Prehistoric Kingdom News

Welcome, Park Managers!

Today, we're inviting you to play Update 8 on the Public Testing Branch! This is an experimental, opt-in version of the game that can be accessed in order to provide feedback, report bugs and help us test before a major release is ready to ship.

We will be releasing hotfixes, improvements and further polishing Update 8 to ensure that this egg has been fully incubated.

[h3]How to Access the Public Testing Branch[/h3]

1. Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library
   
2. Go to Properties
   
3. Betas
   
4. Select 'ptb_public_testing'

Please note that it is not recommended to play Public Testing Branch parks on earlier versions of the game. Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's appropriate channel.

[h3]About Update 8[/h3]
This update brings a huge amount of important changes to the game, including completely rewritten animal locomotion and AI, and a brand new species. The team has also addressed a number of technical issues, bugs and stability fixes that we hope will improve the experience for players.

In rewriting animals from the ground up, we have dramaticaly improved their performance across the board. Much of their code is multi-threaded and designed to spread the workload over as many CPU cores as possible.

This has been a massive undertaking and while there are still improvements and polish to be made to the animals, we cannot understate how important this process has been for the future of the game. As the team works towards future updates, we have even more optimizations coming that will further polish what has been introduced in Update 8.

Optimization continues to be a goal of ours that we are constantly chipping away at with every update, so we thank you for patience and hope that parks with a large number of animals should feel more scalable.


[h2]New Species[/h2]
Meet the park's newest arrival, Velociraptor! This small, carnivorous dinosaur boasts an impressive coat of feathers, decorating its body with elegant wings, a tail fan and a particularly eye catching mohawk.

Velociraptor can be found as a two star animal in Challenge Mode, making it the perfect candidate for an upcoming park.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Animal Rewrite[/h2]
Animals have had their locomotion and AI rewritten from the ground up, giving them new ways to move around, create decisions more organically and introduce some much needed optimizations.

This new foundation has been designed to be as technically modular as possible and will allow the team to more easily support sophisticated AI behaviors like herding, hunting and combat in the future. Through upcoming patches, we will continue improving the quality of our animals.

[h2]Genetic Mutations & Improved Variation[/h2]
In this update, creatures bred from the Animal Nursery now have a chance to be born as an albino, melanistic or leucistic mutation. These mutations are procedurally generated, allowing any skin to mutate and retain their underlying design.

Animals with genetic mutations are rated higher than those that aren't, giving exhibits a nice bump in score if mutations are present.


On top of genetic mutations, all skins now have enhanced individual variation, offering subtle or drastic variation depending on the animal. We hope players will grow an even bigger attachment to the animals in their park with this change!


[h2]Guest Queuing & Improved Decision Making[/h2]
When waiting to ineract with a module, guests will now form small queues to reduce crowding issues in the park.



We've managed to resolve a number of underlying issues with guests that should greatly improve their decision making and how they choose to get around the park. As a result, guest flow and traffic should resolve better and promote a healthier economy.

[h2]Park Beauty[/h2]
Park Beauty is a new gameplay factor that helps influence the park rating. Modules such as power generators, animal nurseries and even dirty habitats create a negative area of influence, lowering the Park Beauty if they overlap with guest visibility.

To combat this, players can block guest sightlines using fences or modular pieces; occluding the area of influence.


Park Beauty can be increased by building gardens, decorated buildings and constructing high scoring habitats that are visible to guests.


[h2]Tropical Biome Overhaul[/h2]
The Tropical biome has been overhauled with 34 foliage items, including a mix of new plants as well as updates to previous species.


[h2]New Biome Presets & Seasonal Arrowwood[/h2]
For this SPOOKY holiday season, we've added two seasonal presets to the Temperate biome! Players can finally paint seasonal variants for the birch, field elm and holm oak in their habitats.

To make the forests really come alive, we also added seasonal variants for the arrowwood bushes, offering a crimson counterpart to the original green versions. We can't wait to see how players decide to use these plants!


[h2]Water Troughs[/h2]
In Update 8, players can now build small or large water troughs for animals to drink from. For all the thirsty animals out there, this one's for you!


