Dev Diary: April 2026
Welcome to the April Development Diary!
This month we released the first PTB for Update 17, adding new management mechanics, updated water rendering and two species of Stegosaurus for you to discover. Though it’s yet to contain combat, we’ve had really good feedback so far! Players on Steam can switch over at anytime, so be sure to read the patch notes for all the details.
Combat has continued to see a lot of development throughout April, with animals now taking damage and even dying if they take too many hits. We’ve developed custom tooling that allows us to attach “hurt boxes” to animals while attacking, meaning that any lunge, hit or bite must be close enough to actually damage an opponent. Next month, we’re aiming to expand attack variety, support “sweeping” attack damage (e.g. tail swipes) and begin to start polishing things up as we mass-produce combat animations for all the animals.
Our custom editor for adding damage and interaction events.
In the meantime, we’ve also kept chipping away at future content for 1.0! We started AND finished building an exciting feature that we know you’ll love, made a bunch of new foliage assets and began laying the technical groundwork for scenarios. We’re especially excited for the story missions so that new players will have a dedicated onboarding experience.
For the park builders out there, you’ll be pleased to know that a new batch of stylized animal signs are on the way! In U17, 10+ cutouts will be able to decorate your walls, including our lovely Stegosaurus and some vivarium species.
Update 17
Allosaurus
At long last, the king of the Jurassic arrives in Update 17! Coming with four different alternate species, we’re proud to finally unveil the first two models for Allosaurus fragilis and jimmadseni.
For each species of Allosaurus coming to the game, we’ve tried to give them unique skulls and bodies inspired by their fossilised counterparts. For example, fragilis is much more robust compared to the sloped snout of jimmadseni.
Being a large but slender theropod, there’s a lot of character we’re excited to put into its animations! We’re definitely trying to make this dinosaur feel particularly conniving as it stalks around its habitat.
Combat
As you can imagine, our animation team have had their hands full building out the combat library for our various rigs. With our combat system, we’re working to add a number of unique capabilities depending on the animal such as kicking or slashing if something gets too close. You can see some of this variety below on these tests for Brachiosaurus, mammoth and Dilophosaurus.
In terms of AI, a large part of this month’s development was spent on encounters and circling behaviors, ensuring that animals target the flank of their opponent and can defensively position themselves. This is best demonstrated by something like Stegosaurus which will actively turn its body and tail towards threats during battle.
While the T. rex is still our main combatant for testing, we’ve prepared a couple of short clips to show you a brief glimpse at where things currently are. We’ll remind you again that this is all still very work-in-progress so there’s plenty of improvement to come, especially by the next Dev Diary.
As we’ve said plenty of times, this is a dynamic system at its core. Even in the final product there will still be clipping or imperfect alignments and that’s just the reality of choosing this path. However, we believe the variability that comes from dynamism makes it all worth it. Even in terms of development, working on combat has put pressure on other areas and allowed us to patch holes in the locomotion system that made animals more sluggish than intended. It’s really hard to convey in such a short video just how much work has needed to go into combat thus far, but it’s quite fun to watch things play out when it’s not always a choreographed fight.
Speaking of, a cool thing we’re also working on is that when an animal has been knocked over or falls due to low health, predators can come and perform a kill animation, finishing off their prey. Even in its current state, we think it’s a pretty rad detail!
(T. rex is immortal and has increased damage for testing. And no, they won’t always roar after a kill. Sometimes they’ll sniff or do nothing!)
Update 18
Wetland Plants
As a little tease of what’s to come, we also have new wetland plants arriving later this year in Update 18! To make the most of U17’s water rendering improvements, we’ll be adding new underwater vegetation like eelgrass and expanding the roster of surface plants with species such as hyacinth.
And of course, it wouldn’t be a biome update without revisions! U18 will add new versions of the bald cypress, mangroves, reeds and cattails to revitalise your existing marshes.
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Thank you for reading April’s dev diary!
We greatly appreciate all the feedback and excitement that the Update 17 PTB has received so far. All of your screenshots have been mindblowing and are a huge motivator for the team while we continue to chip away at combat. We hope that you’ll continue to look forward to seeing more combat progress in May’s Dev Diary!
- The PK Team
