Good news!
Captain Contraption's Safari Park Playtest 4 is live and available to download and play until 29th July. We decided to do a few more playtests before we push forward with the demo.
The changes in this build are quite big. The goop economy has been rebuilt from the ground up, you can now sell buildings, dead creatures are no longer wasted, and runs get longer the better you play. There's also a serious performance pass ... big parks should be a lot smoother.
Thank you to everyone who filled in the surveys. Almost everything below came directly out of your reports. We will be running the same survey again for this playtest so please provide feedback if you have time.
Headline Changes
Recycler Robots Dead creatures are no longer a dead loss. Every Population Control building now ships with a Recycler robot that collects corpses and converts them into goop, and you can buy more. Bigger creatures recycle into more goop. Corpses wait politely in a queue if all your recyclers are busy, and they won't rot away while a robot is on its way to collect them.You Can Sell Buildings Made a mistake? Every building can now be destroyed for a refund (with an "are you sure?" so you don't do it by accident). Fields Work Completely Differently Fields used to charge you goop for every single meal, which meant every animal you owned was quietly losing you money forever. Now:
Fields charge a flat goop upkeep per minute, and grow their crops for free.
A field that can't pay its upkeep goes dormant and stops regrowing, your herbivores starve visibly instead of your bank draining invisibly.
Fields come pre-stocked, so they start working immediately instead of waiting on a delivery robot.
Adjacent matching fields discount each other's upkeep ...building in blocks pays off.
Bigger animals eat more. A dragon takes up roughly 2.2x the field space of a chicken. Field capacity is now per crop and shown in the UI.
Your goop spend now follows the number of fields you choose to build, not the number of animals you happen to have. The goop stalemate should be gone.Longer Runs Every objective you complete now adds time to the clock. Play well and your run keeps going. The objective panel shows how much time each one is worth.Events Pay Out Visitors witnessing park events (hunts, fights, feeding, births) now earn you bonus income. Ongoing activities are also modelled properly now — a hunt is a single event with a beginning and an end that visitors can join partway through, instead of the same hunt being reported over and over.Species Level-Ups Are a Choice Levelling up a species now offers you two random creatures from those you haven't unlocked yet, via a new creature picker, instead of handing them out in a fixed order.
Balance
Research grant money no longer scales off past performance. A struggling park was being punished for struggling. Grants are now a fixed reward.
The "species seen" penalty is now a variety bonus. Previously, owning more creature types could reduce your income because the multiplier was a percentage of species present. It's now a bonus that grows as visitors see more different species.
Percentage of species seen can no longer exceed 100%.
Ticket price stay-length bonus is capped — it was growing large enough to drown out everything creature-related.
Visitor groups start bigger, and grow optionally at each research grant rather than from every objective.
Culling robots are capped at 5 per Population Control building.
Max game speed raised to 6x, and the simulation now speeds up correctly at high speeds (see Fixes).
Field upkeep costs, unlock costs, research grants and objective rewards have all been retuned against a new economy simulation.
Adding time no longer interferes with the research grant timers, and time is no longer added during liquidation.
Hunting speed corrected.
Fixes
Crashes & End of Run
Fixed an end-of-run crash caused by extreme camera positions.
Liquidation now waits for every visitor to leave the park before ending, and the closing crawl is paced by how many visitors are still inside.
Fields are now reliably destroyed during liquidation.
You can no longer build during liquidation.
Numbers & Readouts
Population can no longer go negative. Two predators landing a killing blow on the same frame were each counting the creature out.
Population graphs update reliably. History from a previous run was bleeding into the next one and scrambling the time axis. Newly selected series also draw immediately instead of waiting for the next tick.
Graph population values no longer show fractions.
The inspector no longer shows a dead creature as alive.
Paths
Fixed a false loop closure that could create a broken junction and strand your guide mid-tour.
Right-click no longer deletes paths (it's left-click now) and no longer traps you in the path panel.
Clicking any UI element or hotbar button now closes the inspector and exits path build mode, so you can't lay a path by accident.
Buildings & Robots
Cancelling a build no longer leaves a ghost progress bar behind.
Selling a Goop Factory no longer permanently starves the fields it was delivering to — in-flight deliveries are re-queued.
Destroyed buildings no longer play their animations from beyond the grave.
Hunter robots can no longer kill the wrong creature (a recycled target could be mistaken for the original).
Speed & Simulation
Fixed a major time-scale bug. Time scale was being applied twice to a lot of systems, so at the 3x setting those systems were actually running at 9x. 2x and 3x now mean 2x and 3x. Some rates that were tuned by eye at high speed have been retuned to match. I'm pretty embarrassed by this one.
Save/Load
Park event markers now survive a mid-run save and reload.
Objective completion was being written and read under two different keys, meaning completed objectives were never actually filtered out. Fixed.
Misc
"Wondering" → "wandering". Sorry.
Visitor tour scoring was being corrupted by other creatures' vision checks, making ratings unreliable.
Performance
Several passes at this:
Creature vision is now spread across frames ... creatures spawned together no longer all think on the same frame, off-screen creatures check less often the further they are from the camera, and dense clumps have a cap on how many neighbours each creature processes.
Obstacle-avoidance raycasts were ~22% of a frame. One of two redundant raycasts per creature has been removed entirely, and the remaining one now runs less often at distance while looking proportionally further ahead.
Neighbour lookups were rewritten onto a flat spatial grid and now filter by range during the search instead of afterwards.
625 invisible physics colliders were removed from the world grid; Unity's 2D physics was spending 6.5ms a frame simulating them for no reason (to be clear I put them there, I just stopped using them and forgot)
Animations are culled completely off screen.
Culling drones, hunter robots and visitors all had their per-frame cost reduced.
Park events no longer allocate memory every time one fires, and duplicate events are cut at the source.
UI & Quality of Life
Follow button in the inspector — the camera moves to and tracks whatever you're inspecting.
Graph hotkeys to show and hide graphs; the buttons are toggles and right-click hides them too. Axes are labelled with units. Graphs now draw above the end-of-run summary screen.
Hotkey to enable/disable the selected building.
Special and event objectives are pinned to the start of the objective list.
Currency is consistent — $ in the top left as well as on the selection tiles.
Visitor messages moved to the bottom of the screen, and the visitor context window is more space-efficient.
Clearer PAUSED indicator.
Sound and feedback for building and deleting paths, and for refunding a building. New building destruction animation.
Floating text now shows negative costs for spends, including auto-bought barrels.
Updated Population Control and field descriptions.
Tutorial
Tutorial steps now count from when the step is shown, not from your absolute state — so if you already had four fields, the "build four fields" step no longer locks you out.
The tutorial now explains that paths must form a complete loop, and that the path flashes green when it's done.
The skip button only appears after a delay, so you don't dismiss it reflexively.
Fixed a bug with the building-placement tutorial listener.
Tutorial text updated throughout for the new field mechanics.