Dev Blog #3!

JJ/Seir

• Director & Founder

Hello Anomalies,

We're back at it with Steam Dev Logs! or more accurately, Dev Blogs. This Dev Blog will be covering the past couple months of January & February, Enjoy! The past couple months have seen major changes to development behind the scenes as you will be able to read from Dima's section. We are pushing forward to our Vertical Slice/Tech Demo build for QA to test then for Donators to play with so that we can iterate quickly towards a build ready for Early Access. We are working hard to bring you all a quality, fair and FUN game. We're very excited to explore the future of this game together with the team and community staying in touch. I hope I won't lose my hair over the coming years haha I'm beginning to get back into art although challenging after such a long break from it. I've been working on different things to assist with the team such as the Map Layout I've shown in the past and that's now present on our roadmap, documentation (it never ends), management, and more. There's still a lot I want to do and contribute to better communicate the vision here which I'll be working on. I'd love to connect with other directors and share experiences!

With that said, a new server icon is in the works by Ember that remains true to the game as our current one is outdated and was unable to updated due to unforeseen challenges. I can't wait for us to get back into working on new playable characters/species again with even greater quality than before.

Ember Newcomer

• General Artist

It’s been a great experience working with the development team for the past 8 months. In that span of time, I was able to accomplish designing the first wave of merchandise, concept art for playables, points of interest, user interface elements, and even a little bit of the origins behind the Primeval Horizon universe. I have also worked on giving the Achillobator a brand new set of four carefully designed skins for the customization system. Feather alpha assets were also designed for our feather shader that our material artist, Dormant, has been working on implementing to the Achillobator model. To touch on more current work, I have just completed the concepts of our new tree design, the Wovenwood. These trees are made of an extraordinary system of branches and aerial roots that form accessory trunks, much like its inspiration, the Banyan tree. Its massive size allows for arboreal nesting opportunities. To the side of the main design, I also rendered an example of the leaf shape as well as the material design of the trunk. This was all done in preparation of its 3D creation by the environment artist, which will be put in the game as one of the assets for our extraterrestrial landscape. Something else I also just completed was the redesign of the Main Menu. Following the design consistencies of the UI I designed prior, I pieced together a layout using dark, monstrous themes that represent a fantasy horror setting. Animated fog was added as a bonus, which was done with some help from Paleo Entertainment. These elements have since then been added to the engine by Sandro. Plenty more on the creative side of our project is in the works and I look forward to sharing more in the future!Steam post imageSteam post imageSteam post imageSteam post imageSteam post imageSteam post imageSteam post imageSteam post image

Caveman

• Programmer

Hello I'm Caveman, I'm one of the programmers on Primeval Horizon. My past few months were spent building systems such as Territories, Packing & laying out groundwork for things like Nesting, and then a lot of time was spent in refactoring everything with Dima our Tech Director, here we rewrote most of the code, streamlined and optimized our systems.

This month (End December to January), I've focused on refining the locomotion & combat (using the awesome animations done by Kleiner our Animator), engine upgrades, footprints and scent

with the addition of a working growth mechanic and it's integration with other systems so that they scale with growth !

There's still more polishing and tweaking needed, which I'm on at the moment !

But I'm very excited for the coming months, as we're seeing everything come together slowly !!

Thank you for reading !

AK

• World Designer

Hey everyone! I'm AK and I'm the lead world designer and environment artist for Primeval Horizon. I have been working on this project for the past year and last month I started adding a bit more vibrancy to the forest by adding a whole new forest biome which I like to call the "Red Matter Forest" because of the brilliant shades of red the forest displays. I also added rivers and lakes to the area of the map that we will be releasing for the demo and the area looks great and we're really happy with how the map is turning out! I have also been adding new topological markers like cliffs and paths to help you find your way back out of the dense forest in case you get lost and trust me, it's bound to happen at some point. I have also been modifying existing points of interests using the before mentioned water sources and also creating new ones. In the coming time I hope to polish the map further and have it ready for a good looking demo and I hope it meets everyone's graphical expectations of this wonderful game!

Adam

• Programmer

Hello Im Adam Mattacola , Im one of the programmers on Primeval Horizon. I am helping the AI/ NPC's in the game and have an interactive world with other dinosaurs living their life. We have a system where they will go drink by near by rivers and go about their normal activities as they roam the open world, unless of course they see you. Herbivores will run whereas Carnivores will attack and depending on the type, they can even hunt in groups, so beware......

