Welcome to the July Development Update!

Over the past month, we’ve been working hard on our animal overhaul and Update 8 as a whole. In this blog post, we’ll be providing a quick status update on the release and talking about how our new AI integrates with our future plans.





To keep it brief, our biggest ongoing task is developing animal AI. We’ve got a great plan going behind the scenes, and quite a bit of the data side has seen a lot of work. For those unfamiliar, this is going to be an expansive and highly dynamic tree of decision making that needs to support future content like hunting, fighting and the potential for more behaviors.

Rather than incredibly discrete, rigid behaviors, this new AI figures out the best action to take by using its Brain™.

The “brain” manages an animal’s physical needs (hunger, thirst, temperature, etc.) against its emotional needs (contentment, boredom, fear, sociality), leaving a lot of room for emergent behaviors as we add more complex features in the future.

For example, perhaps a freezing Triceratops (low temperature!) may try to fight a T. rex out of desperation (low contentment + high fear!) to get to the nearby heater. In any other circumstance with high contentment, maybe the Triceratops would avoid a T. rex.


Mockup: animal fighting is not planned for Update 8!

In this iteration of the animals, a huge amount of effort has been put into improving performance over the old AI while making it more dynamic. These new animals will run better, think quicker and make far better use of your hardware.

After Update 8 is shipped, the team will begin working on the animations needed for our eventual combat and hunting mechanics. It’s too early to give you concrete examples of exactly how it’ll work, but know this; our goal is to keep the animals as dynamic as possible. It mightn’t end up ultra-cinematic-hollywood movie quality with highly synchronized predetermined dueling animations, but we’ve designed something that we think perfectly fits the needs of PK’s varied sizes and species.

In addition to animals, we’ve also made a ton of fixes, tweaks and added pathfinding improvements for guests.

Alongside smarter path dispersion, a new queuing system prevents hordes of guests from swarming your facilities, allowing only a few visitors to standby and wait for service!



The Management View overlay for guests has also seen an update. High concentrations of dissatisfied guests will now appear red in a heatmap, updating as visitors resolve their needs and move around the zoo.



There are many more improvements we’d like to make, but in a lot of cases, you should definitely feel and see a difference in Update 8.




Created by luci257.


Created by Krisu.


Created by Emilie.





Thank you for reading July’s dev diary!

Once we begin wrapping up development on Update 8, we will provide the community with a release window and give an extended look at the upcoming animal overhaul.

It’s taken a little longer than we had hoped, but it’s all coming along very well. Update 8 is going to be one of PK’s cornerstone updates and we cannot wait for you to play it! Thank you all for your patience!

- The PK Team

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Welcome to the June Development Update!

In today’s blog post, the team shares what is the longest dev diary in quite some time. We’re talking animals, gameplay, pretty pictures, a painfully long word count, the whole shebang. There’s so much to get through that we’ve just gotta get right into it!


If you’ve been keeping up with our dev diaries over the last few months, you’ll know that the team’s been tackling a bunch of updates at the same time. While the next release continues to receive much of our focus (Update 8), we’ve been able to start pre-production for quite a few more updates.

The team’s been laying the groundwork for a number of exciting future additions, most notably breakouts, animal ontogeny and the much requested paleoflora! With scientific advisory and original concepts by Tom Parker, one of our 2D artists, Ida has painted custom leaf textures for over 10 species of paleoflora so far. These textures will be used to dress the 3D models of our foliage.

Being one of the less celebrated aspects of prehistoric ecosystems, we hope to bring a new appreciation of paleoflora to the wider public once paleobotany releases down the line.


Assorted leaf textures for 4 paleo plants!

In other news, we’ve been carefully reviewing the main gameplay loop and will be working to address some pain points over the next few updates. Whether it’s a system that feels too disconnected or one that’s potentially more hidden than we’d like, we’ve been drafting up alternate design plans that we believe will make the game more fun and rewarding to play.

Later in this dev diary, you’ll get a better glimpse at one of these changes coming in Update 9; the Produce Station. For now though, let’s focus on what’s coming next in Update 8!

The animal overhaul has been going really well! Our test dummy, the Protoceratops, has a brand new AI brain that directs it towards a random point. The completely rebuilt animation controller drives the animal procedurally, strafing, turning, reversing and moving at variable speeds to get to its destination.

The locomotion system just came online at the time of writing, so we’ll be providing you with a super early look at some development footage of the Proto navigating from point to point. Apologies for the presentation!



There are a number of things here we’d like to polish over the next month (e.g. stopping jitter, correcting animation movement speeds, improving pathfinding accuracy), but the overall potential for authentic and dynamic looking animals is totally there, and with further development, it’s going to look so good.

Now that we can get the animals moving, we can continue building everything that sits on top of that. Their needs, interactions for eating/drinking, we essentially need to reintroduce elements from the current game in a smarter way that contributes to the organic and procedural goals of this rework.

One of our other key pillars with the animal overhaul was to make them run fast. Not physically, but computationally! Where possible, these new underlying systems are all multi-threaded, meaning they are much more performant and optimized for modern processors.

There’s a lot more work to be done before the animals are completely ready to ship, but we are incredibly happy with where they’re headed and can’t wait to finish them up for you. Making an AI movement system this sophisticated requires a lot of time and research, so we thank you for being patient with us!


It’s small, it’s speedy, you know it, you love it - it’s the Velociraptor!

Making a glorious return to Prehistoric Kingdom, this feathery fossil has been restored with a dashing retractable mohawk and a variety of bird-like calls. Having once roamed the Cretaceous landscapes of Mongolia, everyone’s favorite 3 foot turkey will be the next animal arriving in Update 8!

