DevLog #14 - February
Welcome to February’s development update!
While this devlog isn’t as gameplay-filled as last month’s, we still have a lot of in-game goodies to keep everyone hooked! Ready to dig in?
February saw the celebration of Prehistoric Kingdom’s 5th birthday anniversary; something that seemingly came out of nowhere!
The team and project alike have changed greatly since its inception in 2014, altering and evolving to get us to our current goals and work environment. The love and support of our fans, backers and oldest prehistoric veterans means a lot to us, so thank you for sticking with us along the way.
Behind the scenes we’ve mainly been working on polishing up currently implemented features and continuing to improve the user experience but of course there’s always more to that!
Level Design
Since finalizing most of our Tropical Wet island, Mau started work on the next climate; Mediterranean!
This time around there’s dozens of tiny archipelagos to the north of the island, with sloping hills and flat terrain across the main surface. With a few buildings placed around the park it’s easy to see how much building space there is!
Once we get the game into your hands, our Greek archipelago is sure to lend itself to some creative monorail tracks and park layouts!
Path System
Seeing a bit of development love from our coding wizard Matt, the path system is currently in its early days. There’s still much to do in the way of polishing and making them look nicer with borders, however, it’s a good start!
Like we did last month for the terraforming and fences, we’ll be sharing a demonstration video once we’ve made them nicer to use. Stay tuned!
Music System
Much to our composer’s delight, ambient tracks will now morph between full or light versions of a given piece depending on the time of day. Thanks, Mau!
https://youtu.be/wxGVclkCheA
Due to the length of month cycles and music frequency in testing, we’ve had some amazing sunrises accompanied by our own swelling orchestra. Since this system is so flexible, we plan to give the same functionality to animal introductions and breakout music.
Building Concept Art & Models
Although there weren’t a whole lot of new structures this month, our shipping harbour got a total makeover to better suit the quality of recent buildings using Nathan’s excellent workflow techniques. Cleaner and sharper than ever, we’re greatly looking forward to creating its in-game animations and UI!
The Visitor Dock received some extra love with higher quality textures, more detail and an adjusted mesh that now includes lights and benches!
In-Game Foliage Updates
Since the release of SpeedTree 8 we’ve been able to get a hold of some excellent tropical and mediterranean foliage assets to populate our islands with. Big palms, little palms – we got ‘em!
Tropical Wet Foliage
Mediterranean Foliage
Some climates like the Tropical Wet will naturally include ferns on their grass surfaces to better match their real world counterparts and get auto-generated when terrain painting with the right texture.
Animation
Like last month, Mau and Nathan both worked in unison to successfully create the animations for the dromaeosaur rig. With its intimidating size and large sickle claws, Utahraptor has quickly become one of the most fascinating species in the animal roster.
Cunning and full of bird-like influence, we hope you enjoy February’s animation reel!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP7h6e3XwCY
In the sound department, Byron’s been working on brand new sounds for our Utahraptor in addition to new tracks for various parts of the game. Across all title pieces, ambient tracks and event cues, the game is going to have quite a bit of music!
Music
Straight from our last animation video, Chaos Theory is a new track that will play (and loop) during an animal breakout! Loaded with percussion and some feisty brass, your guests will be running in no time.
https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/chaos-theory
Bronto Burgers is another of our bespoke looping pieces written specifically for a building in the park. As the title suggests, this funky food theme can be heard from Fast Food Kiosks while they’re active.
https://soundcloud.com/byronmckay/bronto-burgers-extra
New Skins
Before jumping into the last handful of theropods and oddities, Cindy prepared the remaining alt skins for our defensive Thyreophorans; Miragaia longicollum, Edmontonia rugosidensis, Sauropelta edwardsorum and Ankylosaurus magniventris.
In addition to the thyreophorans, Utahraptor received its final skin from September’s DevLog!
With the second largest number of dig sites available on a single continent in Early Access, Asia features a diverse range of extinct fauna from the Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene, and Quaternary.
The inbox is where you’ll find all your incoming messages from the outside world and get a monthly summary of how your park’s operating.
Offers
Offers make a return from tycoons of the past as a way for players to complete optional objectives and earn rewards for their accomplishments.
Organisations, museums and other eager entities may approach your park with requests to see certain animals or different objectives completed in order to present the player with a variety of benefits like money, science points and even positive park reputation.
Some excavation teams and museums can even offer their excess findings in favour of adding living, breathing specimens to the park!
Dig Results
Once a dig team has finished, their findings from an active site will be sent to the player’s inbox.
Park Rating
In addition to an on-screen popup, the park rating recap shows all new unlocks and available research.
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Thank you for reading February’s Devlog!
March will oversee the near completion of one of the first large builds of the game, one we’re gonna make sure to showcase as soon as it becomes available.
– The PK Team
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If you would like to check out our past blog posts, you can head to the official one here!