I also help with the cinematics for Primeval horizon and just recently worked on showing the potential skin selection for the dinosaur Achillobator. This is going to be a great game and am so happy to be a part of it.

Jordan

• Sound Designer

Over the last few weeks I've hooked up new MetaSound systems in Unreal Engine to animation states, giving tighter control and more responsive triggering across movement and combat.

I’ve been developing various multi layered creature vocals including broadcasts, calls, distress, threats, and more. Each sound is constructed with weight, texture, and aggressive transient detail to give the dinosaur scale and personality. Creature voice design is one of the tougher elements of Sound Design, but very rewarding when everything is in place.

I’ve also been developing surface reactive footstep foley, with velocity driven variation to enhance mass and impact.

I’m looking forward to hearing the finished sounds in real time, when interacting in gameplay.

Sandro

• Programmer

This February I worked on Dino Selection and Customization which lets you select a Dino from a list and then modify the look of that Dino. When modifying the look I also made it so that each pattern has a minimum and maximum color. Making it so that nobody can have ridiculous hot pink dinosaurs. You can then save that look as a preset. I also worked on changing the Main menu UI from last months look to this new look.

Dima

• Technical Director

On the technical side, Caveman has been tirelessly addressing build quality issues in preparation for QA testing hopefully by spring, this year. He has also been laying the groundwork for various gameplay features for Primeval Horizon’s crucial game loop. Some of that includes; the Territory System, packs and nesting. Last week he contributed to getting a keen hand on inverse-kinematics for locomotion, leading to better results in movement to feel more grounded but also enabling flexibility to transition smoothly from exciting gameplay, and keeping the creature feel to a high bar. In other words, your creature will angle based on how steep the terrain is. More will come to this area, stay tuned.

I have been busy spearheading the project forward into taking its next big steps. Let’s talk about what they are.

Custom Engine Builds, you might ask why is this important? Don’t all games start with downloading an engine, making a game, then publishing that build? Well, for a small game that is the path you can take. For us though, we have to come to an eventual realization that our game is big, and I mean.. Really big. It’s not normal for a game of our size to develop within the constraints of engine versions that are published by Epic and by far we’ve done a lot of the hard work to get up to this point with the struggles we’ve had, there are reasons why big studios customize the engine. This new direction now elevates these stresses, and gives us new motivation to solve several challenges ahead while giving us the flexibility to change what we want for our game, and rip out what’s not needed to decrease published game size, but also introduce new tech and lead in a new direction away from Epic’s failures in several areas since the inception of Unreal Engine 5.

One of them being....

A complete reliable replacement for Physics.

I have completely replaced the Chaos Physics feature set for Bullet Physics under a week since undergoing this engine transition. In later tests when I have eventually figured out how to get Collision working with the Terrain, and consider edge cases for complex surfaces, the result is a super deterministic, meaning repeatable physics that is an early step to involving really amazing gameplay opportunities in the future.

This will eventually be replaced for Jolt Physics sometime soon, as this was an early case of learning how to get this done, and whether it was actually hard enough to get it done. (Spoiler Alert), In a lot of ways it wasn’t, but in the most miniscule ways, it was. I hope you can appreciate the work being done here, and what we will do to address Character Physics or as they are called Soft Body Dynamics for Creatures in the future.

Wardragon/Koola Main

• Quality Assurance Lead

It's been a slow QA month (admittedly didn't help half of QA was sick at the same time, myself included XD)

Most notable things we did this month were catalog and set up custom foliage and set up the temperature ranges they appear in, their diet and what effects if any there are from being eaten

and refined and discussed the mechanics of group leader a bit to ensure the group leader is a reasonable reward to risk intraspecific combat over as well as establishing just how large broods are (since nesting is heavily tied to the group leader status)

for example even a large apex such as rex can produce up to 12 eggs per brood of eggs, so nesting will never be a tedious process when it comes to laying the eggs themselves

with the amount of eggs being produced we needed to decided what to do with excessive eggs, so now if eggs become to old or are left uncared for long enough they will rot

(eggs expiring from age have a chance of turning into AI hatchlings instead)

Dormant

• Material Artist

This month’s progress may have been slower than expected, but the results are shaping up to be truly transformative. I developed a new pipeline for generating hair cards for dinosaurs, offering extensive control over fur length, direction, noise, and different feather types. The fur and feathers automatically inherit material colors from the body and deform correctly with the skeleton.

With this system in place, creating and feathering future dinosaurs will be significantly faster and far more flexible.