This animal comes with 3 different skins (Dust Devil, Mirage and Oasis) and each has a fun little design detail!

• Oasis: no scales on the snout
  
• Mirage: includes iridescence and sexual dimorphism
  
• Dust Devil: inspired by roadrunners

The team had a lot of fun working on this animal. The raptors have a lot of personality and despite only being a 2 star creature due to its size, it’ll always be 5 in our hearts.



Humid air, sunny skies? Yep, the tropical biome is getting a TOTAL makeover in Update 8! Including 34 foliage items, the environment team have truly given our oldest biome some new life.





In addition to all these plants, we’ve made some changes to the biome itself! The Tropical dirt has now become a lovely leaf litter, and the Samanea tree has been moved to gardening as it no longer fits the biome’s aesthetic.

With all of these improvements, the tropical biome looks absolutely gorgeous. All the assets have been updated to better resemble their real life counterparts, so do keep in mind that existing parks might look a bit different depending on how you used the original plants.





Previously known as land value, Park Beauty is a new mechanic that factors how attractive your zoo is into the park rating, looking at guest accessible areas to calculate what’s bad and what’s good.



Since the last dev diary, Park Beauty now interacts with dung piles and the score of an exhibit, positively illuminating healthy habitats or marking poorly managed, stinky enclosures as bad.

By constructing gardens, statues, decorated structures and placing foliage near your buildings, you’ll quickly begin to cultivate high Park Beauty in the surrounding areas. If an area is pretty, guests are much more likely to use donation boxes and help give the park an economic boost!


Park by Magnanimous_Matt

On the other side of the spectrum, modules like power generators are a source of ugliness. Using walls, fences or foliage, players in Challenge Mode will have to think about how they build their park to best obstruct the view from guests.


Park by Magnanimous_Matt

Jumping over to Update 9, we’d like to discuss one of the upcoming changes to the gameplay loop.

With Park Beauty becoming a more central mechanic for Challenge Mode, the team’s very keen to introduce more modules that provide a function or service for the park. Recently it’s become quite a big goal of ours to bring some management aspects out of the menus and back into the world, contextualizing the infrastructure Prehistoric Kingdom might need to operate.

And with that, here’s our first change.

Produce Stations are a large, customizable module that passively provide food for the park’s animal feeders.

Placing a Produce Station in the park will have it automatically begin generating a single piece of stock every few seconds, cycling through one diet at a time. This means you’d get 1 plant, then 1 fruit, then 1 fish etc. over the course of a minute before the cycle repeats.



However, a Produce Station can also be specialized to only produce a certain diet. If you have a lot of herbivores in the early game, it might be worth setting the Produce Station to only generate plants!



You’re now getting way more plants, but you‘ll soon need a second Produce Station if you have something like carnivores to support.

Luckily with enough funds to support the upkeep, you can build a whole set of specialized Produce Stations to capitalize on the extra efficiency. Changing the diet specialization of a Produce Station will also change its exterior farm area, so you’ll always know what it’s making at a glance. Players can specialize in plants, fruit, meat, fish or insects.



To better manage the park’s food supply, we suggest researching some Produce Storage modules. These crates add to the global storage capacity, allowing you to generate and hold more food.



Anytime a feeder is resupplied out in the park, the required amount will be automatically taken out of storage. And on the off chance that you’re making more food than your capacity allows, the excess produce will be sold off for a small profit!

...

And that’s it! These two modules will eventually replace the shipping mechanic used in the current game. By bringing food production out of the menu and into the park itself, we hope to give the player more agency and choice in not only the speed of their food production, but where in the zoo they’ll place them.

For us as developers, it also opens up opportunities for things like storms, power outages, and facilities breaking down to impact a system that was previously untouchable. The team looks forward to developing this idea and bringing it to you in Update 9.



Created by carlos200022.


Created by gemini98.


Created by luci257.



Thank you for reading June’s dev diary!

As development on Update 8 continues into July, we get a little bit closer to finally handing this update off to the public. There’s quite a bit left to do on the animal side of things, but as mentioned, the team’s very optimistic and we are all looking forward to seeing it finished.

Once we’re happy and confident about hitting a specific release window, you’ll know via our socials or in a dev diary. Until then, thank you very much and we’ll see you next time!

- The PK Team

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Welcome to the May Development Update!

In this dev diary, we’ll be showcasing a selection of development highlights from May and talking a bit more about our goals for the animal overhaul. There’s quite a bit to get through, so let’s get to it!





Both Update 8 and Update 9 have been progressing well on all fronts over the past month. Many players have been eagerly waiting for a better look at the animal overhaul, and while we do have more news to share, quite a lot of it is related to the backend programming side of things.

The current iteration of our animals, the ones in the public game, were built with rigid architecture that made it difficult to add new behaviors. In the new system, we are building the AI modularly, creating sets of emergent behaviors that can be turned on or off depending on the species. Our goal here is to put a high focus on animal reactivity and social interaction through multiple layers of decision making.

This means that animals become far more reactive to their environments and the creatures that they are housed with. For example, a T. rex may cause a Dryosaurus to flee while your Triceratops holds its ground.



As it currently stands, we are expecting development on this stage of the animal overhaul to wrap up towards the end of June. There have been a lot of changes under the hood with dozens of new variables at play, many of which will need to be tuned and adjusted to ensure everything responds the way it’s intended. Because of this, the team would like to release Update 8 in July to provide an extra period of polish and development. We thank you for your patience, and we look forward to sharing more previews as we get closer to release.

