angle, they’ll automatically become stairs to better suit the slope.

Although fairly rudimentary in appearance at this stage, we are certain that many of you creative builders have already begun to think of new walkway design ideas for your future parks!

We’ve implemented a small texture gallery window to help make texture, color and theme switching quick and painless when selecting and working with various modular objects.


UI Mockup.

By keeping wall and roof textures contained to their own panel, materials are comfortably accessible at any time while designing - leaving more space in the object selection menu for a huge pile of pieces.

Players will be able to select areas of their custom buildings and effortlessly change textures without having to rebuild the structure, allowing for easy design switching to see how your building looks in a completely different style.

Applying a much softer edge to the affected areas, terrain painting has been updated! Lower intensities are far more usable while offering better control over terrain blending and adding an improved sense of polish to the system.



As seen above, the recent changes provide a vast degree of subtlety that simply did not exist prior due to the hard delineation between surfaces. Smoothing it out resulted in hand-painted areas looking far more natural.

Acting as one of the most visually important parts of the game, it’s imperative that we continue to improve the visual fidelity and shader functionality for animals in-game.

To keep animal shading consistent across all times of day, we’ve added occlusion maps to create definition on our creatures regardless of shading or the position of the sun.



Earlier in the month, we upgraded our foliage shader to support translucency, enabling sunlight to realistically pass through leaves where appropriate. Combined with Nathan’s new techniques for creating plants, our foliage is about to start looking a whole lot better.


Our most recent Kapok tree model and shader.


Kapoks are now properly shaded from all angles.

While the new year begins we’ll be working hard on environmental updates alongside core features to get both flora and terrain textures to a better state across a number of climates.



Closing in on the completion of our species spotlights with the introduction of five-star animals, fan favourites Parasaurolophus and Utahraptor received their in-game debut - complete with a design overhaul!






Almost four and a half months out from PAX West, we’ve been making changes to streamline the user experience and bring improvements to both the interface and game design where necessary.

Based on usability feedback, Byron redesigned the landscaping panel to feature an enhanced layout, cleaner visuals and superior button styles that will be applied to the rest of the UI in order to help bring better consistency where it may have been lacking prior.


The New Design.


The Four Panels: Painting, Foliage, Water and Terrain.

Most reminiscent of ratites like emus or ostriches, Gallimimus is a classically bird-like dinosaur featuring feathers and a lengthy stride. Animated by Mau, this chicken mimic behaves similarly to its modern-day counterparts.





The third-largest ceratopsian in Prehistoric Kingdom, Styracosaurus is best known for its large nasal horn and impressive frill. Sharing an ecosystem with the fearsome Gorgosaurus, this defensive dinosaur treads confidently whilst boasting its intimidating appearance.







Delightfully croaky and ready to hiss, Byron’s Guanlong takes inspiration from a variety of birds and ground animals to bring its raspy character to life. Running around with a group of up to four individuals, this crested critter is one tropical bird you don’t want a bite from!



Alongside creature vocals, we’ve also taken the time to begin expanding our custom sound and foley library to truly bring these animals back to life. From swarms of flies to the subtle grunts and hisses of a feasting dinosaur, it’s the tiny details that help flesh out the believability of our animal roster.



Now that there’s a two-week gap between species spotlights, we’ve had a lot more breathing room when it comes to redesigns and overhauling animals. Featuring a design from Lis each, Cindy remade the beloved Parasaurolophus and Utahraptor with big improvements all around.







...

Thank you for reading December’s Devlog!

With elevated paths working in their current state, the next goal of ours is to improve them in addition to adding new components to the modular system such as advanced editing to manipulate objects using a 3D gizmo.

Until next time!

- The PK Team

...

Sign up to get notified!

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Discord
  
• Reddit
  
• YouTube

Welcome to November’s development update!

Getting closer to the holiday season, the team’s been busy conceptualising, revising and creating new ideas and assets for the project.



This month we welcomed a new member to the team - Lis! As an additional skin design artist, she’ll be taking on a variety of roles such as finalising VIP backer skins and creating new animal designs for future post-launch content.



Examples of her past community-made content.

We’re grateful to have her on-board as a helping hand and can’t wait to see more excellent creations!

Last month we talked about having to update our engine in order to utilise some of its newer features and fixes. While the mechanics were mostly untouched by the upgrade, visuals and a number of asset packages broke themselves in a rather severe fashion.

Because of this, we sadly weren’t able to work on new features for the better part of the month and had to delegate programming time to fix areas of the game that were affected.

In the meantime, the team’s been able to sit down and revise a handful of mechanics not yet implemented that felt too bloated or unfocused in their design. As a small team, it’s important to remain realistic and push things to the back burner if they aren’t absolutely essential to the core, playable experience.



