Prehistoric Kingdom News

Welcome to March’s Development Update!

In this month’s devlog we’ll be taking a look at what we’ve been working on, what the community’s been up to and the response to our latest release!

Created by Rudi Rennkamel.



To start, we want to thank everyone who has participated in the alpha (roughly 1,300 people). You’re all building some amazing stuff and the team is extremely happy to hear the excitement in the community.

Detailed in our last livestream, there’s a number of additions and improvements we’re working on for the alpha. Since then, the team’s decided to reschedule the addition of the Viewing Platform and building state icons for beta so that we can properly introduce their mechanics at a more appropriate time. Overall, we’re expecting support for alpha to come to an end in early April, though this may be extended if major issues arise.



On a more musical note (pun intended), our composer and sound designer Byron began writing and planning out the new soundtrack earlier in March. This time around we’re aiming to create a very dynamic score, one that’s adaptive and built around a layered music system. We’ve learned a lot about modern audio implementation over the last year, and we really wanted to do the potential of this game’s music justice.

Though a lot of the original melodies and motifs will carry over in some form or another, we hope you look forward to hearing some fresh work in the upcoming beta.






As you may have already seen in alpha footage, our visitors are able to fully navigate in, on and around modular structures. This is a real game changer, as it means that guests do not solely rely on paths to get around your park.

Naturally, this also allows users to build custom bridges without the need for elevated paths! If there’s a navigable area between a guest and their destination, they’ll use it.

Created by @leafzproduction

This functionality extends to guest pathfinding in general, allowing them to walk along building foundations as if a path were underneath them.



Pathfinding is something that will be continually tweaked over time, and we already have a bunch of ideas on how to improve it. It’s got huge potential and we can’t wait to make it the best we can.


Thanks to great feedback from our lovely alpha players, we’ve started working on some tweaks and updates to our user interface. Please note that these changes will not be available until beta.

UI Concept Art (Nursery Update)

For the Nursery, we noted that some players struggled to find the animal creation box. With these adjustments, we hope to make that area more digestable as the “main” workspace. Some more miscellaneous enhancements were made too, tweaks like centralizing the animal’s name and various balances to the overall piece.

When it comes to construction, however, there were a few things that we needed to communicate better:

• When am I editing a group?
  A new screenborder, group header and dedicated exit button will appear when a player enters a group. A subtle audio cue will also play.
  

• What are the keybinds?
  On-screen keybinds will be bigger and more specific to what the user is actually doing, eliminating excess visual noise and hopefully inspiring new players to give them a glance. If you’re a master though, these floating keybinds can be turned off in the options menu.
  

For the toolbox in general, we’ll be splitting it into two components for centralized access: settings, and customization. What appears in the respective windows will be context sensitive, dependant on what’s currently ready for placement or what’s selected in the world.

UI Concept Art (Modular Toolbox, Keybinds, and Group Editing Overlay)

UI Concept Art (Modular Toolbox Customization)

This change will give players the ability to select multiple items in a group and change the textures of walls, roofs and rocks at the same time, something that isn’t allowed in the current UI.

Remember though, this is context senstive! If a roof piece is selected, only the Roof Material panel will appear for customization. What does or doesn’t show is entirely based on what you’re doing.

[h2]Building State Icons[/h2]
To help with general usability, building state icons will be added during beta to better display what’s needed from the player at a moment’s notice. These remain a consistent size on screen, but scale down over distance.

We should note that these are reserved for things that require your attention or that are time-sensitive, we don’t want to overwhelm the player with non-critical information. Passive things like incubation timers are in a friendly bubble, and bad things are in red-black hexagons.

Concept Art (Building State Icons)


It’s big, it’s bold and it honks! Meet our redesigned Lambeosaurus, a surprise change that wasn’t properly unveiled until alpha’s launch. This animal has quickly become a favourite amongst alpha players with its unique calls and vibrant skin variation.



Apart from a bunch of lovely new designs, we tweaked a number of key features like its facial anatomy and of course, the new giant tail! This one’s for you, Big Paul.



In case you haven’t seen any gameplay from the alpha, there have been loads of fantastic content creators covering it in extreme detail. Though we sadly can’t showcase everybody, these are some great starting points!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Beta & Early Access Roadmap[/h2]



Looking at our release roadmap, this is where the game is headed in 2021.