Since the last blog post, we’ve been setting up the genetic mutation data for more and more of our species. Today, we’d like to show off how much variety can be achieved within a single skin from the same animal. With some basic masks and clever shaders, this has all been achieved procedurally.



There’s so much variety that it’s basically impossible to get the exact same variation during a regular playthrough. To showcase this in realtime, you can see us cycling through melanistic, albino and leucistic values at random on our Smilodon. We hope this will help players get even more attached to a specific animal!



In the previous dev diary, we touched on the land value system coming in Update 8. Since then, we’ve introduced a dynamic occlusion mechanic to help players combat the negative effects of power generators. This is part of a new tab in the Management View, allowing you to visualise trouble spots in the park (temporary UI seen below).



In the example above, you can see how blocking sightlines with foliage reduces the negative area of a power generator. Players can also use modular structures like wall and roof pieces to help further reduce their impact! We hope to do a dedicated preview on land value and park beauty before this update releases.

To catch a glimpse of our next upcoming animal, you might want to follow the sound of its peculiar chirps, caws and rattly barks. Be warned though, that sickle claw seems like it can pack more than a punch!

Keep an eye out in June for the full unveiling of this species! We can’t wait for you to see all of its wonderful animations and personality.



Let’s talk about Update 9, the one that’s coming after the animal overhaul. Last month we briefly touched on the new species coming in this release and today, we’d like to explore the primary theme of this update!

Yes! The grassland biome is finally coming to Prehistoric Kingdom and we’re absolutely in love with it. 21 brand new plants are included, providing classic staples such as the beloved acacia and marula tree alongside a dozen placeable grass types such as triodia, pampas and elephant grass.







Created by acrogiga2004.


Created by Noah2002.


Created by gemini98.



Thank you for reading May’s dev diary!

After Update 8, please look forward to a more holistic showcase in the future with a look at our finished grassland map set in Tanzania. There’s so much more that the team’s been working on behind the scenes these past few months and we can’t wait to unveil more throughout the year. Once again, thank you for your patience. We hope to share more with you soon!

Just before we go, we’d also like to wish everyone a happy and safe Pride Month!

Until next time,

- The PK Team

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Welcome to the April Development Update!

With the recent release of Update 7, the game has officially been in Early Access for one year. Over the last 12 months, we’ve seen so many amazing community creations, parks and screenshots that continue to blow us away. From gigantic starships to custom prehistoric flora, your boundless creativity shows no end. Happy anniversary, PK!

The previous update introduced an expanded power system, new modules, biome presets and a lot of fantastic terrain-related quality of life changes. You can check out the patch notes for Update 7 here!



For the remainder of this short blog post, we’ll be providing some key information about when you can expect the next update for Prehistoric Kingdom.


The Public Roadmap Trello has been updated to better reflect our internal goals. The cards don’t necessarily show absolutely everything coming in these releases, but they do provide a general idea of what to expect. With every major patch, we get closer and closer to a full release.



The next big patch, Update 8, includes a technical overhaul for the animals - reworking their locomotion and development backend to support future behavioral features like hunting, combat and breeding. This has been a big job! Not only do these new foundations need to be finished, but all of our existing animals need the old system ripped out and replaced.

For this reason, we are expecting Update 8 to release in mid-late June. We’ll have more information for you in the next dev diary, but we wanted to let you know in advance that May will likely be a quieter month.

We’re excited to announce that Update 8 will also be including a brand new animal! This species is perhaps one of the more infamous creatures in the fossil record, growing in popularity through its cultural significance. In the world of Prehistoric Kingdom, though, things aren’t quite the same!



Land Value is an upcoming feature in Update 8 that combines exhibit score and park attractiveness into the park’s rating.

This is a localized system that evolves with the park, making areas “positive” with beautiful habitats/scenery items or “negative” with power generators, broken facilities and low cleanliness. Guests will be naturally drawn to places with high land value, potentially donating more generous amounts to Donation Boxes.



Our goal with Land Value is to tie many of the game's independent scoring systems (exhibit score, cleanliness) together into a single management view while fleshing out the building system with consequences (e.g. placing a big, loud power plant near a guest plaza). We believe this addition will help to make everything in the game feel more interconnected.

Genetic Mutations will finally be making an appearance with Update 8. Procedural in nature, we’ve continued to develop and curate the look of our mutations, including new features such as eye coloring to more accurately capture the essence of this natural phenomenon.

An animal rating system will also be included alongside mutations to add further value to your albino, melanistic and leucistic specimens.




For our final piece of news, we’d like to leave you with teasers for the animals coming later in Update 9. As stated in a few blog posts now, the team has some truly great creatures on the roster for this year.

Since they’re not coming in the next immediate update we obviously don’t want to give too much away, but we know how much you love to speculate. We’ve got a sneaking suspicion that quite a few of you will be very pleased! Stay tuned!







Created by ASSASSINSPINO.


Created by Clover.


Created by Polish Poy.



Thank you for reading April’s dev diary!

We’ll be back next month to give you a status report on the next update for Prehistoric Kingdom. Thank you for an amazing first year in Early Access!

Until next time,

- The PK Team

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Welcome, Park Managers!

We've rolled out a small hotfix to address some issues with the last update. Thank you so much for your patience and for bearing with us. Please provide your feedback and bug reports through the in-game tool or our official Discord server.

• Fixed Tyrannosaurus freezing
  
• Fixed distant tree loading
  
• Fixed an issue with loading saves

Welcome, Park Managers and happy one year anniversary!

Thank you to everyone who has played, supported and given feedback to Prehistoric Kingdom. It's crazy to think it's already been a full year, but here we are!

