







Spooky Halloween, ladies and gentlemen! We are back with a second, lengthier progress update, to demonstrate the results of the recent work in this period of *mostly* radio silence. There is quite a bit of content, so bear with us!



Although all working departments have contributed rather nicely to the shaping up of the game, you will find that after two months, a great deal of progress has been done on the building systems especially, but also on some features regarding the animals, both of which you will be seeing more of further down this very post.

First of all however, we should be talking about some major feature changes for the soon upcoming public ‘demo’ build, so here they are:



Initial animal roster



That’s right! Our plan is to release 4 animals with the first public demo release, these animals being Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Velociraptor and Gallimimus, hoping development will go smoothly enough for us to put it all in action! The remaining 4 planned demo animals, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Camarasaurus and Dryosaurus will most likely be added at a later point to the public builds, so worry not!



Animal Spawning



The other major change in plans comes in the shape of little baby dinosaurs! You read that right, instead of the classic hatchery formula, we’ll be having a “Nursery” building (see the image) with limited breeding capacity. In here, you will be able to produce dinosaur infants and then place them into your park with an easy drag and drop action. We believe this change in the game plans will come in favour of the player, as you can keep your exhibits and enclosures just the way they are supposed to be (without a huge noisy metal building in it, that is). That doesn’t stop there however! These baby dinosaurs will eventually grow up, a feature which we have already worked on, coming to a pretty satisfactory result: not only does the body size of the animal change over lifetime, but the bone proportions and body shape also changes according to its age. This process, called ontogeny, is backed by the fossil record of these animals, and you can rest assured we will try our best to base our animal ontogeny on it as closely as possible.



For now, we are proud to present a feature that very few games have managed to successfully accomplish so far, in the form of two gifs (notice how the body proportions and facial features change over lifespan):



Building systems

This is what we built in our current private team build with the available building tools:



Below you can see what exactly it looks like while building in-game:



We managed to put up a simple, yet effective grid based system for our buildings and fences, as well as making a heavily customizable decoration placement tool, that we’re sure you’ll all find handy (for instance, the above rock arch was made using it). We are pretty satisfied with it as of now, while still having plans for curved fences and paths in the future.

All that being said, we are still not done…



Miscellaneous



There were some changes made to our Triceratops model, one of the most notable ones being its species change, from T.horridus to T.prorsus, the reason for this being exactly the available ontogenetic transitional fossils for this species (gotta make them babbeh Trikes). You’ll also notice the change in the alternative skin design (there are still gonna be 3 color scheme variations). Hoping you like it as much as we do (our sound designer is all over it), we’ll end this blog post with a musical preview from our lovable aussie composer Byron. Enjoy what is but one minute of a longer ambient track that you will be hearing soon! Catch you on the next progress update!



