Welcome to the 12th devlog for Prehistoric Kingdom, officially marking one year from the release of the first content-filled, monthly progress blog post! Coinciding with this festive period, this post will celebrate our successes and accomplishments as a project, while also serving as a reminder of what’s yet to come.

Since this is a special month, we decided to skip over the ‘State of Development’ chart, replacing it with a year-round inclusive review of what has been done so far, right towards the end of this post.

That being said, we hope you’ll enjoy seeing more gameplay than post months. We are ready to start talking progress!

Building System

This month we put a lot of focus into making our building system feel and sound polished. Our second SFX designer (Byron) worked closely with our gameplay programmer (Mau) to ensure that every piece of player interaction had some sort of feedback for the player.

Compared to the demo, we put a lot more into making Prehistoric Kingdom feel responsive and sound great. Through many revisions, we are super happy with how the core elements are shaping up.

Improved Scaffolding Effects

It’s hard to believe that we first created our scaffolding system all the way back in October of 2016! A lot has happened since then so it’s only natural for us to try and overhaul its performance and aesthetic.

This system had a lot of unsolvable issues which led to some pretty hefty performance hits whilst also not looking all that great, either. To remedy past problems our team looked at small real world construction sites to create brand new assets and find a much less taxing way of implementing a runtime scaffolding effect. Below is the result we found most satisfactory, please keep in mind the ground is part of a simpler test level.

Object Selection and Demolition



In Early Access we’ll be introducing a simple and easy way to select multiple objects. To achieve this, simply hold the left mouse button down and drag the selection box over all structures and decorations that you might to move, duplicate, or delete.

Additional items can be added to the selection by holding shift and clicking on the desired building. Think of it like manipulating files on your desktop; pretty easy, right?

Visitor Models

What good is any business without clientele? To top October off, we continued producing assets for our visitors, with the middle age group in mind this time. The adults will serve as the ‘mainstream’ category in Prehistoric Kingdom, being the most common guests in the park with the most well-rounded needs of any group.

Animation

To respect the tradition set last month, Nathan has been hard at work producing wholly new animations for the medium-sized theropod rig. While the showcase video features Allosaurus in particular, you can expect these animation to apply to animals such as Yutyrannus and Ceratosaurus, albeit slightly changed in order to better fit the target animal.

Music

Much like what’s been done for our dinosaurs, mammals will also be getting their own introduction tracks. Primigenius has a larger emphasis on drums, winds and horns than what is usually found in our music.

In addition to this, Byron also finished up an old breakout piece; Tantrum-o-saurus rex. Filled to the brim with familiar orchestration and Prehistoric Kingdom motifs, this track is sure to set in some nostalgia and panic as a hungry theropod runs rampant through your park.

“Quick View” Menus



Small access buttons on the corner of the screen offer a handful of various tools and shortcuts for important management views in addition to features like screenshot mode or the park map.

A global list of all recently bred animals is also accessible so that players don’t need to head back to the Nursery when populating their park.

Notification Popups

This month we started working on our notification popups – something that we’d like to be mostly out of the way and provide clear contextual information. Certain actions like unlocking new animals will be a bit more exciting, however, as seen in our work in progress animation below.

Animal and Building Info Panels

As a fitting departure to 2018, our animal and building information panels have reached a final pass before moving onto UI implementation within the game itself.

After a long process of iteration, it’s satisfying for us to finally put down the concept stage for these elements and say “This is it. This is the one.”

Screenshot Mode

Screenshot mode got some pretty major reworks to allow for a far greater degree of flexibility when trying to get that perfect shot. We considered implementing the Ansel tool but decided on creating our own system due to compatibility issues with AMD cards in addition to some new features like time of day and fog settings.

New Skins

The end of the year brings a bunch of new fully realised alternate skins to life. As our holiday treat, please enjoy the finished alt skin sets for Edmontosaurus regalis, Parasaurolophus walkeri, Iguanodon bernissartensis, Allosaurus fragilis and Megaloceros giganteus!