In this update, we've expanded the power system, added new modules and made a lot of important quality of life changes. There have also been some substantial optimizations and stability fixes, though our work on this front continues. Be sure to read the full patch notes!

The Next Update
As a brief aside, we'd like to quickly touch on the next release, Update 8. This update is going to be quite a major one for the game, including a brand new species and completely reworked animal locomotion. Due to the amount of ongoing work required, the update is expected to go live in June.

It's imperative that all of the new backend is efficient and allows us to safely expand it to include future behaviors and improved AI. Thank you all for your patience!

Now, onto the content!



The Research system has been expanded to include the Energy category, coming with 10 researchable items including new generators and upgrades for power output.




This latest update also includes an early iteration of structure durability, allowing key modules such as power generators to breakdown over time. Once broken, players will need to repair the module by selecting the group or broken generator itself. From there, you can click the new "Repair Structure" button.

To ensure that nearby buildings stay powered, we've added Backup Batteries. These utility items will charge up overtime, providing power when a local generator has failed.



In the future, players will have staff to help maintain all the facilities in the park.

Two new modules have been added to the Structures category within the research system: the Restaurant and Shopping Center!

These modules are significantly larger than the existing kiosks, serving more visitors at once and bringing in greater profits. Like the other modules, their colors can be customized.




In the future, guests will be able to sit in the restaurant booths.

Several new prefabs have been added using the new modules arriving in Update 7. These structures are a great way to quickly build out your park!



This also includes a gorgeous Natural Aviary design, beautifully furnished with wooden architecture and an open internal space.



22 vegetation presets have been added across all the current biomes, allowing for quick and convenient habitat construction. These presets have been curated to provide appealing plant combinations in as few clicks as possible.





Alongside the new vegetation presets, we've refreshed the terraforming toolbox with updated visuals to help with usability. For players who wish to select individual plants, this option is still available!



Important modules such as feeders, haybeds, kiosks and bathrooms will now flatten the terrain when placed below or close to the ground. This functionality extends to floor pieces, allowing players to build foundations.

By default, players cannot terraform over floor pieces or modules. For power users, these new terrain rules can be completely disabled in the building toolbox or terraforming window to make some custom structures easier to build (e.g. pools, moats, etc.)




Floating foliage will now be detached from the terrain, allowing players to terraforming without disruption. Plants placed below the terrain will maintain their height offset, even with terrain adjustments!



Furthermore, the plant brush will no longer place foliage on top of paths, fences and modules/floor pieces. As mentioned above, players can disable terrain rules to allow foliage painting on modular pieces again.



Modular prefabs will now be placed from their modular grid height! This change gives players a consistent placement height to work with, allowing you to better curate the placement experience of custom prefabs.

As this is a structural change, it might affect several user prefabs that have been made prior to this modification. To get around this, simply shift the height of all the group’s pieces (quickly selectable through box select or Ctrl+A) to match where they should meet the ground, relative to the grid’s height. Resave your prefab with these changes.

With the help of workshop creators, we believe this new standard will create a more consistent and less-intrusive build experience. We apologize for the inconvenience.

• Distant trees do not appear on loaded games. We are investigating this ASAP!
  
• Animals can freeze randomly. We are looking into this issue.
  
• For best anti-aliasing, please try the CTAA setting. We will likely enforce this as the only anti-aliasing setting (+ off) in the future.

• NEW: Biome Vegetation Presets
  • Added 22 vegetation presets to the foliage painting menu, allowing players to quickly create a wide array of environments
    
  • Updated terraforming menu layout
• NEW: Expanded Power System
  • Added the Energy research tree
    
  • Added Backup Batteries
    
  • Added 4 new power generators
    
  • Added generator efficiency upgrades
• NEW: Structure Durability
  • Added an early version of structure durability that allows power generators to break down over time. Groups with broken modules can be repaired.

• Gameplay
  • Enabled the Energy research tree, coming with 10 researchable items:
    • Basic Power Kit
      
    • Solar Panel
      
    • Increased Solar Panel Efficiency
      
    • Wind Turbine
      
    • Increased Wind Turbine Efficiency
      
    • Wind Turbine Large
      
    • Increased Wind Turbine Large Efficiency
      
    • Geothermal Power Plant
      
    • Increased Geothermal Power Plant Efficiency 1 & 2
  • Expanded the Structures research tree, adding 2 new items:
    • Restaurant
      
    • Shopping Center
  • Added automatic terrain flattening! Modules will automatically flatten the terrain if placed within a certain distance threshold from the ground. This will also stop terraforming actions from affecting terrain underneath the respective structures. This also applies to flat floor pieces, as long as their world rotation is 0 on the Z and X axis. Automatic flattening can be disabled through the options menu
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Added Paraceratherium Silhouette
    
  • Added Diesel Generator
    
  • Added Wind Turbine Large
    
  • Added Geothermal Power Plant
    
  • Added Backup Battery Small
    
  • Added Restaurant
    
  • Added Shopping Center
• Prefabs
  • Added Natural Aviary prefab
    
  • Added Restaurant Modern prefab
    
  • Added Giftshop Modern prefab
    
  • Added Large Geothermal Facility prefab
    
  • Added Large Wind Farm prefab
    
  • Added Solar Farm prefab
    
  • Added Small Wind Farm prefab
    
  • Added Small Diesel Plant prefab
    
  • Added Kiosk Apato Apparel prefab
    
  • Added Kiosk Giganto Gifts prefab
• Undo/Redo
  • Added support for vegetation painting in the undo/redo stack
    