Pieces, pieces and pieces! There are around 66 unique shapes for roof and wall pieces per texture. Curved walls, rounded slopes, slanted roofs, gables, eaves, height variants, slope variants - all the expected building blocks are here as well as some nice additions such as roof-end pieces and flat eaves.

Not all pieces have been added at this time, but these overview shots should offer a solid look at the different components that are available for construction (even if they currently have a beautiful temporary development texture!).





Next month we’ll be moving onto developing the UI for texture selection, advanced editing and adding a handful of props to the game.



This month’s species spotlight features a range of unique body types and fan favourites. Finishing up the four-star animals with Megatherium, we will be revealing the five-star creatures every two weeks!











Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of wall and roof pieces in Prehistoric Kingdom, each with their own textures like wood, stone and metal. We’ve created a handful of design sheets to act as a guide for piece designs, and today we’ll be sharing some of that artwork.


4x4 Glass Designs.

Included as part of the Modern theme, a translucent glass set helps to cover all your basic viewing and window needs! Basic, divided, patterned and embellished glass designs assist in shaping the feel of your park and opens up new options for player theming.

Since it is a Prehistoric Kingdom, our ancestors need some kind of representation, right? Gathering resources and references inspired by Paleolithic and Neolithic architecture, a modular Stone Age theme is being planned for launch.


4x4 Designs.

These pieces differ from the regular walls by including unique meshes with bumps, extrusions, and wooden poles to better capture a truly prehistoric feel.

Mau began working on the locomotion animations for Carnotaurus in November. As an Abelisaur, we wanted to give it its own rig for the purpose of making an already strange dinosaur more unique.






What’s small, elegant, and absolutely adorable? Not this creature! With large teeth and an interesting body plan, Daeodon is one of the more unique mammals in Prehistoric Kingdom.

Based on a number of large ungulates, it was important to go beyond the traditional stock pig sounds found in most restorations - something grumblier, weirder and… chuffier?





Our Lambeosaurus, Woolly Rhino and Giant Ground Sloth were redone with major changes to their anatomy. Most skin designs are retained however tweaks were made to better resemble the original concept art or new artwork (e.g. Lambeosaurus). If you’d like to see more of Cindy’s portfolio, check out her ArtStation for a better look at some of the animals!







As a surprise announcement, we were lucky enough to have a special guest redesign our one and only ferocious feline before its model revamp in the coming months. Working with our good friend and fantastic paleoartist Fred Wierum, we are proud to showcase the new skin variants for Smilodon!



We can’t thank Fred enough for helping out with this animal. You can find more of his work here!

...

Thank you for reading November’s Devlog!

Although a shorter one, the team hopes you enjoyed a look at some of the new artwork and revamps coming to the game. Thank you for all of your patience as we continue to improve our own skills and the end product.

- The PK Team

...

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Discord
  
• Reddit
  
• YouTube

Welcome to October’s development update!

In this month’s spooky post we’ll be discussing some of the things we’ve been working on in addition to creature remakes and a brand new animation reel!



This month, a small handful of influencers were given keys to a slightly enhanced iteration of the PAX build to demonstrate some of the features in Prehistoric Kingdom.

Although there were some expected issues that have since been fixed, we’d like to give a huge thanks to Geekism, BestInSlot, and Swrve for showcasing the project at this stage. There will be more coverage in the coming months as we add the last few features to finish up the creative features, but until then, stay tuned!






Development in October saw the beginning of the new modular building system as well as a full month of animal reduxes, animation, and sound design.

While the rest of the team continue to work on their assignments, Matt’s had the lovely task of porting the project to the latest version of Unity so that we can make use of some new features and address issues that had been resolved in the most recent iteration. As we’re quite far into core systems now, you can imagine that this was quite a big task to ensure that nothing broke along the way.

Now that it’s mostly dealt with (had to get it over with at some point!) new progress in other fronts should appear more frequently.





As the tycoon genre continues to push forward with precise modular construction tools, we’re following suit to bring a high level of customization and variety in creative opportunities to our audience.

Originally, our plans from Kickstarter were to add wall pieces to what would essentially be the very basic modular tools found in the Steam demo. Now, it’s beginning to become the fully-developed and expansive creative suite that this genre’s fanbase has come to expect from modern simulation management games.

Featuring temporary icons and basic functionality, you can find a short demonstration video below.



What sets Prehistoric Kingdom apart is the flexibility to freely enable or disable the grid during construction for any modular object, including wall pieces, pillars, foliage, statues and more! This feature gives players expression and versatility in their design process, whilst giving the option to keep pieces all within the one modular group for easier editing and management.



With a variety of different objects and pieces coming in the final game as well as helpful building options, we can’t wait to see what designs, props and facades the community constructs!

Next month we’ll be developing the 3D gizmo tools that allow for precise movement, scaling and rotation of modular objects like props, foliage and decoratives.


