Welcome to the February Development Update!
With this being our first full month back working on PK, the team continued implementing the new management features discussed in January’s Dev Diary. Since we don’t want to repeat ourselves and show off the same content, this month’s post will instead only focus on the new things and be a bit shorter as a result.
Throughout February, we were able to squeeze in a number of bug fixes, optimizations and resolve the trippy-water that could be seen on the side of amphibious vivariums. This fix came just in time for our animators to add some new aquatic movement spots for the Titanoboa!
Touching on some of the management features, we’ve extended the upcoming Resource Usage view to show any active transfers in the park. After selecting a resource type from the dropdown (e.g. meat, plants), floating arrows and an icon will appear to show where staff are delivering to and how much they’re taking.
With a few of these management tasks now almost complete, the programming team’s been focused entirely on planning and preparing the codebase for animal combat over the last week or so.
Having now sorted our species into prey, predators or scavengers, we look forward to realizing the potential behaviors that stem from these niches. The next four or so months will be a long process filled with trials, errors, and a LOT of animation, but we’ll have more combat news to share with you starting in March’s Dev Diary.
The model for everyone’s favorite dino-turtle has been completed! Meet our two species of Stegosaurus: stenops and ungulatus.
When looking at each species side by side, it becomes clear that the two are quite distinct! Ungulatus is not only much larger, but it has raised hips, a sloped back, taller plates and a longer face. It’s certainly got more of a classic, 90s vibe.
To make sure our model was faithful to the current science (while still retaining its PK style), we worked with paleontologist Matt Dempsey who was able to provide us with a wealth of feedback and insight into a Stegosaur’s anatomy. Thank you for your help, Matt!
Internally, the team named the first ungulatus skin after a certain kaiju thanks to its grey body and blue “radioactive” plates on the male. Let’s hope these guys are a bit kinder to Tokyo!
After such a long absence, the team couldn’t be more thrilled to finally bring this dinosaur to the game. To celebrate its arrival, we’ve put together a short video highlighting their animations and early sound design tests.
To help flesh out the game’s Cenozoic landscaping options, we’ll be adding new plants to the Scrubland and Wetland biomes in U17 and 18 respectively. As you might guess, this first batch aims to drastically improve the variety of the Scrubland biome and actually make it into, well, a scrubland! This next update will bring 28 variants across 4 new species to the game, with those being lavender, cistus, false esparto grass and the juniper bush.
To sweeten the deal, we’re also revisiting the Italian strawflower and sabal palmetto to make them much more faithful to their real world counterparts. We’ve tried to capture varying levels of growth, coloration and have even included “shaggy” and clustered variants for the palmetto. There’s a lot more variety here overall, making a grand total of 46 new plant assets coming in U17!
But that’s not all, though. When the game fully releases next year, there’ll be even MORE foliage for not just Scrubland but a few other biomes, too. Notable additions will include the highly requested cherry blossom, agave, eel grass, stone pine and acuri palm! It will truly be Plant Kingdom.
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Thank you for reading February's dev diary!
We hope you enjoyed a close look at Stegosaurus and are looking forward to a new roster of Scrubland plants coming in U17. We will be back next month with news on combat, Stego ontogeny and more!
- The PK Team