  • Added support for path placement in the undo/redo stack
    
  • Added support for path replacement in the undo/redo stack
    
  • Added support for fence replacement in the undo/redo stack
• Audio
  • Added sounds to the refill and clean habitat buttons
    
  • Added sounds to the guest facility buttons in the management view
    
  • Added broadcast variants to Acrocanthosaurus
    
  • Added unique yawn to Protoceratops
• GUI
  • Added a power infomenu panel when selecting power modules, indicating an item’s current output and range, and in the case of backup batteries, current charge

• Balance
  • Updated minimum animal exhibit sizes, lowering the min. need across the board. The minimum exhibit size for a single animal of each species should now be much lower
    
  • Removed purchasing cost from Excavation Sites. These are now instantly unlocked and purchased upon reaching the required rating level. This change effectively removes a ‘middle man’ cost sink, hopefully making the Challenge mode experience more accessible
    
  • Heavily lowered park costs across the board
    • Lowered animal incubation costs by an average factor of x5
      
    • Lowered animal unlocking costs by an average factor of x4
      
    • Lowered research costs by an average factor of x2
      
    • Lowered upkeep costs by an average factor of x3
• Gameplay
  • Actions can now be carried out while the Management View is open
    
  • Floating vegetation now doesn’t realign with terraforming changes, while plants already colliding with the terrain will keep their terrain offset after terrain editing actions
    
  • Modular Groups now have a far more consistent way to ground themselves to the terrain: the group’s grid height - this means that a structure’s default height position will now always originate at the grid’s height. NOTE: as a structural change, this might affect several user prefabs that have been made prior to this modification. To get around this, simply shift the height of all the group’s pieces (quickly selectable through box select or Ctrl+A) to match where they should meet the ground, relative to the grid’s height. We apologize for the inconvenience
    
  • Fence replacement is now completely blocked if replacing an existing fence with the same fence type
    
  • Foliage painting respects buildings, paths and fences
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Changed visuals for Solar Panel and Wind Turbine
    
  • Improved texture seams on the Igneous Rock piece set
    
  • Moved Donation Box 1,2 and 3 to the Guest Amenities section in the GUI
    
  • Modular style selection now displays all the different styles present in a building (as opposed to one style per styleset), allowing users to quickly swap out specific materials in their structure without having to select individual items
    
  • Removed shadows from modular glass and glass fences
• Foliage
  • Reduced reflectivity of Scots Pine and Bald Cypress leaves
• Audio
  • Adjusted camera mix when underwater
• Visuals
  • Improved dithering effects on the ambient occlusion’s second pass
    
  • Adjusted night time color grading for overcast and stormy weather
    
  • Removed contact shadows from grass rendering - we’ve been going back and forth with this visual tweak for the last few weeks, but ultimately chose to settle on a fluffier, less noisy grass look
    
  • Improved CTAA antialiasing, the game image should feel slightly less jagged overall
    
  • Decreased overall ambient reflectivity
    
  • Further balanced ambient lighting on all levels
• Music
  • Updated a Torvosaurus music cue in the tutorial
    
  • Music is now properly paused when opening the pause menu
• Save/Load
  • Animal fact voice lines now persist in saved games, so they shouldn’t repeat over the same playthrough
    
  • Nursery animal skin ‘seen’ status now persists in saved games
• GUI
  • Streamlined the Landscaping Menu for simpler feature access and ease of use
    
  • Updated the Modular Group Infomenu, compartmentalizing data throughout several windows, for a less cluttered look. Function modules are now more easily accessible through the Overview section
    
  • Updated the Power Management View, drastically simplifying all power-related information
    
  • Updated Mammal Taxonomy data (visible in the Nursery Menu)
    
  • Improved movement smoothing inside the Excavations Menu world-map
    
  • Character voice lines are now properly paused when opening the pause menu
    
  • Improved modular style buttons overflowing in the Structure Styling Toolbox
    
  • The Main Board Undo & Redo buttons now contextually activate/deactivate based on the available undo/redo operation stack
    
  • To combat notification spam on complex park, we’ve set a cap on active notifications pop-ups to 9 at any given time
• Tutorial Improvements
  • Disabled Favorite toggle in the Building Menu during the tutorial scenario
    
  • Nigel takes less time to return to the player with new objectives during the ‘Tree Lizard’ mission
    
  • Camera cinematics are now properly paused when opening the pause menu
    
  • Fixed a premature objective completion case tied to placing the path in the same starting point during the ‘All roads lead to dinosaurs’ mission
    
  • Prevented user from being able to edit terrain height during the tutorial

• Critical
  • Fixed one critical bug preventing users from fully loading saves
    
  • Resolved potential research initialization issues
    
  • Fixed modular selection issue tied to changing visual style
    
  • Fixed potentially critical main menu initialization bug preventing users from properly starting up the application
    
  • Fixed critical bug related to dung beetle nest placement
    
  • Guests stuck in the corner of the map are now detected and reset
• Gameplay
  • Fixed issue causing a new prefab placement not triggering on the first GUI click, while editing a modular group
    
  • Fixed path replacement gizmo issues, the tool now refreshes appropriately when switching replacement mode
• Construction
  • Fixed an undo issue that would cause modular objects to be re-created with incorrect positions
    
  • Fixed unintended edge case that would cause first walls in groups to be weirdly unaligned if the ‘Stack’ and ‘Align’ toggles were both enabled
• Visuals
  • Light colors load correctly now
• Audio
  • Stopped exterior post-processing from being audible when underwater
• GUI
  • Fixed another nursery notification edge case that would report the wrong amount of incubated animals
    
  • Fixed new bug causing the save menu not to properly refresh after a new save registration
    
  • Fixed notifications menu issue causing park alerts to bundle in the same notification group, missing any text

• Fixed multiple critical memory leaks, the game should be less prone to crashing
  
• Significant optimizations to modular processing
  
• Massive CPU optimizations to visitor AI processing
  
• CPU optimization to power visuals processing
  
• Optimized power system memory usage
  
• Massively optimized loading of complex or dense levels (particularly with lots of modules)
  
• Significantly optimized memory load on complex saves

Welcome to the March Development Update!

