The programming team are working real hard to get the patch out. If you are in our Discord server and/or on the testing branch on Steam you will have been seeing new builds going up over the last week or so as they iron out the remaining bugs. We’re currently testing for performance issues, so if you’d like to help us, follow these directions and leave us feedback on our Discord.

For the dev log this week, Jake and I will be showing off some of the art-side of preparation for the new playable Triceratops, with a helping of Xico in-between! A Xico sandwich, if you will.

Jake

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on the remaining locomotions for the trike ontogeny. The hatchling has been getting the brunt of my attention in particular. Look at how this hideous little turd moves. Look at it.

These require some special consideration for how the animal will play. The speeds on all the locomotions need to be exaggerated a little just to make Triceratops viable. It’s quite vulnerable and slow as a hatchling. Thankfully an explosive growth rate and good camouflage will help mend this, but making it move at a reasonable pace will also help avoid the frustration of not getting from point A to B quick enough.

These locomotions are just about the last thing that needs to be done on the art side for the new playable. Then it is in the hands of the programming team to put it all together. I’m hoping to wrap up my end of the deal by the next dev log. Maybe there will be something new to showcase by then.

Xico

January was a tough month for my sanity. I spent the majority of its time going through our current 3563 sound files and converting them to a smaller, friendlier size without changing their resolution (meaning the sound quality will remain the same). After this was done, I did some extra small changes to the size of certain sounds, based on the community’s suggestions. These changes will help us in the future to have a better sense of the sound’s localization in the environment, especially when I start messing around with binaural plug-ins and other nifty software pieces.

This month I’m also following some of the community’s suggestions. A common occurrence was that the hunting music was confusing the players as to what it was supposed to represent, so alongside with Henry we came up with a method that should be clearer to y’all. Also, some of you were too spooped with nighttime music and thought the transition between the placid daytime exploration music and the horror-filled night music was too jarring. I came up with 4 new small pieces that should play around dusk to prepare you for the horrors to come. It’s a mix of the dreamy aesthetic of daytime music with creepy undertones to prepare you for night’s struggles. Here’s two snippets for y’all!

Tom

As Jake has been working on the locomotion sets for the Triceratops growth-stages, I have been working on the stationary animations. All of those were knocked out for the juvenile before the last devlog, so I’ve been on the hatchling and sub-adult ever since then. Basically all of this has been done now, so I thought I’d reveal some of these today.

I decided to use some animations you wouldn’t have already seen on the adult Triceratops, as they haven’t been implemented in the game just yet, but will come with the trike as a playable character. First of these is my favourite of the idle variants. You’ll notice your player Dakotaraptor will play these when you stand still, and Triceratops will be no different. The AI will eventually do these as well, they just don’t right now. This is only an aesthetic addition that doesn’t really add to gameplay, but I like how this one looks so wanted to show it off.

I also think the subadult model looks really cool, maybe cooler than the adult.

The second animation I will show is a social display. Triceratops is planned to have a much deeper social gameplay system than Dakotaraptor, so this will have a much greater impact on your play. You’ll hear more about this at a later date. There is good evidence surfacing that the structures on the heads of ornithischian dinosaurs evolved for the purpose of sexual selection.

For this reason, we wanted our Triceratops to heavily utilise its horns and frill in social display. Here you can see our young boy doing so. Look how fit he is, ladies. Those are some major horns.

To end it off, I really wanted to show the cutest of the juvenile animations, because it is my favourite in the whole game right now. Look at this little puppy!