[h2]Updated Materials[/h2]
The modern stone brick wall style has had a major revision in Update 8. The new material is higher fidelity and sports a more geometrically consistent look to fit with the modern theme.


The modular rock pieces have also received a texture and material upgrade to make them appear more grounded with grit and edgewear that was missing from the previous iterations. We can't wait to see how great your environments will look!


[h2]Automatic Foliage Removal[/h2]
Modular and path placement actions will automatically remove terrain-bound vegetation from underneath them, making it much easier to expand the park.


[h2]Cinematic Camera[/h2]
A cinematic camera tracking mode is available for non-mini exhibit animals, toggleable through the animal info panel at anytime.

When selecting a newly bred species, the cinematic camera is automatically enabled to coincide with Nigel’s voice lines. Players can disable this functionality in the options menu (per save).

[h2]Nigel's Hints[/h2]
If your animals or habitats have been neglected, Nigel will occasionally chime in to point out issues that need to be addressed. There are 76 new contextual lines across a variety of possible triggers.


[h2]Exhibit Size Requirements[/h2]
The minimum exhibit size requirement has been removed from the game. This means animals will no longer need an arbitrary exhibit size to make them happy. Instead, animals only care about exhibit crowding.

Exhibit crowding compares the physical size of animals against the rest of their habitat. As additional creatures are added, the crowding level will increase. Small animals take up less space, while large animals take up more.

We hope this change makes habitat construction more intuitive and less restrictive!

[h2]Exhibit Water Requirements[/h2]
Due to the addition of the water troughs, the minimum painted water requirement has been removed or reduced for the following animals:

• Brachiosaurus
  
• Camarasaurus
  
• Coelodonta
  
• Coelophysis
  
• Dilophosaurus
  
• Dryosaurus
  
• Edmontosaurus kuukpikensis
  
• Juxia
  
• Mammuthus
  
• Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum
  
• Paraceratherium
  
• Protoceratops
  
• Psittacosaurus
  
• Smilodon
  
• Tarbosaurus

Animals with no minimum painted water requirement do not need lakes in their habitat to be happy.

[h2]Navmesh Regeneration[/h2]
Due to navigation changes introduced in Update 8, players will have to regenerate their navmesh upon loading old saves. This will increase the time it takes to initially load an old save, but resaving your park will prevent the navmesh from being regenerated again.

• Additive animations (e.g. vocalisations, looking around, stretching) require a bit more work before they can be added onto the new locomotion system. This is a high priority for us and we will be rolling out this feature ASAP!
  
• Animal grazing has been disabled while we develop a more dynamic solution that can work in tandem with the new locomotion system
  
• Animals do not animate while in the Nursery
  
• Animals may transition out of eat/drinking unnaturally fast
  
• Animals do not have footstep sounds
  
• Animal navigation view has been disabled while we develop a new implementation
  
• Animal IKs are a work in progress and will be improved with upcoming hotfixes
  
• Some animal interactables can be scaled freely, which may impact their usability or give unnatural results.
  
• There are some issues with desynched data between modular objects and foliage, most commonly experienced when performing undo/redo actions. We are working on a fix for this!
  
• There is a chance for prefabs containing utility or feeder modules to be split in two after performing a specific series of actions. We are actively investigating this issue!
  
• There are some issues impacting the effectiveness of dung beetle nests. Habitats can be manually cleaned out while a hotfix is worked on.
  
• There are some issues present in the tutorial that the team is actively investigating

[h3]Full Patch Notes[/h3]