March was an exciting month for the team as we finally released the highly anticipated mammal, Paraceratherium. Our early teasers managed to fool some of you with the surprise addition of Juxia, but as expected, the majority of speculation was on point. Great work, everyone! If you missed that update, you can find Paraceratherium (and more goodies) in the Update 6 patch notes.



For the rest of this blog post, we’ll be briefly covering the next update and providing the usual insight on what we’ve been up to. A bit of a relaxed one this month, but nonetheless, quite neat!



The team’s been busy working on a myriad of tasks; guest optimizations, new modules, new music and some super boring stuff like yet to be revealed species. Ugh, what a dino-snore, am I right?

In all seriousness, a lot of our work this past month has either been technical or content that’s not ready to be revealed. We’ve got some great animals lined up for the year, but we aren’t looking to begin implementing them until the locomotion and AI overhaul is finished. As a cheeky tease though, it’s worth mentioning that Paraceratherium won’t be the last mammal you’ll see this year!

For now though, let’s talk about some of the things coming next in Update 7.

Biome presets are a new addition that allow players to quickly paint a collection of curated plants from within a biome. Simply select one of the presets and start creating!



Since many of our biomes feature a lot of plants, players currently spend a great amount of time choosing the right combinations for their park. Presets allow you to quickly grab some common environments in as little clicks as possible.

If you’d still prefer granularity, players can always switch back to see all the plants within a biome. We’ve updated this view to better make use of space and address some usability issues present in the previous version. Check out the differences below!



In Update 7, we’ll be giving the power system quite a bit of love - finally expanding it to include new modules and the power failure mechanic.

As a result of this update, Challenge Mode is going to play out a little differently. When first starting out, you’ll only have access to the essentials; a Diesel Generator and a Backup Battery.



Providing power to the park, a Diesel Generator is cheap but unreliable. Soon enough, it’ll begin to fail and require the player to reboot it. This introduces you to our newest mechanic; power failure.

To help keep things running, players can place a Backup Battery within the range of an active generator. This battery will need time to charge off the grid, but once it’s ready, it’ll provide temporary power the moment a generator fails.



With the Research system, players can discover new modules with improved power output, range and reliability like the solar panel or wind turbine.

Though these may be a bit more reliable than Diesel Generators, they can be impacted by temporary environmental factors (e.g. solar panels can’t produce power at night). Backup Batteries are key in ensuring the park can remain operational even in downtime.



In the last stage of the Research tree, players can work towards unlocking their final power modules; an upgraded Wind Turbine and Geothermal Power Plant! These large structures reward the player with a high level of reliability and output in exchange for increased upkeep costs.







For a glimpse at what’s coming down the line, let’s take a quick look at modular terrain flattening.

When we read feedback about Prehistoric Kingdom, one of the biggest barriers we see pop up is how the terrain interacts with structures, or rather, how it doesn’t. For example, terrain slopes are almost completely unworkable without terraforming and for new players who simply want to place down official prefabs, this isn’t great!

Thanks to the help of our newest programmer, we’ve finally had the development bandwidth needed to tackle this long standing issue.





So, how does it work? There are certain pieces that the terrain will adapt to, assuming they’re placed close to the ground or under the terrain. Intentionally placing any of these pieces above the terrain’s minimum threshold will not trigger the flattening behavior.

Pieces that flatten the terrain include:

• Modular floor pieces
  
• Modules (e.g. animal nursery, kiosks, toilets, generators, etc.)
  
• Animal interactables (e.g. feeders, enrichment items)

By allowing only a very focused group of pieces to flatten the terrain, we aim to provide a building experience that feels more grounded and behaves like you’d expect. So far we are very pleased with the results and will be continuing to improve the system before it’s shipped.



Created by CasualWoodsman.


Created by Jirasaurus.


Created by MajorCheirus.



Thank you for reading March’s dev diary!

Not too much more to say on this one, folks! Hope everyone enjoyed Paraceratherium and we’ll see you again in April for the next dev diary (and our Early Access anniversary!).

Until next time,

- The PK Team

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Welcome, Park Managers!

Just a quick little hotfix to address some immediate issues with the latest update. Please provide your feedback and bug reports through the in-game tool or our official Discord server.

• Fixed Juxia size bug
  
• Fixed Edmontosaurus kuukpikensis star rating
  
• Fixed Excavation menu rating checks
  
• Fixed invalid path bug

• Optimized Paraceratherium rendering
  
• Optimized rock rendering

Welcome, Park Managers!

Update 6 is here! The highlights for this patch include the reworked donation system, rock styling and a brand new animal! You can find a rundown of everything that's new in the full patch notes below.

As mentioned in our previous dev diary, the team has been working on a number of updates concurrently in an effort to better space out our release schedule. We've worked very hard to get this update out in a timely fashion, so we hope that everyone enjoys all the new content available in Update 6.

If you’re yet to play the game or think it’d make a great gift, we'd like to mention that Prehistoric Kingdom is currently 20% off on Steam!

Please provide your feedback and bug reports through the in-game tool or our official Discord server.