It’s very important to note that these are estimated dates as we are taking community feedback into account during both alpha and beta. We want to release a stable product for Early Access and we will take the time necessary to do so if it ensures a more premium experience.

Our next milestone, beta, will be introducing a bunch of improvements, new features and animals on top of the six available in alpha. This is very exciting for us, as with every major release our project feels more and more like a game.

Some mechanics that were closely tied to staff (e.g. animal food production) have been pushed back as an update post-EA launch to help ease the development schedule. As always, we’ll be providing insight into what’s changing or what’s being added in future devlogs.

Created by ChasmosaurLuke.


Created by JurassicRiley.


Created by TheBeachDog.


Created by Zekin.


Created by LionRider.


Created by OfManyVoices.

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Thank you for reading March’s devlog!

Alpha’s been brilliant so far, and the team is hard at working on some new hotfixes and patches that’ll be out very soon. Once again, thanks so much to all of our supporters - whether you’ve been with us for years or days, we’re happy you’re here.

Until next time,

- The PK Team

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Welcome, park managers!

After taking the week-end off, we're back working around the clock to address the most urgent issues reported by the community in the last few days. Today's update revolves around massive memory optimizations, and several UX improvements, especially with regards to the modular system.

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Animals
  • Fixed an issue that caused animal IKs not to update if time was stopped or if they were being moved, eliminating a lot of the janky leg stretching.
    

• Guests
  • Guests now avoid walking inside Mini-Aviaries.
    

• Construction
  • Fixed issue with multiple terrain masks multiplying their intensity together (especially noticeable on paths and path junctions).
    
  • Fixed terrain masks for paths and reduced their radius, as they were too large. This should allow players to terraform and paint water far closer to paths than previously allowed.
    
  • Fixed selection collision for several items, including tarps, awnings and mulch pieces.
    
  • Fixed several modular bugs hidden under the hood, some of these should hopefully prevent selection states getting stuck. If selection issues persist, please keep reporting them on our Git Issues page.
    

• UI/UX
  • Fixed an issue with Vsync setting where it would fail to apply.
    
  • Camera controls and several other keybinds (such as M for movement), don’t fire when using renaming inputs.
    

• Misc.
  • Resolved game references to old, unused assets.
    

[h3]Changes[/h3]

• Construction
  • Reduced terrain mask radius for buildings.
    
  • Modular pieces can now collide with fences.
    

• Guests
  • Reduced general guest density by ~75%.
    

• UI/UX
  • Transitioned user action cancellation to Right Mouse Up instead of Right Mouse Down. This makes it possible to rotate the camera through RMB and not accidentally cancel an action (for those users that don’t utilize MMB to orbit with the camera).
    
  • Refined sensitivity for gizmo snapping rotation.
    
  • Clicking anywhere outside of the HUD while in advanced editing will now apply the current edit.
    

[h3]Additions[/h3]

• Animals
  • Added social vocal animations to Nasutoceratops, Styracosaurus and Tyrannosaurus.
    
• Construction
  • Added a Chainlink piece to the 'Structural Elements' modular menu. This piece has world-space textures, so its visual fidelity should remain high no matter its scale.
    

[h3]Performance[/h3]

• Reduced the game’s memory usage by ~30-35%. You should experience less crashes loading into a new game. This should hopefully fix many issues loading modular groups and items from existing saves.
  
• Added an FPS limit option to the graphical settings, which should decrease GPU consumption for some machines. Further rendering optimizations are still ongoing.
  

[h3]Notes[/h3]
In the odd case your saves don't show up on the load menu when you start the game, worry not, they are still there! A restart should fix the issue until we can look at it in a future patch.

Going forward, you can expect more work to be put into animal and guest AI, which should be our focus for the next few updates.

Welcome, park managers!

Prehistoric Kingdom’s Closed Alpha has finally arrived! An early version of the game is now available to play for eligible alpha tier backers and early adopters. If you should have access and currently don’t, please consult our previous blog post to find your key.

If you’re having issues, please get in touch with Crytivo support so we can get your key delivered to you! Any delayed keys or problems with receiving them is an honest mistake and we want to make sure everybody who needs a key gets one.

Now, let’s get into the details!



These are our core features currently available in the alpha, offering a small selection of sandbox and work-in-progress challenge mode features for you to play with.