• NEW ANIMAL: Velociraptor
  • Added Velociraptor mongoliensis, found in the Djadochta Formation! Thanks to its small size, this speedy thief can be one of your starting animals in Challenge Mode.
• NEW: Animal Locomotion Fully Rewritten
  • Animals can now walk in any direction as needed and will seamlessly speed up or down as required. This is our foundation to support more sophisticated AI behaviors and will continue to receive further polish improvements in upcoming patches
• NEW: Animal AI & Decision Making Fully Rewritten
  • Completely overhauled the technical AI backend for animals. This will allow us to more easily expand upon AI-related animal behaviors in the future!
• NEW: Animal Genetic Mutations
  • Players can now randomly breed albino, melanistic and leucistic animals with the improved variation system
• NEW: Guest Queuing and Decision Making Improvements
  • Guests will now create small queues when waiting to use various facilities. Pathfinding and decision making should also be improved
• NEW: Park Beauty
  • Improve beauty around the park to help raise your rating, blocking guest line of sight to infrastructure and dirty habitats with fences or modular pieces. Park beauty can be significantly raised by building gardens and decorated structures!
• NEW: Nigel's Hints
  • Nigel will now chime in to point out animal related management issues. There are 76 new contextual lines across a variety of possible triggers.

• Gameplay
  • Modular and path placement actions now automatically remove wild vegetation from underneath them
    
  • Added a cinematic camera tracking mode to all animals, toggleable through the animal info panel, and automatically triggered when first selecting a newly bred species, coinciding with Nigel’s voice lines. This feature can be disabled in the Options Menu
• Animals
  • Added multiple new one-shot behaviors to animals previously missing them:
    • Nasutoceratops
      
    • Pachyrhinosaurus
      
    • Styracosaurus
      
    • Triceratops
      
    • Protoceratops
      
    • Coelodonta
      
    • Paraceratherium
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Added Large & Small Water Dish, new drinking interaction points for animals
    
  • Added Velociraptor Silhouette piece
• Foliage
  • Added Temperate Seasonal Forest and Seasonal Birch Forest presets
    
  • Added Arrowwood Seasonal 1, 2 and 3
    
  • Added Kapok 2,3 and 4
    
  • Added Banana 2, 3 and 4
    
  • Added Fan Palm 2 and 3
    
  • Added Elephant Ear 2 and 3
    
  • Added Ladyfinger Palm 1 and 2
    
  • Added Jungle Cover 1 and 2
    
  • Added Monstera 2 and included the species into the tropical brush
    
  • Added Palm Grass 2 and included the species into the tropical brush
• Audio
  • Added broadcast and social response calls to the following animals:
    • Argentinosaurus
      
    • Brachiosaurus
      
    • Camarasaurus
      
    • Dryosaurus
      
    • Psittacosaurus
      
    • Smilodon
  • Added broadcast variations to Triceratops
    
  • Added social variations to Deinocheirus
    
  • Added missing sound when Psittacosaurus yawns to sleep
    
  • Added missing sounds to Mammoth behavioral animations
    
  • Entities that are steeply above or below the camera are now muffled, focusing the soundscape on animals that are within view
• GUI
  • Added a brand new animal info panel that will be part of a game-wide UI revamp
    
  • Added options to either change auto-save frequency or disable it entirely, which can be found in the Gameplay Settings

• Gameplay
  • Removed minimum exhibit size requirements from all animals as the crowding need made it redundant
    
  • Removed or reduced minimum water requirement for the following animals:
    • Brachiosaurus
      
    • Camarasaurus
      
    • Coelodonta
      
    • Coelophysis
      
    • Dilophosaurus
      
    • Dryosaurus
      
    • Edmontosaurus kuukpikensis
      
    • Juxia
      
    • Mammuthus
      
    • Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum
      
    • Paraceratherium
      
    • Protoceratops
      
    • Psittacosaurus
      
    • Smilodon
      
    • Tarbosaurus
  • Close-up animal orbiting will now more closely focus an animal’s eyes instead of its jaw/throat
    
  • Instant animal incubation will now work even during paused time
• Animals
  • Updated Smilodon's basic 'Dauntless' skin
    
  • Improved fidelity on Smilodon’s eye texture
    
  • Improved fuzziness for several animals’ fur and feather coats
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Metallic animal statues will no longer glow at night
    
  • Topiaries now cannot be navigated through
    
  • Transparent glass panels no longer cast shadows
    
  • Replaced Modern Stone Brick Wall texture, being higher fidelity & more appropriate for the Modern theme
    
  • Updated all Igneous rock’s textures for higher visual fidelity
    
  • Updated Igneous rock snow overlay texture to be closer to the terrain snow
    
  • Updated LOD distance and material reflection on all bone/skull props
    
  • All bone/skull props can now be properly recolored
• Environment
  • Overhauled Tropical map (old saves not affected)
    