Possibly the largest mammal to ever walk the Earth, Paraceratherium is our latest arrival! This animal features two alternate species (transouralicum, bugtiense) and the small, alternate genus, Juxia. We're incredibly proud to finally include this classic animal in Prehistoric Kingdom!


Donation boxes are a module that allow guests to donate directly to the park. Strategically placing them in high traffic areas near good scoring exhibits will help net a greater number of donations.

However, donation boxes have a limited monthly capacity! This means that once they’re filled up, guests can no longer use that box. At the end of each month, their earnings will be automatically collected and the boxes will be emptied.

Players can research bigger donation boxes to help raise the potential of their monthly donation income.



The art team have remade all our rocks to better compliment our other assets, utilizing a different art direction with new visual features like detail normals to preserve their fidelity.

Moss, sand and snow styles are also now available for rocks! These three substrates will always appear on the top side of a rock no matter how you rotate or scale them.



Please note that while we've tried to keep the general shapes fairly close to our current rocks, some build adjustments may be required depending on how you’ve used them in the past.

Three variants of mangroves are now available for the Wetland biome, the perfect companions for your swamp-dwelling animals!



Placing select items such as feeders, modules, walls, floors and roof pieces will automatically mask-out grass from the surrounding area. This functionality extends to water, too!

• Some users may experience an extreme drop in framerate when terrain painting. This is is currently under investigation.
  
• Many digsites are unintentionally available to unlock during the early game. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible.
  
• After placement, some Paraceratherium may temporarily contort their bodies to a disturbing degree. This behaviour was previously observed with Dilophosaurus and Scelidosaurus.
  
• Donation boxes are still being balanced, we'd appreciate community feedback to get them working nicely!
  
• Donation boxes are currently not recolorable. This is a system issue that will need to be addressed in the future
  
• We will be working to improve the economy over the coming weeks

• NEW: New Animals
  • Introducing 2 new species of Paraceratherium and an older, alternate genus, Juxia!
    
  • New dig sites: Chitarwata Formation, Hsanda Gol Formation and the Sharamuran Formation
• NEW: Donation Boxes
  • Added donation boxes
    
  • Added medium and large donation boxes to the Research Tree in Challenge Mode

• Animals
  • Added new animal dung type: Avian Dung
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Added 3 types of rock substrate styles: moss, sand and snow
    
  • Automatic Grass Masking - Placing down modular structures will now automatically remove the grass underneath
• Foliage
  • Added Mangrove 1, 2 and 3 to the Wetland biome selection
• Water
  • Grass is now automatically removed by water

• Balance
  • Balanced tree coverage values across all biomes, with exhibit foliage density now being more forgiving
    
  • After repeated user feedback, the duration of day length relative to night length has been increased
• Animals
  • Animal dung size has been balanced, now smaller animals generate dung mounds more appropriate to their size
    
  • Added support for rating differences among unique animal alt. species
    
  • Changed Tarbosaurus’ rating from 5 to 4 stars
    
  • Changed Edmontosaurus kuukpikensis rating from 4 to 3 stars
• Guests
  • Facilities rating now starts at 5 stars, with stars being lost depending on the stage (red/yellow/green) of each guest need category
    
  • Guest need satisfaction is much more accurate now, with every individual affecting the score. The guest facility rating should be easier and more consistent to maintain in the green, with clearer indication of when things are going wrong
    
  • Guest need visuals have been adjusted, staying green when things are ok, only deteriorating when struggling to satisfy a need
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Foliage masking is now cleared by default when starting foliage removal
    
  • Players can now click through a habitat marker to select modular items on the other side. This should resolve a selection edge case that made it harder to select modular items on the marker’s edge
• Music
  • Character dialogue now reduces mid-frequencies of music
    
  • Less volume reduction on music when character dialogue is present
    
  • Opening full screen management menus will no longer end currently playing music
• Graphics
  • Improved environmental reflection fidelity
• GUI
  • Max. incubation capacity displayed in the Nursery Holder now accurately represents the park-wide max. capacity
    
  • Re-integrated terraform action tooltips after they had been disabled for some time, giving more contextual cues as to what the current input is
• Tutorial Improvements
  • Introduced an additional 4 minutes of music cues to the tutorial
    
  • Fixed cinematic camera frame skips
    
  • Notification audio is muted during loading
    
  • Introduced a dynamic animal tracking camera mode to better complement the Mammoth Outro section of the tutorial and various other dynamic elements
    
  • Improved responsiveness of Dryosaurus running away from the player camera during the ‘Let there be light!’ objective
    
  • All placement objectives are now properly constrained to their respective areas of effect
    
  • Improved placement action feedback when user input is constrained by specific ranges
    
  • The kiosk shell structure is now automatically selected for placement during the ‘Bread and Circuses’ objective
    
  • Statue placement is more accurately curated during the ‘Bread and Circuses’ objectivet
    
  • Disabled Animal Movement functionality after the ‘Accommodating a Predator’ objective
    
  • Fixed potential soft-lock occurrences that would allow users to wildly terraform the landscape during the early sections of the scenario

• Critical
  • Fixed Error Dialogue not showing up on screen when a park’s save file failed to generate
    
  • Fixed a critical issue related to certain keybind input not registering after having played the tutorial
    
  • Improved multiple guest navigation problems, guests should have a relatively easier time properly navigating the park, though this is an on-going process that we’ll keep working on in the future
• Music
  • Fixed Management Dashboard music stopping abruptly when still inside the menu
    
  • Fixed an issue causing in-game music to stop when opening the Options Menu
• Audio
  • Fixed the research unlocking audio playing when holding click over a locked research element
• GUI
  • Fixed a bug related to the displayed incubation number in incubation notifications
    
  • Fixed the Nursery Menu creation button not updating properly when switching nurseries
    
  • Fixed the Excavations Menu skin unlock toggle and tooltip not refreshing properly during balance or rating increase - the game’s feedback for unlocking a new skin should be much better now in this regard

• Resolved a memory leak related to the waste management system

Welcome to February’s Development Update!

