Hello Primals!!
Firstly I wanted to thank you all for everything and it is because of you that we are still here and trying to reconnect with our community to be as transparent as possible with the future development of Primal Earth. We have embarked on this journey of creating a wildlife game where you can feel the immersion of what it means to live as one of these animals. After facing many difficult bugs and unforeseen problems within and outside of the game we were left with a decision that causes us to root ourselves and face the fact that we are just not ready to release the game. The team and I have come a long way from where we first started this project and with the knowledge that I have now that I didn't have then I am confident that I can get this game to where it needs to be. The current live version of the game was constantly crashing and ruining the experience of what we are trying to create. Since the baby versions of our animals were not ready to come to the game we decided to cut the growth out and play as the adult only, this later lead to the gameplay feeling as if there isn't anything to do and more so like a sandbox than survival.
A substantial amount of time and money were spent on our models and trying to get them game ready from different studios and freelancers; Unfortunately the quality of work we received after the deed was done just didn't meet our expectations and the work was scrapped. So instead of continuing to pay for work that we weren't happy with we decided to learn how to correct these mistakes ourselves. It has felt like a mountain of problems and we are just now arriving at the turning point. Improvements have been made to the project as well as our upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.7 the game is finally working as intended with UI and save features. This month I have focused more on the movement and refining it as much as possible as well as introducing our new camera features that should enhance the experience as well. I have also started work on special effects that will be later used for our scent mechanic. Trial and error has been a steady process with the development of this game from feeling like we hit a wall to potholes in the road but regardless we have never stopped working on how to get around it or even how to get through it. This year will be our year to restore the bond we had with our community and hopefully build that trust back better than it was before. We are still here and we are stronger than ever Thank you for everything and we will not let you down.
The gofundme will end On March 8th with the tiers and rewards ending with it
The patreon will be revamped and become subscription based with new tiers and lifetime rewards
A new discord role will be created for supporters and lifetime supporters
Monthly Dev blogs
Dev Streams
Q&A's
Thank you all for your patience, constructive criticism, complaints, and faith in us
-Kai
Hello everyone! Honestly, there has been so much going on behind the scenes that I do not even know where to begin to completely summarize everything so it’s not a huge wall of text. So many complications had happened in multiple ways that, like Hakai mentioned above, we had to stop and look even deeper into the root of what was causing certain problems to happen. The problems had caused us to have to redo many things including different maps that I was looking forward to keep developing and to let our community explore them. It was pretty frustrating for us and while we wanted to just release our patches for our community to experience, we realized we cannot without making all the necessary changes to improve not only gameplay but server stability and optimization so it is more enjoyable. We needed the solid foundation that we, as the developers, are happy with and that it can give our community the experience we envisioned. We know that some people think we have given up but that’s just the opposite and we apologize for being very quiet lately. We just have been very focused working on redoing quite a lot of things behind the scenes and we want to make our gameplay better than what people experienced. Will that mean that things will be 100% smooth from the upcoming patch? No, but it is going to be multiple steps in the right direction for our game and we can continue to develop/add new things from this new foundation that we have created. This is not just a game to us, this is something we are creating out of passion and we are dedicated to get our game to the standards that we and our community loves.
With that being said, the current map, Masai, will be completely different from what you all know. The map has been in the process of getting reworked and is now much bigger than it was. Making it much better for our Life gamemode (survival) when we release it. This map will be mostly open Savanna plains with a lot of lakes/waterholes of various sizes. On the previous map, the lighting was also very different compared to what it is now. Before, on the previous map, the lighting was a bit duller and I really wanted to add some more color/life to the lighting. First picture is before on the old map and second picture is the new current lighting on the new map.
Lighting has always been one of my favorites to dabble with and perhaps the current lighting could use some more tweaking. But, my goal is not only to create a more realistic look but a more lively map that’ll eventually feel very different from our previous one. Eventually this map will have various sounds, birds, crickets, etc. that’ll be more immersive and interactive with your animal.
Also moving forward, optimization has also been an important part that Hakai and I have been working on when it comes to the map, code, and various other features that we will continue to work on and improve throughout development. As we keep adding things, we will have to continue to test and keep make adjustments to get that middle ground. Once that is established, it’ll only get better from there.
As for skins, lots of variations will continue to be added from the skin competitions in our discord and from whatever we design (if you would like to participate in competitions please join our discord! discord.gg/primalearth) Skin colors can range from fully realistic to other colors found in different mammal species with the exception of reptiles/birds being a bit more colorful (You will NEVER see neon colors as a lion or any other animal.. unless it’s a reptile/bird or any other species that makes sense). Not only that, but we will give the option to choose all realistic skins for realism purposes!
We, as the whole dev team, really appreciate everyone for their patience as we get our game back on track. If you have any ideas or suggestions please feel free to leave us feedback or ideas in our discord!
~Goddess
Hey everyone, Alkaline here! For those of you that don’t know, we’ve been deep in the trenches lately, particularly within the animation field. Since becoming lead, I have been working hard to help get us to a place where we finally feel like we are climbing out of those trenches. Many hours have gone into diagnosing and fixing problems with rigs, trial and error, and making rigs that play nice with UE. That said, I wanted to pull back the curtain and show you guys a little bit of what goes into helping bring Primal Earth to life. Animation often looks simple from the outside, but there is a massive amount of backend work required to make sure everything functions flawlessly between the animation being made and when you actually get to see the animation in the game.
Lately, my main focus has been completely overhauling and optimizing several different aspects within the animation field, including backend files and rigs. I have been adjusting and re-doing our rigs in order to work with the new movement system that Hakai is implementing. I’ve also noticed that some of the models will warp, clip, or bend weirdly when they move so I have been going back in to fix weight painting issues to make sure every joint and muscle flexes in a way that gives a natural experience to our players. However, a cool animation in Blender doesn't mean anything if it breaks in Unreal Engine, so I’ve been testing and adjusting our files so that the transition from the animation software into the actual game engine is seamless. I have also been working on establishing a solid pipeline. This means that every single animation goes through a quality check before moving up for final approval, giving our other Lead Developers more time to focus on their respective areas while ensuring animation quality remains consistent.
As some of you may have noticed, we have expanded within the animation team! All of our animators are part-time with some of us being in school, working full-time 10+ hours a day, or working other part-time jobs. Despite everyone balancing school, careers, and other commitments, the team has been doing incredible work and continues to push the quality of our animations forward.
The animation team has been working on improving and replacing animations within the current playable roster and will continue to do so. The current animals being worked on are the cheetah, cape buffalo, zebra, and the lion cub. Now that I am wrapping up with some of the backend work, I can begin to focus more on re-working the cheetah and giving it an entirely new set of animations and work alongside the other animators to deliver custom, and better animations for all of our models and make adjustments where needed.
What Does This Mean for You? Taking the time to build out this backend pipeline and clean up the files and rigs means we are now beginning to operate like a well oiled machine. With a good foundation set and the team operating on the same wavelength, you can expect a smoother, faster, and higher-quality flow of custom animations coming your way soon! We want to make sure that Primal Earth looks and feels as realistic and natural as possible and I can’t wait to show you guys the progress!
-Alkaline