We are so excited to see what the alpha players come up with. Even from our VIPs we’ve seen some insane builds thanks to our suite of creative tools and extended functionality like full modular pathfinding on both the animals and guests - how cool is that?!

The visitors can be a little funky to look at (all male guests went to the same barber!), but their pathing capabilities are what counts here. Their visuals and animations will be drastically improved with time.



Everything has room for improvement and alpha is no exception! Over the next few weeks we’ll be providing stability fixes and a handful of content additions such as absent animal behaviours like eating and drinking.

On the user experience front, building state icons are one of the things we’ll be adding to better signify structures that require power or buildings that have reached guest capacity. Currently, the power status of a building is only displayed in the Management View or in its UI popup when selected, so it’s definitely something we’ll be improving.

[h2]Release Roadmap[/h2]
As discussed in a recent livestream with Crytivo, we’ve provided an updated roadmap for our release schedule as well as what you can expect to see from beta.

It’s very important to note that these are estimated dates as we are taking community feedback into account during both alpha and beta. We want to release a stable product for Early Access and we will take the time necessary to do so.



We’ll also be adding a few more animals into the beta on top of our current six present in the alpha.


As we’re still working on setting up support for custom keybinds in-game, please refer to the sheet below for various inputs. Building actions do have on-screen prompts, however! Players can also access a Help menu by pressing F1 or by navigating to the left side of the screen.




Though we are already aware of various issues in the build, we felt that these were the most pressing to notify alpha players about to prevent duplicate reports.

Animals

• Certain slopes may cause quadrupeds to be angled weirdly.
  
• Returning to a quadruped from a distance may cause its body IKs to briefly freak out.
  
• Creatures may get stuck or stop moving. Picking up and replacing the animal should fix them.
  
• IK issues can cause creatures to jitter or render their animations at a lower frame rate.
  

Creative

• Painting water at different heights can cause slight water plane “bleeding” on large slopes when placed directly next to each other. This can be fixed by smoothing the slope.
  
• Hard slope limits haven’t been introduced for terrain tools like raising and roughen, resulting in unnaturally sharp pillars or “spikes” if used excessively.
  
• Some terrain tools can be a little too quick at max intensity (raise, roughen).
  
• Forests can become overly dense at max brush intensity very quickly.
  
• Modular grid visualization can become offset. This is purely visual and does not alter the building mechanics.
  
• Due to its massive size, there can be unintended edge cases with the modular system. For more specific details, please refer to the GitHub.
  

Misc.

• Saving is still somewhat experimental! Please make multiple saves to ensure you do not lose progress.
  
• Cancelling actions can cause painted trees to disappear for a single frame.
  
• Paths can experience lots of visual artifacts, especially on slopes. This will improve throughout Alpha.
  

To report more issues or UX suggestions, please visit here.


Due to some issues we’ve disabled planar reflections until we can get them ready for general use. We’ve implemented makeshift screen-space reflections for now, though you may notice missing data in areas that should be reflected as black. This is a temporary workaround until more time can be spent on improving it.

There’s also a lot of audio and related systems to cover, which means certain actions like modular group duplication, water bodies and guest crowds are silent. Some of these areas will be updated with sounds during alpha support.

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If you have any further questions, please be sure to contact Crytivo’s support or get in touch with us through Twitter, Facebook or Discord.

Thank you for all your support so far. For those of you joining us in the alpha, we hope you enjoy your time with it! Once everyone has had enough time to understand our tools and the way the game is played, we’re expecting to see some truly fantastic stuff.

Until next time,

- The PK Team

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Welcome to our Alpha Information Update!

This is a quick post providing an update on key distribution and pre-orders. Please read this carefully as we want to ensure you receive your key in time for alpha on March 19th!

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[h2]Key Distribution[/h2]
[h3]Crytivo Alpha Buyers[/h3]
For those of you who purchased Ranger Alpha or the previous alpha tiers (Ranger, Tycoon) via the Crytivo store, you will be receiving new Steam keys in the coming days. Any existing keys you may have used will be revoked as new ones are going to be automatically assigned to your account.

To find your key, you’ll need to log into the Crytivo website using your account and proceed to the dashboard. In the games library you will be able to locate your new key for Prehistoric Kingdom.

