DinoSystem News

But it's still advised to start a new game, as some changes could potentially corrupt the save.


VIDEO DEVLOG FULL CHANGELOG



Terrain texture have been upscaled by ~50%, along with some changes in the color palette. There are also improvements in weather effects, like snowflakes made bigger and more visible, enhanced rainbow and sunlight reflections.








Yes, it's true! It's finally possible to remap most of the game controls from the settings menu, including all the Survival Mode actions. In addition to this, most of the default control keys have been changed to reflect the keys used for similiar actions in other games; remember that now you can always change them at will!



One of the most common problems reported by players are the controls: they are difficult to learn and counter intuitive. Although I'm doing my best to improve the situation with little tweaks here and there, in order to effectively change the movements I should made deep changes in the whole system, which is pretty unlikely to happen. Therefore I hope the ability to remap the controls will help improve the situation, at least partially!




Main menu background has been replaced by high quality art from the artist Lukas Jevcak. The new background perfectly recreates the sense of mystery, wonder and loneliness felt during the game, along with the wild, inspiring environment.



The main menu music has been replaced by a longer, more inspiring track. In addition to this, game generation and loading phases pick a random screenshot of the game as background, instead of a black screen.




You have now the option to start as a bald or semi-bald character! Hair will gradually grow during the game, based on your conditions (as in real life, hair can grow more quickly based on some factors like metabolism and nutrition).



This still has no impact on the actual game, and you still can't cut them, but in future I'll expand this system to be more organically intertwined with the game mechanics.




Animals will now avoid (or try avoiding) obstacles from distance, not only when hitting them. This prevents them from always breaking your walls or hitting each other like bumper cars. In addition, several ecology balance tweaks should improve dinosaurs survival on the long term, although the work on this front is still in progress.

About the Taming system that I announced for this update, unfortunately I had to scrap part of the work done so far on it as I wasn't satisfied with it, so it will come with the next update if everything goes well this time!




Needless to say you should check the full changelog under the Survival tab to get a clearer idea of the amount of tweaks done to the Survival Mode.

Just to name a few, Stomach Fullness "cap" relation with metabolism is now inverted: the faster the metabolism, the higher the cap, allowing you to eat more. It also scales partially with Body Fat, which means that being fat urges you to eat more (and get even fatter).

Major rework of how maximum Health and Breath are calculated based on Metabolism, Nutrition/Hydration, body stats and skills.

Most of you will love this one: Building a Thatch or Walls now require less resources (especially wall).

Many, many other things...




This update brings the game to a level of polish that leads me to consider it closer to the full version than the initial alpha version: in few words, it's now over 50% "complete". I've used the quotes because DinoSystem will never be complete, as I'll continue improving it over and over, but there must be a time when I say "ok, it's a proper game now!".

Now let me stop dreaming and back to work, there is still a huge amount of features and content to add!


As always, please report any bugs, deliver suggestions, and help me share the word about DinoSystem!



Dan

But it's still advised to start a new game, as the amount of changes is enormous.


Check the FULL CHANGELOG for the complete list of changes in this update!



Troodon is a small, nimble and smart meat eater covered in feathers, it is more active at night and can hunt in packs. Troodon cares for its youngs even more than the T-Rex, youngsters will follow their mother until adulthood, but they have the bad habit of stealing stuff from other animals nests and.. you, especially when you're sleeping.





This is a little thing that enhance the feel and the variety of the game; the character will now leave footsteps on sand or when the soil is wet...





Flowers will now bloom in spring and, depending on weather and environment, can continue appearing until summer or even autumn. Flowers are not harvestable yet, but will be in a future update, for now they contribute to enrich the environment with colors, especially in spring.

Also, the new "small plants" system built to implement flowers will allow me to add more type of plants and plant-like things, like mushrooms, that will probably come in the next update.






The update brings much more to the table, especially tons of fixes, Survival tweaks, AI improvements, ecology balance fine-tuning, and so on!

Player now inflicts more damage with attacks, especially headshots, T-Rex will no longer chase you during the tutorial (unless you're so stupid to provoke them :P), and you can even start the game in "Peaceful mode", with no T-Rex on the map (especially useful for smaller maps).
Stomach fullness has been reworked to be less restricting, and a simple leaf can be used to threat bloodloss, even if not efficiently.

The amount of tweaks is enormous, and I really recommend to check the full changelog for a more detailed view on this update.



Reaching a point where the ecosystem is perfectly balanced is no easy task, it requires weeks, if not months of work. Before the Troodon was introduced, the balance was quite good, but everything changed with this new actor, and this required me to rebalance many things. Remember that the game does not "cheat" by spawning new animals or killing the ones that are overpopulating, so it was needed to make little changes in reproduction rates, AI, age process and strength of all animal species.

At this time the balance is not bad, but not as good as it was before this update, and it will require some time before it will be balanced again, so don't dispair if species go extinct too soon or take the upper hand.



As announced in the previous post, big updates will now come on a monthly basis, instead of every two weeks, this will allow me to make more important additions in a more relax manner. But smaller updates (for addressing bugs and balancing) will still come often, even more often than usual.

In the upcoming days, I'm going to overhaul the development roadmap, making it more detailed (like UnrealWorld RPG or Dwarf Fortress did), in order to give you a better idea of the general plan.


Thanks for reading all the badly written stuff, and have fun!
(but pls report bugs :P)



Daniel

After a long delay, the next big update featuring the nimble Troodon, along with many improvements, is finally approaching!

The update is going to be live on Tuesday 16th this month!

Unless Steam prevents me to upload the files again, there should be no further delays!

In the meantime, you can check the changelog preview, note that the changelog is evolving and will list more changes when the update is released.


Dan

Next major update is nearly ready, i took few more days to refine some mechanics and make sure everything works as smooth as possible, in order to avoid breaking something (which would require more time to fix later, due to the ecosystem mechanics complexity).

Last week I've been in Florence with my gf for vacation, but took my new laptop with me, so I managed to work on the game in the hotel during the evening (and on the train!). My girlfriend is starting to believe I'm more attached to the DinoSystem development than the rest of my life, which is somewhat true :P.

I apologize for the delay, expect the next update to be released in few days!