WIP Modular Building Tools and Textures.

Whilst not focused on, work was put into an iteration of the dynamic weather system during October to experiment with how fog, clouds and lighting changes can affect the game’s tone and feeling.


WIP Overcast Weather.

In addition to the occasional overcast sky, dynamic cloud shadows are cast over the island as thicker clouds roll-in overhead! During gameplay we’ve found that this improvement has gone a long way in making the setting of Prehistoric Kingdom feel more grounded in reality.



As per usual, new graphical tweaks were brought to the project in our continued effort to make the game as pretty as possible.

Miscellaneous adjustments included a more focused vignette and increased chromatic aberration alongside bigger changes like time-based fog colors, increased fog rendering distance, modified lighting colours and color-grading tweaks to give the game a deeper spectrum of color. Overall, the team is happy with the graphical direction of the game with the assured goal of only getting better with time!





October was filled with a dozen of deadly dinosaurs with no mammals in sight, how spooky! Featuring many first looks at the new models of old classics, this was definitely a bigger month for our continued reduxes.









Oh, deer! Made famous by its large rack and title as the Irish elk, Megaloceros stands tall alongside our menagerie of mammals included in Prehistoric Kingdom. Animated by Nathan and Mau, we’ve looked at a wide variety of reference material to make this animal move, sound and behave appropriately.



In the future, we will be moving away from the animation video format in favour of more managable content that allows us to share our best animations without losing time that could be spent elsewhere.



Apart from designing the new sounds for Megaloceros and a few other creatures, Byron wrote the newest animal introduction track titled Giganteus. Expanding the range of Prehistoric Kingdom’s music as a continuation of the icy mammal themes, this piece introduces the solo cello and viola to help incorporate a more personal and rigid sound to the music.

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/giganteus



Our chunky herbivore friends saw massive improvements courtesy of Cindy’s ongoing remakes and enhancements. Featuring far more detailed textures with some slight design revisions, Ankylosaurus, Camarasaurus and Diplodocus have never looked better in Prehistoric Kingdom!








Much like the animals, staff have their own set of needs that must be satisfied to prevent issues such as dissatisfaction, lack of efficiency and quitting their position.

Basic needs include a worker’s mood, effectiveness, energy and salary. These four statistics can influence each other in addition to outside forces such as animal escapes, deaths and natural disasters.



If a staff member’s mood drops below their minimum tolerance level, they are far more likely to quit as a result. To efficiently manage your park, we suggest keeping an eye on your staff members and ensure that they’re operating to the best of their ability

“My park sucks but I don’t want my staff to leave; what can I do?”

The answer to this question is simple - provide benefits! When disaster strikes and the worst occurs, staff may quit if they don’t feel safe. Benefits allow the player to pay for various coverages to improve the longevity of their staff in the event of tragedy.


Examples of some of the togglable benefits.

Although expensive, benefits will greatly increase the tolerance level of staff across the board. When you’re a corporate managerial mogul with a park full of extinct animals, keeping it up and running is your number one priority!

...

Thank you for reading October’s Devlog!

We hope you enjoyed this month’s development update! We’ve got some more great things cooking up behind the scenes and we can’t wait to show it off in the future.

- The PK Team

...

• Facebook.
  
• Twitter.
  
• Discord.
  
• Reddit.
  
• YouTube.

Welcome to September’s development update!

It’s been a big month here at Prehistoric Kingdom. In today’s post we’ll be recapping some important events that occurred in September as well as detailing some of our future plans. Without further ado, let’s get straight into it!



Earlier in the month we streamed footage of the PAX build over on our Twitch channel - giving us the opportunity to speak directly to the community and discuss future content.

One of our key points discussed during the livestream was the future of Prehistoric Kingdom and what’s left to do before moving onto the next phase. Announcing new features such as a dedicated moat tool and enhanced modular building, you can find the core slides from the stream below.





Additional information discussed during the stream can be found here.

Development during September was a little more relaxed after the weeks spent preparing the game for PAX West and the livestream. We took some small much-needed breaks, but the show must go on.

As detailed above, we’re going to start laying the groundwork for our modular building system in October. Much like the project, our plans for modular construction have expanded greatly and once finished should offer a selection of tools that are extremely easy to work with.

In terms of general development, we’ve mainly been addressing issues relayed to us from PAX and getting the first pre-alpha into the hands of our generous VIP backers as well as making the game look prettier. We’re currently investigating some new issues that will be fixed in an internal patch soon but despite some bugs, the entire team has been humbled by the overwhelmingly positive reception to early footage.





Saving and loading were added this month so that players can now return to their parks at a later date! Thankfully, it works far better than the demo’s iteration and should be more immune to strange issues like missing data or corruption with game updates. Of course, we’ll need to see how it plays in the future, but so far everything’s been working fine!



