Dec 31, 2019

Prehistoric Kingdom - Shadow Raven Studios

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.

Development Progress

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!

Elevated Paths

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!

Modular Building: Switching Materials

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.

Terrain Painting Updates

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.

Animal Shader Update

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.

Foliage Shader Update

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!

User Interface Update

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.

Animation

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.

Sound Design

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.

Animal Redux

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.

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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

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Dec 31, 2019

Update 0.9.1 January, 1st 2020

RogueVerse - Foumart Games

Hi Everyone! The 0.9.1 update is now live!

What's new:
1. Taverns have an updated look including new features:

Save Button - player can save the game at any time in the tavern without having to lodge.
Cards Menu - an expanding menu where player can select and cast any of the collected healing cards, sell the treasure cards, or invoke quest cards. For more about quests see below.
A quick access button that will automatically transport the party to the other tavern on the stage if there is a clear way between.
Fix of services pricing. The cost now corresponds with the number of characters from player's party that need the service.

2. Quests have been added - a quest gives the player an additional room full of monsters that is invoked from a card in the tavern. The interesting aspect is that the way back is blocked until you clear the room. Some special items and enemies are encountered only in a quest.

3. A Level complete screen is displayed when you clear a stage. It shows details of the bonus earned from selling the excess items that were left on stage and awards special cards if certain criteria is met, like giving a card for every hundred of critical hits inflicted, etc.

4. A new way of navigation was implemented - wherever you click on the mini-map your party will find a way and go there automatically. I'm especially happy with this new feature, as it made some cool shortcuts possible, significantly improving the game play flow - for example you can click around a corner or behind walls on the game screen.

5. Locked high tier battles - when you attack some of the hardest enemy parties in the current stage the battle will be played in special conditions and escaping will not be possible by just walking away. (While in battle the player will have the option to cast spells from cards and there will be some spells that would allow the player to escape from a dangerous battle - this will be implemented in the next update)

6. The saving system was improved. Except checkpoints on every stage, the game now creates auto saves and the saves that you make using the new big green save button in the tavern are called manual saves.

7. Countless of smaller improvements that I'm sure will be noticed.

Bug fixes:
1. Level generation bug, where the game was not placing a dungeon exit on stage 4 was fixed.
2. Progress loss issues were fixed.

Enjoy!

Dec 31, 2019

Happy new years!

Garden Paws - bittentoastgames

We hope you had a great 2019 and are ready for 2020! We've sent out an in game letter with some fireworks to help celebrate the new year! This mail will be available for a limited time in game, don't worry the fireworks are always available in game to craft.

New Houses!

We've heard from the community that you'd like some new houses, especially in multiplayer, so that you and your friends can each have your own home. We've added 3 houses for purchase on your way to Franks. These houses can be purchased in single player or multiplayer for 5,000 coin each.

If you'd like to pool your coin together remember you can always turn on/off share shop profits in the settings or purchase a money bag from Mayor Wilson to trade coin.

New Items

There are 3 new recipes, Blueberry Soup, Blueberry Filling and Blueberry Pie.
There are 2 new paintbrushes at the Paintstation. The Winter Paintbrush (10 styles) and the Snow Paintbrush (9 styles). Each one can be used on the walls/floors/custom carpets or custom paintings.
You can now collect snowballs from snow piles in the winter.

Bug Fixes and Patches

Replaced A star pathfinding with Native Navmeshs, hoping that will fix the crashing in the dungeon some people have been experiencing.
That should also fix the issue with customers going behind the counter.
Patchnotes in-game now pull from a remote location so can be updated more easily.
There is now a in-game popup that lets you know if corrupt installation files are detected.
Fixed an issue with the shellfish traps instantly being retrieved after placing.
Fixed an issue that would reset painting in the house walls/floor after visiting the dungeon or other islands.
New Music and SFX for winter island and winter island games.
(Potion Paws Crossover) The Crystal Paw now states in game that it is the habitat for the Cat Ghost.
Some chests have been slightly moved to keep you on your toes.
Lemonade now replenishes 10 stamina.
The Happy Holidays mail has been removed.