Hi everyone!
We have opened up the playtest again and are changing the way we run it. Instead of a fixed weekend test we are just going to keep the playtest open. As a small team we find it hard to get the word out about our games and having a playable version of the game on Steam (even if it is a beta) really helps. The plan is still to hold back updates until there is some significant change, so please keep sending us feedback using the normal channels (in-game survey, email, discord, steam forums).
This is the biggest update the game has ever had… Since the last playtest build the park has grown actual terrain there are now two named maps (one available in the demo) with a star-based progression between them and the deepest pass on creature behaviour we've ever done. Creatures now sleep, flocks behave like herds of individual animals instead of one blob, fights actually end, and dragons fly.
A lot of what's below came out of new balancing tools we built for this update… we are now able to simulate thousands of full runs of the whole progression and see where players get stuck before you do. Almost every number in the game has been re-tuned as a result. The simulation tool is just a simulation though, so if the numbers feel off let us know.
Main Changes
Maps:
There are multiple maps and each map has its own hand-authored terrain (water, forest and mountains).
There are two maps each with its own name, terrain and a minimap preview on the level select so you can see what you're getting into. More will be in the final game.
Each map now has three star objectives instead of one final objective. Completing one banks a star and the run carries on, completed stars stay on the list so you can see what you've earned while chasing the rest.
Stars persist across runs. The level select shows the stars you hold, and later maps unlock once you hold enough stars across your whole save. A locked map tells you exactly what it costs and how close you are ("0/1 stars to unlock") instead of just refusing to open.
New Species Set: Savanna:
Seven new creatures: Lion, Elephant, Giraffe, Zebra, Rhinoceros, Ostrich and Hyena, with their own nest, crops and objectives. Hyenas will eat their own dead. Of course they will. They're hyenas. This species set won’t be available in the demo, but I wanted to see what actual safari park animals felt like in our safari park game!
Creature Flocking has been overhauled from the ground up:
Flocks no longer collapse into a single point. The separation force was, embarrassingly, backwards so clumps formed and could never come apart. Fixed properly.
Every creature is now an individual. Members of a species used to be numerically identical, so two creatures in the same spot behaved identically forever. Each creature now has slight personal variation in speed, vision and flocking behaviour, which is enough to break the symmetry … herds now have stragglers and wanderers.
Herds no longer all eat the same blade of grass. Creatures picked the exact same nearest food and walked the same line to it in lockstep. They now spread out across a field, and their memory of good feeding spots fades over time instead of magnetising them to one spot for life.
Territories spread over generations. Children inherit territory from both parents rather than being anchored wherever they happened to be born, so lineages fan out across the map instead of winding ever tighter into a clump.
Flocking has been hand-tuned per species so sheep move like sheep and orcs move like a warband, and vision ranges and acceleration have been reduced across the whole roster - creatures react to what's nearby rather than the whole map.
Creatures Sleep:
Stamina now comes from sleep, and only from sleep. Previously a bug in eating recovery meant 21 of the 23 creatures never ran out of stamina and simply never slept. Now every creature runs down its stamina by moving and takes a nap to restore it.
Fights End:
Creatures used to fight to the death almost every time. The "will I keep fighting?" check kept a creature in the fight while it had either health or stamina left, and stamina never ran out in a short fight. Being badly hurt or exhausted is now enough to break off and run, so fights have routs, chases and survivors instead of always ending in a corpse pile.
Dragons Fly:
Flying creatures are in, and Dragons are the first. They ignore ground obstacles and soar over your park looking magnificent and eating your money. Adding flying creatures is what made me notice all the flocking bugs mentioned above.
Cannibals:
Orcs, Orc Riders and Hyenas will now eat corpses of their own kind. Everyone else has firm opinions about not doing that, and after a bug fix actually sticks to them: non-cannibals no longer get handed a corpse of their own species as a long-range food target. A side effect is noticeably more hunting in single-species parks, since carnivores now chase live prey instead of walking across the map to a corpse they'd refuse to touch on arrival.
Creature Report Cards:
Every creature now shows S–F letter grades for Survival, Stamina, Toughness, Attack, Speed, Propagation and Vision, plus descriptive badges (Flying, Cannibal, who it fears, who it fights). Grades are ranked against the whole roster. You'll find them on the creature detail screens and the creature picker.
Balance
Nearly every number in the game has moved this update. The highlights:
Creature costs and ratings re-tuned across the whole roster, priced by what a creature actually earns and costs your park (its visitor appeal, its upkeep, its victims) rather than by my gut feel. Although the model I made might still need calibrating so if something feels off let me know.