Shortly after PAX we spent a few days developing our own screenshot mode to give early players an additional thing to do as well as help the team more easily create new species spotlights and promotional material.

Compared to some of the other screenshot solutions available on the market, we decided to develop our own system as it allows for easier customisation in addition to better accessibility for a variety of graphics cards since it’s built directly into the game.

While it was an extremely easy feature to implement, it’s added a lot of replayability to the game as sharing paddock builds and pretty scenery has never been easier. Depth of field, image effects, filters, camera field of view and more can all be changed and utilised by players to get the perfect shot. And yes, since we include the ability to natively change the timescale we’re expecting some awesome player-made documentaries to come out of this!




In the future we'll be adding support for light direction and dynamic resolution so players can take high-resolution images!



This month’s species spotlights featured an interesting array of cuddly and not-so-cuddly creatures as we begin to close up with our three-star animals.








As some of you may have noticed in our Milestones graphic, Nathan expanded our fence list beyond our expectations for Pre-Alpha 1! With over 30 fences in the game, there’s a lot of variety to select from when building your Prehistoric Kingdom. Take a look at some of our brand new creations!




Continuing the trend of improving the old, the restaurant has been massively improved with higher fidelity textures and a new model. Like the old iteration, we’ve kept the top floor interior visible. However, now it’s far more detailed and even includes a fluorescent Crowny light!



Due to needing to address issues with the PAX build and having to make constant tweaks in preparation for our VIP’s and YouTubers, there will be no animation reel this month as we didn’t have the time to squeeze it in.

Tune in next month for a new animation reel!



Although on the larger side of our small herbivores, the Dryosaurus chirps and chitters with its almost-chittering like calls. Byron’s completely remade our favourite Morrison ornithopod to retain its sound identity from the demo with a brand new mix and enhanced vocal quality.

Please enjoy the Dryosaurus sound update!



In the realm of music, Byron’s been working on a new breakout track for the game titled ‘Run’. It’s not finished yet but we wanted to give everyone a little sneak peek at what’s to come.

https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/preview-run



Cindy gave two of our Mammoth Steppe friends a fantastic remake this month with completely overhauled textures and big anatomical improvements from Mau. We’re proud to do mammals justice even when against the dozens of dinosaurs available in the game and hopefully, the results speak for themselves.








Mammals weren’t the only things to receive tweaks, however! Although we won’t be updating its textures, Baryonyx had some troublesome anatomy that we wanted to take a closer look at as it’s one of the first animals we made post-Kickstarter. With some tweaks to size and body proportions thanks to more available information, England’s fishy forager is now at its true size and features a more accurate silhouette.





Continuing where we left off from last month’s update, we’ll be discussing staff specialization and its implications in park management.

As previously established, all three staff types have their own skill types relating to their role in the park. The more times a staff member completes a specific skill (e.g. cleaning or refilling a feeder), they’ll gain a skill point and complete that task faster.

Once the keeper has maxed out their skill level in a specific area, they’ll be able to complete that task twice as fast - but how does specialization come into this?

By paying a training fee, players can promote staff members into only completing tasks relating to one of their skills in order to more efficiently manage their zoos when generalised staff simply isn’t cutting it anymore.



Now that a staff member has been specialized, they have the potential to work almost six times as fast for that specific role upon maxing out their skill level.

Although it’ll take longer for them to improve their level since they’re performing a stricter range of tasks, the long term benefits of investing in this system are highly recommended for efficient park management.

Once a specialized staff member has maxed out their skill level, they’ll gain a special perk offering various benefits depending on their job type and chosen specialization.


Example of perks available from a staff type's chosen skill specialization.

These perks offer passive abilities that will greatly reward players for their time investment and can help to cut back on park management stress or make things like animal capturing easier.


Whilst specialization isn’t absolutely required to run your park, players seeking more management opportunities should be able to enjoy experimenting with this system to provide new and diverse results. Tune into October’s update for the next instalment of staff management; needs and benefits!



Since our Kickstarter VIP’s have received their first early preview, check out some of their park creations and screenshots!


Created by AD.


Created by AD.


Created by Silver.


Created by Silver.

Lastly, please enjoy some builds from one of our developers!





...


Thank you for reading September’s Devlog!

It’s been a crazy month for impressions and feedback from the community. We’re humbled by the response from those who have gotten to play it and are dedicated to improving Prehistoric Kingdom where we can! October holds a myriad of improvements and core additions that we’ve all been waiting for, so we’ll see you all again next month!

- The PK Team

...

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Discord
  
• Reddit
  
• YouTube

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.
  
• 
  
• Maintenance Workers collect trash, repair broken structures and can improve the speed at which buildings are constructed.
  
• 
  
• 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.

...

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

....

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Discord
  
• Reddit
  
• YouTube

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!



---

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

---

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Discord
  
• Reddit
  
• YouTube