An early look at what's next

by MaverickMatryoshka

With the year closing out and our first half year of public access squarely behind us, now is a good time to look ahead at what's next for the project.

After launching the UE5 migration patch we've been working on solving some of the main points of friction in the game. Based on the feedback given, for the next patch we narrowed this down to the following:

  • More playable characters
  • More variety in playstyle
  • A more engaging map

While there are other notable ones that we'd like to tackle in future patches―such as more engaging AI―these were the ones we settled on for the near term.

More playable characters and variety in playstyle

Let's tackle these as a combination, because they go together.

With two playables at launch to start off with, we wanted to prioritise expanding the roster going forward. Our first large carnivore, Allosaurus, is a direct result of that effort, just like our upcoming first herbivore. Allosaurus is a fully custom model designed from the ground up, whereas for the herbivore we went with a store model for the base, and layered custom sounds on top to bring the animal to life. This was done in an effort to save on implementation time to get the gameplay in as soon as possible.

Allosaurus is the first large carnivore coming to the game. Note that the model is still undergoing polish.

We'll have more details on the specifics of herbivore gameplay soon, but we're making big steps with these animals to round out the playstyles more, and produce more player engagement by having the carnivore and herbivore playstyles synergise with each other.

A more engaging map

The first map was a great stress test for us that allowed us to experiment with scale and our tooling. For the next map we wanted to shrink it slightly and spend more time handcrafting the biomes to feel more unique and engaging. We're also aiming to improve flow on the map, so that navigation feels more natural.

We'll likely revisit the old map in the future, but are building an entirely new one for the upcoming patch to incorporate the lessons learned from the previous.

Development screenshot of a lake on the new map

I hope you enjoyed this little teaser of what we've been working on.
This next patch will be the largest content expansion we've done so far, and I can't wait to get it into your hands.

More soon :)