  • Overhauled Scrubland map (old saves not affected)
    
  • Overhauled lighting across all maps
    
  • Replaced Tropical Dirt with a new leaf litter texture
    
  • Adjusted Tropical Sand to appear more granular and less saturated
    
  • Adjusted Tropical Grass to better match the new foliage
    
  • Adjusted Desert Sand to appear less saturated
• Foliage
  • Adjusted all plant colors for a more consistent look
    
  • Adjusted wind simulation settings for almost all foliage to add more ambient sway
    
  • Replaced the previous Kapok, Coconut Palm, Fan Palm, Elephant Ear, Banana Tree and Monstera
    
  • Removed Samanea from the Tropical biome and moved it to Gardening Trees
    
  • Moved seasonal trees from Gardening Trees to the Temperate biome as paintable entities
    
  • Removed shadows from foliage impostors to reduce shadow casters in the scene and smooth out transitions
• Audio
  • Animals
    • All animal sounds are now attached to bones, preventing cases where sounds could previously be “left behind” by animals walking away
      
    • Retooled animal breathing audio to dynamically respond to an animal’s speed, exhaustion and more without relying on animation states
      
    • Various adjustments to distance attenuation including reduced distance falloff on animal sounds for better clarity during top-down gameplay
  • Ambient Soundscape
    • Smoothed out a number of transitions across the ambient soundscape
      
    • Ambient soundscape aesthetic now changes depending on the time of day, with night sounding less bright than day
      
    • Improved weather frequency balance across different camera heights
      
    • Improved random wildlife spawning as well as their audible presence in the world
      
    • Adjusted responsiveness and speed sensitivity of underwater entry sounds
  • Mix
    • Various adjustments to the volume of some animal sounds and UI elements
      
    • Various adjustments to the stereo spread and spatialization of placement and terraforming sounds
    Reverb
    • All reverb now remains active even when time is paused (provides a less flat experience when placing objects or listening to ambience)
      
    • Field reverb no longer reflects low frequencies and creates more realistic early reflections
      
    • Distant reverb now takes prominent effect further away and can be passively activated by loud sounds over a certain threshold (noticeable on animal broadcasts or mammoth trumpets)
• Visuals
  • CTAA implementation has been fixed, resulting in substantially better anti-aliasing
    
  • Improved graphical fidelity of mist atmospherics
    
  • Drastically improved overcast and storm visuals
    
  • Reduced large scale ambient occlusion intensity
    
  • Reduced ambient reflections during midday and day/night transitions for a more natural look
    
  • Glass graphics now display ambient reflections and render properly during atmospherics conditions
• GUI
  • Structure items and prefabs are now always displayed in the GUI, even if their theme hasn’t been unlocked yet. Instead, they will show up with a ‘lock’ overlay and a tooltip pointing you to their respective research item
    
  • The ‘Remove Vegetation’ toggle in the Landscaping menu can now be toggled off, switching the plant action back to add mode
    
  • Improved Notification Popup behavior, with pop-ups now being bundled into broader categories, minimizing the amount of repeating notifications
• Tutorial
  • A pop-up indicator will now more promptly alert the player of existing objectives

• Critical
  • Drastically improved user action stability - on the event of a faulty action, the game will more safely shut down the action, preventing players from getting hardlocked into action states
    
  • Fixed multiple minor memory leaks
    
  • Fixed another research unlock initialization edge case
    
  • Fixed an issue in the Waste system that could cause loading hangs
    
  • Water Remove Brush previously didn’t refresh the terrain water drinking system
    
  • Fixed a number of small bugs that could break loading
• Animals
  • Potentially fixed an old issue causing certain animal skins to display exploding fur/feather coats
    
  • Fixed a number of incorrect idle positions across animal animations
    
  • Improved navmesh check during animal placement
    
  • Drastically improved natural drinking point generation stability
• UX
  • Stopped stutters from spinning the camera view
    
