Dev Diary: May 2025
Welcome to the May Development Diary!
The team is currently deep in the midst of Update 15’s production, working on the required code and art for what we detailed last month. It’s been a busy time but worth it seeing all the new things make their way into the game!
With all the new threaten animations in development, it’s been a fun time collaborating across departments and figuring out how the animals should behave. This extends to work on the additional baby animations that couldn’t make it into U14, like the wobbly hadrosaurs and jumping sauropodlets! They are very, very cute.
Though there’ll be more to show with the animals next month, today we’d like to take a look at some of the other things coming in U15!
Over the next two months, we’ll be fitting this dinosaur with fresh animations inspired by emus, ostriches and cassowary. To do this properly, we’ve given Gallimimus a unique rig with bones that allow our animators to control its various plumage, not unlike what you’ve seen in our Velociraptor.
Mesozoic Environments
As our array of paleoflora continues to grow (heh), over 180 variants from the Coastal, Grassland, Scrubland, Temperate, Tropical and Wetland biomes have been implemented so far. It’s shocking to think there’ll be close to 200 new foliage items once the Boreal and Desert biome have their paleoflora completed!
Today’s showcase will be focusing on 4 of the 8 environments in-game. We’re excited to see how you use them once U15 releases!
Mesozoic Coastal
Mesozoic Scrubland
Mesozoic Temperate
These Mesozoic plants can look nice in mammal habitats, too!
Mesozoic Tropical
Animal Nursery Menu
Coming in U15, the Animal Nursery menu will be updated with new features, a fresh look and greater responsiveness. This is something the team’s wanted to do for a long while so we’re pleased the time has finally come.
Animal Gallery
Starting with the main gallery page, the animal buttons have been condensed to the left side of the screen. Sorting has also been improved, with the option to sort animals by unlocked, alphabetical order, rating, price, type and clade. A new filter menu allows players to find animals within certain biomes and time periods, just like the Paleopedia.
Here’s an in-depth video looking at how the various sorting and filter options work in practice.
Animal Preview and Incubation
Once an animal has been selected, the menu transitions into the animal preview, displaying its basic info and customization options. The animal preview can be changed to show either a fidget, walk or idle animation.
In the bottom right you’ll find all the ways that an animal can be changed prior to incubation. Some of these options include new toggles that can select a random skin, sex, maturity or neoteny stage for each created animal. It’ll be a lot easier to create diverse looking groups!
Another change is in the animal preview itself. Unlike previous iterations, the preview will be completely accurate to the individual you’ll create! This means that with each press of the creation button, the animal preview will update to reflect individual variation and random mutations.
Customization
As part of this update, we’ll also be introducing a new skin editing panel. From here, you’ll be able to override not just an animal’s color and size variation, but activate mutations like albinism, too.
With these overrides enabled, sliders appear to adjust the overall size, hue, saturation and value of an animal. We’ll be working to extend these sliders slightly above and below the natural variation range so that players have a bit more flexibility beyond what’s shown below.
Created by Francoo192
Created by acrogiga2004
Created by Incog
Thank you for reading May’s dev diary!
We’ll be back next month with another blog post to discuss Update 15 and show off even more content. As mentioned previously, we’re aiming to release this update in July, so stay posted!
Until next time,
- The PK Team