In addition to the other three creatures, our Tyrannosaurus has received remakes of the Blackbeard and Ginger designs. To better fit a more contemporary feathering on T. rex, we’ve adjusted the location of feathers on the Ginger skin to remove excess fluff.

In the past we have talked about our plans for the general fossil system, but since so much time has passed since then, we felt it was a good idea to revisit our design in more detail, helping you visualize it with even more interface art.

The Dig Sites

Fossil formations are located all around the world, featuring dozens of unique extinct fauna. Like in past games, this is where players will find the remains of 50 different prehistoric creatures at launch.

South America, for example, features the Ensenada, Huincul, and La Colonia formations:

The Waiting Game

Once a team has been assigned to a dig site they’ll send their findings back to the player at the end of each designated site’s digging timer.

However, if waiting around isn’t your cup of tea-rex, the Fossil Market is perfect for you! Donated from private collections, auctions and museums alike, the catalogue refreshes every month with new animals and specimens each yielding varying degrees of DNA.

It’s a little pricier than traditional digging though it offers the benefit of hand picking creatures and instantly adding to their total DNA viability.

Bingo! Dino… DNA?

Once a creature has reached 50% of its true genome it can be bred within the Animal Nursery. It’s important to note that anything created in this state will have a weaker immune system and lower fertility chance.

Despite this, additional coloration and physical alterations still need to be unlocked by acquiring 100% of the DNA. Certain creatures like Thescelosaurus and Tyrannosaurus can even have their integument changed depending on which genetic skin has been unlocked.

2018 was a big year for us as a team; a colossal year. Between planning, drafting, designing, redesigning, and working on different facets of the game, it’s been a huge year.

New Beginnings

This year began with the strong partnership between Shadow Raven Studios and our publisher Crytivo. With them we’ve been given many new opportunities such as convention showcases and access to additional resources like the lovely Martin Fyris who helped conceptualise many of our buildings during production.

Officially, we started development on Prehistoric Kingdom in late March of this year after releasing the Jurassic Patch for our public demo. We would’ve liked to have started sooner but were held back by the short term nature of the codebase and implementation of new features like better AI and implementing new assets including animals and fences.

Building the Kingdom

Even before Kickstarter, we had a very clear idea of where the project should head and what its direction would entail for our creative process. We knew we wanted to approach production through the aid of 3 well-defined development stages, delineating the progress of the game clearly: creation, management, and progression. In the 9 months since we started working on what is eventually going to be the released game, we were able to create an enormous quantity of art assets needed for all 3 phases. Never in the history of the project have we had so many ‘props’ to fill our game world with, and we are incredibly proud of that.

When it comes to gameplay, there’s been the expected ups and downs. While we have revamped every creative aspect present in our 2017 demo, effectively putting our past work to shame, we also had to depend to some extent on third party assets that would improve upon the engine we are using, allowing us to truly create the product we wish to publish. As such, we weren’t yet able to complete the first phase we set, but considering the work put in it thus far and the technical complexity that comes with it, we definitely feel like we’re on the right track, albeit slowly so. On a practical standpoint, we have the following:

The New Year



Celebrating our accomplishments for this year, we realize that it’s also time to think about the future. 2019 is the year we’re gonna start seeing true, substantial leaps in progress, with one or more phases of our alpha plan possibly seeing completion during this time-frame. As we stated in past blog posts, our top priority right now is bringing the ‘creation’ phase up to speed by developing all the tools necessary to unleash every player’s creative potential.

Early on in the year, we are gonna make it a point to complete our level design so that we can start bringing all our systems together to create polished and user-friendly builds. We are going to finish our fence and path systems, and delve into fleshing out our animals, from the animation system, to the AI that drives all their actions.

Sounds complicated? That’s because it is, quality takes time. With that in mind, we think that at this pace the other 2 phases should take far less development time. One way or another, we will definitely have something to show for our work in the year to come, and we know you are gonna love it!

Thank you for reading December’s Devlog!

2018 has been one hell of a year and we are ever so hopeful that 2019 has got great things in store for the community!

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