  • Fixed the camera stutter during animal tracking mode
    
  • Fixed an issue causing the weather transitions to be timescale independent
    
  • Fixed an issue with the red and green power indicator arrows being turned on at the same time in the power management view, indicating conflicting results
    
  • Fixed issue causing Screenshot mode to not initialize properly when started while a management menu is open
    
  • Fixed a minor button collision issue in the main menu
• Audio
  • Fixed camera height audio parameter not using its full range
    
  • Fixed issue that prevented wildlife sounds from playing on the Tropical map
    
  • Fixed large skin loop foley from playing on small animals
    
  • Fixed an issue that prevented field reverb from creating a stereo image (all entity sounds should now appear wider)

• Animal IKs rewritten to be fully multi-threaded (more optimizations coming here!)
  
• Animal AI rewrite computes the AI across all CPU threads now
  
• Visitor AI now uses CPU threads more effectively
  
• Optimized animal audio processing
  
• Optimized distant tree rendering
  
• Optimized foliage colliders
  
• Optimized foliage texture resolution
  
• A number of minor systems also use multi-threading now

Welcome to the September Development Update!

To begin this month’s diary, we’d like to share that the team is very confident in an October release for Update 8! The core development phase has finished and we have now moved on to testing, finalizing and ensuring all animals have been upgraded successfully.

This update was originally slated for July and has taken a much longer time to finish than initially anticipated. The further we went into Update 8, the more unforeseen but addressable issues appeared, requiring immense levels of planning, teamwork and refactoring to eventually get this release across the finish line.

We have focused on getting all the underlying animal systems to feature parity with what players are used to, in addition to making them highly expandable and much more performant. This new base for the animals will allow us to easily make changes and additions in the future, as opposed to before, where the animals essentially did not change since release.

Update 8 has been a massive endeavor, so we’d like to thank you all for waiting patiently while our team worked hard over the last few months. It’s been an enormous collaboration between all departments and now that it’s almost ready, will allow us to do so much more with the animals going forward!






As one of the final steps for Update 8, we’ll be porting all of our species across to the new ‘AnimalsV2’ architecture, our latest collection of AI, locomotion and audio components that have been in development for the last few months.

Porting the old animals is extremely fast thanks to new editor tooling that allows us to not only upgrade existing animals, but set up brand new species with significant automation.

This new pipeline has tons of advantages, but perhaps the most important to players is how easy it is for us to customize behavioral differences between species. With a few simple sliders, we can now change things like an animal’s fleetness, metabolism or how much food they need to consume before they’re full. As new AI behaviors are added in future patches, it’ll be very easy to plug them into factors like playfulness, boldness and sociality.



[h2]Optimization Improvements[/h2]
It might come as a bit of a shock to some players, but animals are actually one of the worst performing things in the live game. In some key areas, however, we’ve managed to improve the animal performance in Update 8 tenfold.

One of these key areas is our brand new in-house IK system that has been developed exclusively for the needs of Prehistoric Kingdom. For our more tech-oriented fans, the old IK system took 62 milliseconds (!!!) to process limb adjustment for 400 quadrupedal animals. From an in-development test, however, our new solution only took 3 milliseconds for the same amount of critters, offering up to a 20x improvement in IK performance.

Another substantial optimization has actually been animal audio processing. In Update 8, we now cull sounds early based on an animal’s level of detail. This prevents small, detail-oriented sounds from ever triggering if the player is too far away, cutting down on wasted processing.


Before the October release of Update 8, let’s take one last look at all the major improvements coming in this patch. The full, extensive changelog will be available on Steam at the release of Update 8.

[h2]Animals[/h2]
[h3]New Species[/h3]


Boasting an impressive crest and sickle-shaped claws, it’s almost time for everyone’s favorite speedy thief to join the kingdom. Like all the animals in Update 8, Velociraptor will of course be making use of our brand new locomotion and AI.

[h3]Animal Overhaul[/h3]
To recap, animals will be navigating seamlessly using strafes, walking backwards and turning on the spot as part of their general locomotion state. They are very fluid, reactive and can move between walking or running as needed.

Some creatures, like quadrupeds, even have trotting animations to smooth out that dynamic transition. You can see some work in progress debug footage below!