[h3]Kickstarter Alpha Backers[/h3]
Backers who bought through Kickstarter, please visit the Crytivo website. From here you will need to sign in and select Forgot Password, then enter the email address you used with Kickstarter. If you have already migrated your account in the past, this step isn’t necessary.

Once your account has been migrated, you can proceed to the dashboard. In the games library you will be able to locate your new key for Prehistoric Kingdom.

[h2]Pre-Purchase Availability[/h2]
After March 19th, all tiers on the Crytivo store will no longer be available to pre-purchase. If you would like to be part of alpha and beta testing (or to simply grab a copy in advance), this is the final call until Early Access launches later this year.

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If you have any further questions, please be sure to contact Crytivo’s support or get in touch with us through Twitter, Facebook or Discord.

Until next time,

- The PK Team

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Welcome to February’s Development Update!

With much anticipation, it’s finally time to talk about alpha release plans and all the new content we’ve been working on behind the scenes. There’s a lot of important information in this one folks, so make sure you read it thoroughly.







Save the date, Prehistoric Kingdom’s alpha will be available March 19th!

Explore the game’s core creative systems and basic economy management with a mix of challenge and sandbox mode features. Get up close with the mighty Tyrannosaurus or the lovable Microraptor and design their habitats without environmental limits.

The initial alpha release includes the following:

[h2]Animals[/h2]

• 6 Animals;
  Tyrannosaurus, Edmontosaurus, Lambeosaurus, Styracosaurus, Nasutoceratops and Microraptor, including alt skins or species.
  
  
• Multi-Level Pathfinding;
  Use the modular system to create corridors, platforms and ramps for your animals to navigate around.
  
  
• Various Behaviours;
  Animals can engage in a variety of basic behaviours like eating, drinking, grazing, resting, socialising and broadcasting. Some animals will be updated to include absent behaviours shortly after alpha’s release.
  

[h2]Creative[/h2]

• Terraforming Suite;
  Carve the terrain with six distinct tools: raise, lower, smooth, flatten, roughen and erosion. Get your feet wet with up to three paintable water materials and varying depths.
  
  
• 4 Paintable Biomes;
  Tropical, Temperate, Scrubland and Wetland are available to paint terrain and forests with. Use the brush intensity to create subtle and stylish gradients between textures to add some more realism to the park.
  
  
• 13 Structures;
  Bring your Prehistoric Kingdom to life with a selection of buildings from the Animal Care, Infrastructure, Guest Facilities and Enclosure categories.
  
  
• 250+ Modular Items;
  Get custom with over 250 modular items, pieces and plants to build designs of your own specificity. Use the Modern styling to pick from 7 wall textures or 4 roof designs.
  
  
• Paths & Fences;
  Choose from 12 fences and 7 path materials using an intuitive spline-based construction system. Enable terraced fence placement to create a uniquely staggered look.
  
  
• Saving & Loading;
  Save your park and build it up over time. As with the nature of alpha, saved games will likely break upon entering beta and early access launch.
  

Due to more extensive development being required, some previously planned features like object/wall recoloring and undo/redo will be unavailable until beta or early access launch.



[h2]Management[/h2]

• Basic Economy;
  Provide for supply and demand with guest facilities and attractions. Offset the costs of construction, animal production and building upkeep by turning a profit.
  
  
• Basic Power Management;
  Connect and power your park with basic power management. Failure and reboot mechanics have been disabled for alpha.
  
  
• Basic Visitors;
  What’s a park without guests to wander the paths? Additional animations, AI, enhanced model variation and guest related gameplay will be arriving in beta and early access launch.
  

[h2]Important & Additional Info[/h2]
In terms of what you can expect for support during alpha, we’re only looking to tackle stability issues and bug fixes. We’ll be making note of player feedback and talking with the community the entire time, but any new or upcoming content we show in devlogs won’t be available until beta or early access release unless explicitly stated.

We’re treating alpha and beta as distinct milestones so that we’re not simultaneously implementing features and shipping them to a live branch without extensive internal testing or supporting content. By staggering additions between the two milestones we’re able to focus on feedback that’s specific to what we currently offer rather than diluting results.

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• For alpha backers who went through Kickstarter, we’re currently trying to establish a reliable and automated distribution method to ensure contributors receive their key (and other rewards in the future). We will have specifics available prior to alpha’s release via a news update.
  
