Dev Diary: September 2025
Welcome to the September Development Diary!
This month’s blog post will primarily focus on providing a work-in-progress look at the upcoming Vivarium exhibits coming in Update 16. We also have news on Update 15.1, as well as an announcement that PK is currently part of the Steam Autumn sale!
Make sure to grab the game for 30% off before the sale ends October 6th.
In September, the team found themselves working on two updates at once - the U15 support patch and U16. This was an interesting act to juggle since a few of us had to continually jump back and forth throughout the month depending on what other team members needed.
While this did lead to the support patch taking a bit longer to cook, the good news is that we’re already making steady progress on U16! Once 15.1 goes out, it’ll be our sole focus for the next few months. Speaking of…
Update 15.1 Release
Update 15.1 will be coming to the PTB this Thursday on the 2nd of October! If there are no major issues with the build, we’ll be releasing it to the main branch on Steam and Epic as soon as possible.
The ‘headlining’ feature for this update is the long-awaited head-IK or “look target” system, allowing animals to finally look at each other while roaming, resting or idling. To work across all of our animals and seamless growth, this has been a massive engineering project requiring months of iteration.
We will continue to improve this feature as time goes on, but it certainly makes the animals feel more lively seeing them glance at one another.
Next up, we’ve managed to sneak in grazing animations for most herbivores in the game! Like other idle fidgets, these animations have a chance to play when the animals come to a stop or are simply standing around. Delicious!
Finally, the threaten behaviors seen during nesting have now been made into a regular AI state. This means that as animals encounter potential threats, they’ll try to roar at them, scare them off or run away if they’ve been threatened themselves.
This is an area of the game that we’re really looking forward to expanding once we get to combat in Update 17.
Update 16
As detailed last month, U16 will be another massive release focused on fleshing out your park and management opportunities.
To start off development, we’ve been laying the foundation for vivariums and replacing all of the outdated code that relates to the Mini-Aviary. Though still very early in development, we’re pleased to have a functioning prototype that broadly outlines their customization and revised animal movement system.
As new assets and components are finished over the next few months, these modules are going to start looking really, really nice! So with that said, you’re about to see a lot of early development imagery.
Vivariums
A New Home
Vivarium species will be found in the Animal Nursery alongside the rest of the roster. Here, players can filter specifically for vivarium animals or even make use of the customization tools to override their variation and random mutations. There’s also a handy dropdown you can use to see how many animals will fit into a certain vivarium size.
Once created, they’ll have to be dropped into their habitat from the Animal Holder. Keepers will need to stock and clean their vivarium by interacting with the hatch in the back.
Vivariums O’ Plenty
Currently, there are 4 different sizes to choose from:
Box (4x4x4)
Small (4x8x4)
Medium (8x12x6)
Large (12x16x8)
Each of these can be configured to use an amphibious, arboreal, or terrestrial layout, meaning there are 12 total modules to pick from! They work just like the feeders, so if you don’t currently have an animal inside, you can change the configuration to something else.
All vivariums will have detailed terrain, rocks and foliage when they’re finished! They’re using placeholder art and layouts for now.
Speaking of animals, you’ll be happy to hear that they only have a minimum exhibit size! This means that while you might not be able to put Compsognathus into the 4x4 box, they’ll be more than happy in the small, medium or large versions. The bigger the vivarium is, the more individuals you’ll be able to keep inside.
Exterior Customization
Players can quickly change the front, sides and roof of a vivarium through their modular widget. There are options to use glass, mesh, facades, cladding, half cladding and even a null setting for those who want to go totally custom or sink it into the ground.
If you want even more customization, you can also edit ALL the sides independently by enabling a toggle in the menu.
As for things like the terrain textures, cladding and facades, those will change depending on what environment you’ve set the vivarium to: arid, forest or rainforest. We’ll talk about this in more detail once the art is ready for a future dev diary!
Walking With Tiny Dinosaurs
When setting out to create vivariums, we knew we had to evolve the movement system previously seen in our Mini-Aviary. It relied entirely on a long, premade animation loop which made it difficult to transfer to new species or to simply make more animals move at the same time.
For the new system, we’re essentially building a network of points that the animals can randomly move between. They’re able to take diverging paths, backtrack and play a variety of adorable fidgets when they stop at a destination. How long they walk for is also random!
There’s quite a lot we need to do before the locomotion is polished, but hopefully you can see the potential of this new system in the video below. We’ll be aiming to reduce sliding as much as possible and dynamically bend the neck/tails as they turn!
Animals within a vivarium will either be placed onto the movement network or in isolated spots where they’ll permanently rest, sleep or fidget until the player moves away. All the animals will be randomly shuffled into new positions once the player comes back.
For something more active like the Microraptor, we can determine what paths should make them walk, glide or climb! All that information can instantly be reused by something like the Archaeopteryx or Yi as long as they have the required animations. It’s a much easier solution for us to work with and means we can:
Have more animals moving around at once
Add or remove paths depending on what enrichment is enabled
Develop vivarium species faster by sharing spline paths
We are incredibly excited to keep working on this system and use it to its full potential. It’ll only look better and better as we go!
More To Come!
In a future Dev Diary, we’ll be exploring some of the enrichment and interior customization options coming to vivariums in U16.
Roadmap Change
Since the last blog post, we’ve decided to move Staff Progression 2.0 into Update 17. While this will not only ease some of the short term development workload, there are other changes and improvements we’d like to make to the experience surrounding staff and logistics as a whole.
Some notable examples include adding breakrooms and new management views to see the park resource usage and where various staff members are located throughout the park.
Created by B3n
Created by Beezy14
Created by Wither
Created by Khaidu
Thank you for reading September’s dev diary!
We appreciate your patience for U15.1 and hope that you’re excited to try it out once it hits the PTB on Thursday. U16 is shaping up to be a really exciting update and we can’t wait to share more as it develops!
Until next time,
- The PK Team