Footage slightly sped up to fit into a gif!

We’ve also redone our audio breathing system to better take advantage of the new fluid locomotion. Influenced by an animal’s speed and exertion, the pitch, intensity and frequency of their breath will respond to the current circumstances of an animal. If they’ve been running for a while, it might take longer for their breathing to steady.

We’d like to take this even further in the future by making an animal’s health or sickness audible through how they breathe, clueing players into potential issues.

[h3]New Interactables[/h3]
As of Update 8, animals will seek out hay beds to rest or sleep, finally giving your prehistoric pals the sweet dreams they deserve.



We should note that at release, hay beds will only allow one animal to rest on them at a time (apparently genetic engineering makes them selfish). This is something we’d definitely like to improve, but in the meantime, we’d recommend making use of multiple beds in a habitat for the best results.

For the thirsty animals in your park, we’re pleased to announce that the long awaited modules, water troughs, are finally going to be included in Update 8. Available in large and small sizes, water troughs are a great solution for habitats that are too small or too uniquely shaped to comfortably contain lakes.



A small yet hopefully appreciated feature we’ve worked on is physicalized interaction points for feeders, water troughs and lakes. Rather than ensuring animals line up exactly where they need to when eating or drinking, they’ll instead check for valid head placements.

This results in a far more natural behavior where animals can be seen eating or drinking from random angles, so long as their head reaches the goal!

[h3]Genetic Mutations & Variation[/h3]
When players create new animals in Update 8, there’s a random chance for them to be born as an albino, melanistic or leucistic mutation.

An albino and melanistic Edmontosaurus.

These mutations are procedurally generated, not a preset texture. This means that for every skin, they can mutate and vary in unique ways while preserving the underlying look of an animal (note the subtle patterning on the albino above).

This extends to our variation system, too. Every individual animal will have a unique hue, saturation or brightness that’s restricted to a pattern mask, providing far more natural results than what was in the game previously.

The two Brachiosaurus below have the same skin, yet they’re quite distinct thanks to this enhanced variation!



[h2]Gameplay[/h2]
[h3]Park Beauty[/h3]
Park Beauty is a new component of park rating, requiring players to build their park in an optimal way that keeps your aesthetic seamless and beautiful.

Gardens in particular are a great way to boost Park Beauty, while foliage, fences, walls and decorations can help to reduce the impact caused by infrastructure or dirty habitats.



[h3]Guest Needs & Queuing[/h3]
Guest needs have been re-tuned along with a number of bug fixes that previously impacted how guests interacted with the economy. We’ve been able to make a few pathfinding updates along with the brand new queuing feature that should make guest traffic a lot more manageable and hopefully, predictable.

Players can tune into the Guest Needs management view to locate high quantities of disatisfied visitors.



[h3]Nigel’s Hints[/h3]
If your animals or habitats have been neglected, Nigel will occasionally chime in to point out issues that need to be addressed. There are 76 new contextual lines across a variety of possible triggers.

[h2]Visual Improvements[/h2]
[h3]Tropical Biome Rework[/h3]
Including 34 foliage items, the tropical biome overhaul features a mix of brand new species and remastered classics ranging from lush monsteras to towering kapoks!



[h3]Updated Tropical Map[/h3]
In Update 8, the tropical map itself has had a makeover, too. The playable area was remade to better incorporate the updated plants with new forests, waterways, waterfalls and prairies.

Existing tropical parks will not be affected by these changes.



[h3]Updated Scrubland Map[/h3]
The scrubland map has also had its playable space revamped. The landscape has become much more forested with natural swamps and layers of rock dotting the horizon.

Existing scrubland parks will not be affected by these changes.



[h3]Updated Materials[/h3]
Modular glass now displays ambient reflections and renders more accurately during atmospheric conditions.



We’ve also updated the Modern Stone Brick wall textures to better fit our vision for the Modern theme and improve fidelity. Like before, this is a recolorable material.



[h3]Updated Atmospherics, Lighting & Color Grading[/h3]
As you might’ve been able to tell by some of the screenshots in this dev diary, we’ve updated the lighting and atmospherics on every map to make them look even better. The game should look a lot more balanced, real and rich in color.

