Welcome back to a series of monthly blog posts, everyone!

The past month has been extremely hectic for us as a team. With Kickstarter now behind us, our focus was immediately directed to PAX South and finalising all transactions from our successful crowdfunding campaign! In this post, however, we’ll be answering some of your questions and showing off some new goodies to hopefully give everyone a taste of what’s to come.

Today we’re happy to announce our plan for consistent streams and blog posts over the course of 2018! While updates such as this one will be written at the end of each month to summarise all of the development ongoings, live streams will be held starting this February, on a weekly basis – ranging between level design, animal sculpting, texturing, other aspects of Prehistoric Kingdom, and even Weekend Gaming™ sessions. While the streaming schedule is going to be quite flexible depending on our availability, we’ll be sending out updates across Facebook, Twitter, and Discord to let everyone know when we aren’t going to be available on a certain day. Prepare for laughs, excitement, and even some salty bitterness from our fantastic gaming skills.

If there’s anything you’d like us to play or see us develop live, make sure to let us know on our Discord server!

As stated previously, most of our energy has been drawn into wrapping up all the behind the scenes communication with Kickstarter and preparing the game for its full development roadmap over the coming months. With some of our team members tackling their last sets of exams, it’s been an extremely busy time for us during the month of January. With that said, there are some great things that we have to show off!

Brand new modular rocks and logs add a whole new level of diversity to exhibit design – featuring all of the tools that are to be expected with advanced editing objects (like with the existing rocks).

Next up, we’ve got a better look at some of the new skins introduced in the Jurassic Patch. A lot of people have been asking to see more of these on our Discord server, so we hope that this helps.

As mentioned above, we have taken a good portion of the last two months detailing a lot of the gameplay features present in the game, in order to streamline their future development. We will be picking and showcasing some of them in these monthly devlogs. Today, we’ll be talking about security:

Animal Stress & Rampages

The animals in your park will begin showing signs of aggression whenever too stressed (stress in the game is a value that depends on the creature’s quality of life), attacking other animals and their enclosures. One will be able to break out depending on their size and strength compared to its paddock’s fence. Otherwise, it will keep trying to break out until collapse (exhaustion). When an animal does manage to escape, it has the potential to harm the people in the park, and even damage infrastructure, again, depending on its relative size and strength.



Taking Action

In the event of a security breach, your park’s rangers will take action and neutralize the threat (through tranquillizers or lethal means). However, their response time might be delayed, possibly leaving you to manually take care of the situation. In order to decrease it, place security cameras in strategic spots around your enclosures: identifying any rampaging animals within their radius. Another extra measure you can take is building electric fences for the more dangerous species: whenever a power breach is detected, your staff will jump to the rescue.

Keeping your Guests Safe

Triggering the Emergency Mode through the main management tab will notify rangers of any danger in the park at any time. Within moments, guests will start fleeing to the closest available Shelter. Their evacuation can be facilitated through close Ranger Depots: these buildings do not only host helicopters and off-road cars to intercept dangerous animals, but also transport vehicles to escort frightened visitors to safety. Beware, however, Emergency Mode should only be a last resort, as it increases the stress level of your guests and animals alike, ultimately lowering the value of your park.

Although we might always change or expand onto some of these ideas, the features mentioned above are the basic guidelines when it comes to security in Prehistoric Kingdom, allowing us to come to clear development terms. As always, make sure to join our Discord server, if you haven’t already. It’s the perfect place to discuss these ideas and others with the developers and community.

The Tyrannosaurus rex is currently the oldest model in Prehistoric Kingdom, dating all the way back to 2014! As she has always been one of the projects shining stars, it’s about time that our favourite animal attraction received a visual upgrade. While this isn’t a drastic change to the overall silhouette, the sculpt has been completely redone to improve the quality of the creature and bring it up to par with the more recent model additions to the game. Because of this, we’ve allowed ourselves to fix up some anatomical issues and keep it more in-line with our current understanding of Tyrannosaur anatomy. Please enjoy this teaser of the work-in-progress update.

This section of the monthly blog will now encompass selected fanart, screenshots, and more! If there’s anything that you’ve made that relates to Prehistoric Kingdom, feel free to tweet us (@PrehistoricK) or drop a link to our Discord server!

That’s it for this post! Stay tuned for more info, and keep an eye on our Twitch channel for the upcoming streams. We’ll be back for the next one at the end of February.

The PK Dev Team.