Runs start shorter. The base run time and starting time have both been reduced since objectives add time, so a well-played run still goes long, but the floor is tighter.
Research grants pay out more money.
Tour income multipliers rebalanced.
Building refunds are now only available for 60 seconds after building. To stop you lot cheesing objectives.
Fields start with a free crop already grown, so new fields feed animals immediately.
Population objective targets unified across species and final objective targets, rewards and ordering rebalanced on both maps
Farm and Fantasy creatures both rebalanced, and creature relationships (who fears whom, who fights whom) re-tuned..
Visitor satisfaction is now about variety: a visitor goes home satisfied when they've seen at least 50% of your species. Both maps have new "satisfied visitors" star objectives built on this. A park with one very good sheep is no longer a complete zoo experience.
Fixes
Combat & Hunting
Visitors can be killed again. The damage function was adding health to visitors, every attack was a small act of healing, so predators latched onto immortal tourists forever.
Toughness (armour) now soaks only what's left of it, with the remainder of the hit carrying through to health. Previously a creature with 1 point of armour shrugged off a 200-damage blow entirely.
Carnivores respect their fears. A predator no longer stalks a creature it's also supposed to be fleeing from, with the two instincts fighting each other frame by frame.
Carnivores no longer starve walking to distant food while prey grazes right next to them.
Cornered prey can fight back. A fleeing creature's retaliation range was being calculated wrong so it couldn't land a hit on the predator chasing it until they were practically overlapping.
Breeding no longer charges a hidden health and stamina tax on both parents over and above its stated cost.
Culling robots can see the whole park again. Species that share a family (Orcs and Orc Riders, Knights and Mounted Knights, Skeletons and Armored Skeletons) were wiping each other off the population roster, so your Population Control building could be blind to dozens of creatures it was supposed to manage.
Corpses now remember what creature they were… which is one of the weirder patch note lines I’ve written.
Save & Load
Saves are now versioned, so future updates can migrate your progress safely.
Rebalances now reach your existing saves. Creature stats are rebuilt from the game data on load rather than frozen into the save file at whatever balance existed when you saved.
Breeding progress is saved. Reloading used to hand every creature a fresh breeding timer, which made save-scumming a fertility treatment.
The game now handles saves referencing species or tech that no longer exist, instead of failing to load.
Fixed a bug where final objective progress wasn't saved correctly, and several other issues with species data in saves.
Paths & Tours
Guides handle incomplete loops gracefully. A guide on an unfinished path used to stop dead at the end, or worse, beeline across the gap. They now walk to the end of the built path, turn around, walk back to the entrance and end the tour normally so you get feedback (and the tour ends) instead of a stuck guide and a building that silently earns nothing.
Fixed several ways the path system could get stuck … states where the loop couldn't be built onto, deleted from, or even hovered, and a delete edge case that could split a loop and leave a stretch of path unreachable and undeletable forever. Hopefully I’ve got all the edge cases now.
You can no longer drop a path entrance on a cell that's about to be built.
UI & Quality of Life
You can now lock the framerate in the settings.
Tutorial windows are movable - drag them out of the way of the thing they're telling you to click.
You can no longer save and quit the game while a popup is open, which meant you would reload a softlocked game.
The pause button no longer occasionally resumes at the wrong game speed.
UI elements no longer invisibly block you from placing buildings.
Hotbar buttons no longer get stuck mid-animation at the wrong size.
The "you have run out of goop" message now has a minimum delay between repeats, instead of shouting at you continuously.
Creature animation speed is now capped, so animals stop vibrating at high game speed.
The background always covers the full view, and the camera clamps correctly against the zoom level.
"Armour" is now called "Toughness" throughout - it always protected against all damage and recovered with sleep, so the old name was underselling it.
Tutorial
Tutorial steps now show thumbnails of the buildings they're talking about, so you know what you're looking for on the hotbar.
When a tutorial step appears you're granted the money to complete it, so the tutorial can never strand you unable to afford the thing it's asking you to build.
Tutorial text updated throughout for this update's changes.
Under the Hood
Unity engine updated to 6000.3.22.
The run-telemetry recorder has been removed from player builds entirely - it now exists only in our development builds.
Leftover playtest and debug messages removed.
As always, please tell us what you think. The survey feedback from the last playtest shaped almost everything in this update, and we read all of it.
And finally any support you can give us with increasing our wishlist numbers really helps bring the launch of the game closer and keeps us going. If that is inviting a friend to the playtest or wishlisting it yourself both really make a difference.
Thanks and Enjoy
Sean + Dave