  
• Regarding general availability, we will eventually be removing the Alpha tier over on the Crytivo store. An announcement will be made to specify when exactly that’ll happen.
  
  
• Once purchased, there is no “end” to alpha playtime. It’s always accessible and will upgrade to the beta.
  
  
• Alpha isn’t the early access launch! That is arriving later in 2021.
  
  
• Screenshots, streams and videos from alpha can be shared! Show us what you’re making, we’d love to see it.
  

[h2]Development Report[/h2]
It’s almost time to release alpha and we couldn’t be more excited! Our VIPs have had access for a bit over a month now, leaving us with a lot of great feedback and creations to admire.

On the dev side of things, each part of the team has been creating, iterating and implementing a bunch of things so that they’re ready in time. Both planar reflections and water shading continue to improve and a whole bunch of audio has been implemented too, including an overhauled set of UI sounds.

Improved water rendering and reflections.

The visuals for our power management are starting to come together, as well. A change in color grading and some temporary but effective highlights for the power radius helps to show the range of generators to the player. These’ll get extra visual polish in the future, though they’re more than workable for now.

For our feathery friend, the Microraptor received new wing textures and an alula (a bird's “thumb”) to improve its fidelity and correct an anatomical issue.







[h2]Animal Implementation[/h2]
[h3]Modular Pathfinding[/h3]
With much excitement, we’re pleased to say that animals are now able to navigate modular buildings! This is a huge deal for us as we weren’t sure if it was something we’d be able to do. Thanks to one of our programmers, Matt, creatures can successfully walk around walls and utilize both ramps and platforms if the space is big enough.

We really wanted a level of interaction between modular pieces and our creatures, so to finally see it come to fruitition through pathfinding is simply fantastic.





As a result, there are so many more opportunities for creative builds. It can’t be understated how much of a game changer this is for the team (literally), and we cannot wait to see how players implement this functionality into their habitats.

[h3]Audio[/h3]
Sound found its way to our vocalisation behaviours early in February, adding audio to the social call/response, sad and broadcast calls. We’ve created a short showcase video demonstrating the new animations and sounds for our Edmontosaurus. Take a look!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We’ve also been working on our distance model to help ground the distant sounds of broadcasts within the park and deliver important information like an animal in distress.

[h2]Foliage Showcase[/h2]
The field elm, oak and sabal palmetto were added to the temperate and scrubland biomes to introduce more verticality. We’re especially fond of the new palmetto, it’s great for honing in that prehistoric look.

The field elm (left) and oak (right).

Three size variants of the sabal palmetto.

Including all variants, this brings our number of foliage assets available in alpha up to 70.

[h2]Building Showcase[/h2]
Throughout February, we began implementing high quality custom wall and roof materials to replace our previous Modern texture set. Moving to a more advanced workflow (both in implementation and asset creation), this has allowed us to bring out a greater level of detail with a minimal performance trade off - increasing texture resolution by over two times.

Modern textures on the modular wall pieces (glass not shown).

Some of the wall and roof materials will become recolorable at a later date.

We’re aiming to transfer all of our existing buildings over to this new technique by alpha’s release so that Modern textures are one to one across the game.

[h3]Hay Beds[/h3]

All animals need a place to sleep and there’s no comfier spot than a hay bed! These items are used to define custom resting spots within a habitat or modular build.





[h3]Fences[/h3]
Though the weakest of the bunch, Glass Fences are a stylish way to increase habitat visibility. They come in 1, 2.5 and 4 meter heights, making them the ideal window to another world.



Concrete Fences are strong, providing a thick slab of stone and internal steel to hold more aggressive animals. These come in 1, 2.5 and 4 meter variants.





Bringing the total up to 12 types, that’s all the modern fences for now. There are a few wall variants and new materials that we’d like to add down the line, but for the time being we’re quite content with the core lineup.



Brachiosaurus is one of the biggest dinosaurs coming in Early Access! With its neck fully raised, this gentle giant was almost 14 meters tall - a necessary adaptation for browsing trees.






Created by Dinobob.


Created by Dinomans.


Created by bautii.

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Thank you for reading February’s devlog!

Make sure you follow our social platforms to stay up to date with all things Prehistoric Kingdom. Remember, March 19th is the big day for our alpha release! We look forward to seeing what everyone comes up with.

Until next time,

- The PK Team

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