In this post, we’ll be discussing some changes to the roadmap and delve into Prehistoric Kingdom’s next update. As we’ve just released Update 5, this dev diary will be a little more information heavy.

Speaking of the now-released update, this latest one adds the Research system, various range graphics and a bunch of little changes to Challenge Mode. Please check out the patch notes to see everything new in Update 5!





The team is concurrently working on a handful of updates that we hope to release in the first half of 2023, focusing on new gameplay features and further development on animal AI.

While saying is easier than doing, this year we’re trying to be more frequent and consistent in our updates. The Research system, even if its initial offerings were quite basic, was our first step towards that goal in addition to the two other patches released in February. We want to better maintain the game by releasing fixes and general updates in a more frequent manner between larger releases, targeting additions that help the game find a better footing while we work on the big stuff.

We’ve learnt a lot from 2022 and that extends that to our animal roster. There are a lot of amazing prehistoric creatures in our backlog, so we’ve made some adjustments to help release them. Throughout the year we’ll be including animals in our big, themed updates as you’d expect - just like the Desert one back in December. However, we also have them sprinkled throughout 2023 to occasionally coincide with a few smaller gameplay updates. The team hopes that by the end of the year, there should be quite a few new faces running around your parks. You might just meet one of them very soon!

In February, we were also able to have two new members join the team! They’ve been settling in, helping to balance parts of the game and begin work on some new developments. This includes modular grass masking, a huge quality of life change that auto-removes grass under certain pieces such as floors and feeders.

With everything said, we’ve updated our Trello roadmap to better reflect where we’re headed and what we’d like to do. Keep in mind that everything is subject to change and that there are no public dates, treat it more as a step by step process.




Right now, we are heavily overhauling the technical side of animals - improving their locomotion, AI, and responsiveness. We’re putting more resources into them than ever before!

In parallel to all the coding, the animation team have been creating the new animations required for this revamped locomotion system. Strafes, walking backwards, turning on the spot while walking and even trotting are all part of our endeavor to create more convincing and responsive animal movement. You can see some of our tests below.





This includes swimming, too! This upcoming traversal feature has been designed to use the same types of animations, allowing animals to strafe or go backwards even when in the water. It’s all intentionally built to fluidly go between states rather than rigidly stop-start!





It’s important to stress that we’re not simply retreading old ground. Everything is being done in service of developing future behaviors like socializing, herding, hunting and combat. All of your bug reports, feedback and requests have been an important part of designing what we want from this next stage of our animals.

As much as we’re sure you’d love to see the monotony of animation tables, mixers and a lot of editor tooling, not too much is ready for presentation at this stage. It is, however, a massive update and it will take time. We will continue to share progress as the systems evolve.

Let’s talk about Update 6! This is our next gameplay update and we’re expecting it to launch this month in March with everything mentioned below.

Donation boxes are a module that allow guests to donate directly to the park. Strategically placing them in high traffic areas near good scoring exhibits will help net a greater number of donations.

However, donation boxes have a limited monthly capacity! This means that once they’re filled up, guests can no longer use that box. At the end of each month, their earnings will be automatically collected and the boxes will be emptied. Players can research bigger donation boxes to help raise the potential of their monthly donation income.





For those of you who are familiar with Challenge mode, you might know that donations are already a thing! Well… sorta. You see, donations in the current game provide a consistent flow of cash as long as there’s an animal in the habitat. It was one of those systems that we knew was going to get a second pass to improve the game’s simulation and management.

Our goal with this new iteration is to make donations feel more organic and help to reward players in a more meaningful way.

In Feb, the art team got around to remaking all our rocks to better compliment our other assets, dubbing these ones as “igneous”. This is all part of our grand plan to introduce new varieties like smooth, beachy rocks or jagged, stratified rocks.

The new versions make use of a tiling detail texture to preserve their upclose fidelity no matter how big or small you’ve scaled them. We’ve also included two brand new cladding pieces that are perfect for building flatter shapes like floors and walls.

It was important for us to keep the general shapes fairly close to our current rocks in order to preserve player builds. Some adjustments may be required depending on how you’ve used them in the past, but for the most part they’re pretty close! We’re still working on how they look, so there will be some visual differences in the final release.



Now, let’s not take this next part for granite. This update will also be adding moss, sand and snow styles for rocks! These three substrates will always appear on the top side of a rock no matter how you rotate or scale them. Each substrate is fully recolorable so if red snow or purple sand is your jam, you’re welcome!





That’s right, the first animal of 2023 is right around the corner! We’re keeping it a secret for a little while longer, but if you’re lucky, you might just get a new Species Spotlight trailer as we get closer to the release of this update.

As mentioned earlier, we are still deep into overhauling the technical side of the animals. This will (hopefully!) be the last creature to use the current animal systems before everybody is updated in a few months.






Created by Atiel.


Created by luci257.


Created by joseph.af95.



Thank you for reading February’s dev diary!

The last few months of development have felt especially productive for the team. As stated above, we will continue to strive for more frequent updates to better maintain the live game. Please stay tuned for more information in March while we carry on developing the next update.

Until next time,

- The PK Team

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