[h2]Quality of Life Improvements[/h2]
[h3]Cinematic Camera Tracking[/h3]
A cinematic camera tracking mode will be available for non-mini exhibit animals, toggleable through the animal info panel at anytime.

When selecting a newly bred species, the cinematic camera is automatically enabled to coincide with Nigel’s voice lines. If too disrupting, players can disable that functionality in the options menu.



[h3]Auto-Foliage Removal[/h3]
Modular and path placement actions will automatically remove terrain-bound vegetation from underneath them, making it much easier to expand the park.



[h3]Auto-Save Options[/h3]
Added options to either change auto-save frequency or disable it entirely, which can be found in the Gameplay Settings!


For the next few updates, we will be focusing on content driven releases now that the animal overhaul is almost out of the way. This means we can get back to more regularly scheduled updates that include new animals, maps, and modular items while we work on bigger features in the background.

To reflect this, we’ve divided our Trello into current and planned developments. When we’re confident in a feature being ready (e.g. staff, animal behaviors) we’ll move it into one of the update columns on the right.



Our art, audio and animation teams have worked up quite the backlog, so these content updates will come much faster than Update 8. Behind the scenes, the programming team will continue to work on developing staff, improving guests and expanding animal gameplay through new behaviors and staff integration.


Following the next release, we have Update 9; our Grassland update.

This patch will be dropping with 3 new animal species, featuring the big-nosed Australian icon, Muttaburrasaurus. Joining this animal are some not yet revealed mystery creatures, some of which should hopefully scratch a fan-favorite off your wishlist. You’ll hear more about these remaining species closer to the release of Update 9…



In terms of landscaping, this update will of course include the Grassland biome - a gorgeous selection of grasses dominated by a variety of acacia and marula trees. This is a highly versatile biome and will be retroactively added to animals like Smilodon.

To conclude Update 9, we’ll also include a brand new map set deep in the heart of a Tanzanian crater. This flat landscape is perfect for those looking for an easy building experience due to its lack of dense foliage or extensive waterways.

Please stay tuned for information regarding Update 9’s release after Update 8.






Created by Edhelluin.


Created by CZARNOBOG.


Created by 1ncognito.



Thank you for reading September dev diary!

We hope you’re ready to finally get your hands on Update 8 in the next few weeks. It’s a really big update, and although it took longer than expected, we’re happy with it and are just so excited to finally have the opportunity to build out what could be a really interesting and engaging simulation for the animals.

Please keep your eye on our socials for the release announcement, the team cannot wait to have you back in the game!

- The PK Team

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Discord
• Reddit
• YouTube

Welcome to the August Development Update!

In this blog post, the team will be sharing some exciting announcements as well as providing more progress on both Update 8 and Update 9.



That’s right! A digital artbook and mini-soundtrack will be released onto Steam later this year to coincide with one of our next major updates. Whether you’d like to appreciate the work of our artists or listen to some Jurassic jams, we’ll have you covered.

THE ART OF PREHISTORIC KINGDOM

• Over 100 pages of concept art and insight to the development process, exploring not just animals, but guests, structures and more!
  
• Includes artist interviews, notes and exclusive artwork.
  

A WALK IN THE PARK: MUSIC FROM PREHISTORIC KINGDOM

• 30 minutes of music from Challenge mode, the Animal Nursery and opening tutorial.
  
• 15 tracks (including 4 bonus map medleys).
  
• Updated arrangements for challenge mode tracks.
  

Eligible backers and early adopters from both Kickstarter and Crytivo will receive Steam keys to redeem their goods once available. Stay tuned for information regarding pricing, keys and release dates!


Before talking about animals and Update 8, let’s quickly discuss how things are going! To start, there’ve been a bunch of under the hood improvements to improve the game’s stability across the board, with many hopefully going on to address numerous crash reports.

Guests have also been further improved since last month, now including a fully complete queuing system and more fluid navigation. This means that your visitors should be less likely to clump up and must patiently wait their turn to use interaction points. Imagine a conveyor belt, but for humans.

