DevBlog #18: Happy Halloween!

FTessaro - Lead Programmer

Hey everyone, it feels like these months are flying by! As if it was only a few days since our previous DevBlog. As you’d likely expect, I’ve been primarily focused with the ongoing Mechanic Test for Update #4. For the Diet System I’ve set up some additional fruits and vegetables such as coconuts, interactable horned melons, radishes & pumpkins.

The implementation of coconuts also required collaboration with our awesome animation team, so that a certain hard-headed herbivore could use it’s ram attack to split them open to reveal the nutritious prize hidden inside. That collaboration also resulted in a system that plays low, mid or high eating animations based on the size of the eater and plant being eaten, dynamically.

Besides all that, I've been busy making adjustments to the Diet and Fracture systems, the usual day-to-day bug fixing and testing some things that we’ve been working on for updates 5 & 6, which we’re all excited to share with you sometime in the near future. That’s my October everyone, see you next time!

dmIV - Programmer

Most of my month was spent reworking how footprint scent works. They are now detected passively around the player in a small radius, which increases as you hold Q. This can be toggled by tapping Q as well. Players can also begin tracking specific dinosaurs by tapping Q while standing on top of a footprint. This will highlight the prints left by that player with a different color.

Another big change is that you can no longer scent all footprints. Instead players will only leave behind groups of scentable prints a distance away from each other, so you will need to find these instead of following a continuous line. We are still experimenting with different cues and visuals but that’s the general direction, making tracking feel more like tracking.

Amar0k - Programmer

Hello! This month I spent a bit of time working on a new monitoring tool for the team to use as you may have seen in some previews or my stream. It includes a heatmap of where all the players are hanging out. We can use this for balancing or map design to name a few functions. I have also spent a bit of time on the ambient rabbit which I'm hoping to do something similar for each of the ambient animals it now burrows after a certain distance and time spent running from a predator. It will eventually come out of the burrow if you are far enough away. There has been some pretty heavy work going on with the backend servers and how we manage them which is still on-going. Carnotaurus AI also received some much needed love recently as it was slaughtering everything in its path.

Baardo - 3D Artist

This month I continued work on the edible plant assets, including a remake of an older asset, the Coconut Palm. I was able to bring the asset up to a higher graphical fidelity as well as add some extra details to it for the diet system. It comes complete with bushels of coconuts and the coconuts can be cracked open in multiple layers. Quite a glow up for one of the assets that made its debut with the first batch of tropical foliage!

Additionally I made some new smaller diet assets, including a season appropriate pumpkin! In addition to smashing some pumpkins, the player should be able to gorge on radishes and russula mushrooms soon.

Wedge - Sound Designer