In basically every area, guests are vastly more robust and as a result the economy should be much more stable, too!



It might surprise you, but all of this work on guests is actually being done in preparation for staff! We’re not quite ready to publicly talk about our plans for staff yet, but from a development perspective, staff are functionally just special guests with some unique abilities and navigation rules.

Once the long-awaited animal rework has been released in Update 8, we’ll be diving straight into development on staff, including mechanics for one of the game’s new central pillars: logistics management. This is an evolution of the Produce Station gameplay we spoke of in June’s dev diary, now better designed to work with staff integration.

Please stay tuned for more news on staff over the coming months, but for now, let’s talk animals.

[h2]Animals[/h2]


The animal rework has been progressing very well. We made great headway with animals in August, and have got them wandering around and recognizing interactables with the new locomotion systems.

Animals make choices depending on their internal statistics like stamina, endurance, health and metabolism. These stats push and pull on an animal’s needs, determining when they should rest, find food and how long their meal will last before they must eat again. Seemingly simple mechanics like this weren’t part of the old AI system, and will have a huge impact on future features like hunting.

Perhaps the biggest “downside” to all this AI work is that it’s very hard to visualize not only in devlogs, but even while we’re working on it! To help us, we’ve built robust editor tooling that allows us to more accurately debug and see what animals are doing.

This viewer shows a series of tasks animals must complete to accomplish their main goal, shifting columns depending on what has the current priority.



Tools like this are crucial as we make animals more reactive and lively. Speaking of, we’ve been working towards improving how additive and behavioral animations are handled. The goal is to let the AI contextually decide when to play animations so that animals can better express themselves (e.g. socializing, becoming angry, resting) rather than relying on simple timers as per the current implementation.

On top of this, we’re working towards a basic herding implementation that will allow animals to form social groups. Each species has its own natural group sizing, whether that’s a large herd, organized pack or small pairing.

The AI will naturally form multiple groups within a habitat if there are too many individuals of a given species, laying the potential foundation for future combat encounters and territorial disputes. This is an area that we’ll definitely be expanding upon down the line once fighting is in!

[h2]Update Timeline[/h2]
In a couple of weeks, we should be able to give you a concrete release date for Update 8. Once the systems side of the animal rework has been completed, we will not only need to port the current creatures over, but thoroughly test and ensure they’re park ready.

After the release of Update 8, we will be able to return to more regular content drops that add new species, pieces and maps. There’s not too much longer to wait!


[h2]Update 9: New Species[/h2]
The park’s newest guest will be arriving from the land down under… Can you hear the thunder? Say hello to Muttaburrasaurus!

This iconic Australian dinosaur lived during the early Cretaceous period, measuring in at around 8 meters long. Despite walking on only two legs, Muttaburrasaurus can be seen adopting a quadrupedal stance while drinking or going to lay down.



Like other members of its group, this animal is best characterized by its large, protruding nose, giving way to some particularly snuffly vocalizations and snorts! Muttaburrasaurus will be making its way into your parks once Update 9 is released.

[h2]Update 9: Swimming[/h2]
Along with new species, we’ve also been hard at work creating animation sets for the upcoming swimming behavior. Some animal groups are natural swimmers, graceful and efficient. Others are, uh, thankful they haven’t drowned yet. Please look forward to seeing animals hit the water in Update 9!




Created by AwesomeAnth.


Created by gemini98.


Created by Mealie.



Thank you for reading August’s dev diary!

We hoped you enjoyed this month’s progress update and that you’re looking forward to getting a closer look at the artbook and soundtrack later this year.

As stated, we expect things to pick up pretty quickly once Update 8 is released. Development has been progressing very well and we anticipate the announcement of a release date in the next couple of weeks.

Until next time,

- The PK Team

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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!

[h2]Animals[/h2]
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!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

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!

[h2]New Species[/h2]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
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.



[h2]Tropical Biome Update[/h2]
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.



[h2]Gameplay: Park Beauty[/h2]
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.

[h2]Gameplay: Produce Stations[/h2]
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.



[h2]Gameplay: Produce Storage[/h2]
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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