Mesozoica is a theme park tycoon game in which you must create and manage a park full of extinct dinosaurs. If that sounds familiar, you're not wrong: it's clear that Mesozoica is heavily influenced by the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films.
Hey all!Our Lead Designer found the time in between development to elaborate on our progression and management features that are coming to Mesozoica! Have a read and let us know what you think. We greatly appreciate your feedback as we want Mesozoica to be as fun as possible for everyone.First of all, our game has had a rough launch in which we stumbled upon tons of problems with the game. A major issue that was widely agreed upon was the lack of park management and the urge to actually keep playing.Back when we first started developing our core systems we focused entirely on making something that you could feel in awe with.
Our dinosaurs are the main attractions but yet, they lacked something very important. Personality and life.Identifying the issueStarting up Mesozoica now provides you with an empty map, a way to get dinosaurs and the ability to build using our modular building system.
All of this kind of shows us what the game can be but after a couple hours the game felt dull and you basically felt as if you saw everything. There is no way to generate more cash, get personal with your dinosaurs or even progress.
Spamming the black markets would eventually give you all the dinosaurs and that's about it. In our opinion this is a huge issue which needs to be fixed.Tackling the issueA while back we mentioned that we are going to offer you, the player, the opportunity to pick a company for which you will work and from which you will take contracts and objectives. The company that you pick when starting a new game eventually dictates the way you go through the game and build your park.By limiting your starting dinosaurs and amount of cash you as a player will start out 'humble'. Exploring the opportunities that those starting dinosaurs will give you will make sure that you get a more personal connection with the animals you create.Directly linked to the company is your Board Confidence level that will be influenced by accepting and completing contracts that are built up out of singular objectives given by your company's higher ups. Each completed contract will give you a reward in the form of cash and XP. XP will directly improve your Board Confidence level and a higher Board Confidence level will unlock more dig sites and thus unlocking more dinosaurs to expand your park.By getting better and more impressive dinosaurs in your park you will attract more visitors and earn more cash and will be able to keep expanding your park.This of course, gives the game a story and path to follow which you can follow as closely as you want. And of course, a sandbox mode will still be included for those that want their dinosaurs to roam free without any limitations;)ManagementLastly, our management side of the game is getting an upgrade as well, as it will now be more important to keep track of everything in your park.
From visitor wellbeing to dinosaurs getting sick and keeping your burger joints profitable. All through our new updated GUI that will make your life a lot easier within Mesozoica.Please, give us your feedback on the above. Expect more info later this week so stay tuned!Matthew. The purpose of this small blurb is to quickly and effectively explain the updates and the exciting news ahead for Mesozoica. The big topics that we are sure you want to see are TERRAFORMING, BETTER OPTIMIZATION, MORE AND BETTER SOUNDS and finally the news that were investing a great deal of the profits from the game into getting us help that we could have never received without your purchase/support. We are well aware of the impending release of several Jurassic related franchises and we have invested into creating something that Universal wouldn’t touch.
A risky endeavor in which focus on creating a world in which the player decides the fate of the setting and in which they create their own story.Thank you for the patience and understanding, this is our baby as much as it is yours and were not stopping after a rough launch.First of all, thank you for giving this a read. Even if you are someone who has bought the game and refunded it/hasn’t bought the game it means a great deal to us that you’d follow along with our progress as a project.The objective of this long post is to highlight what has kept us silent for a long period and hard at work. While from the outside it may look inactive, the inside gears have been churning. Let's take a look at what has been worked on and changed for the upcoming update to Mesozoica. Foliage SystemThe Problem as defined by the CommunityPreviously we were using the build in foliage system that Unity provided. The problems we were facing with this system was that it was very heavy on the overall performance of the game and that it was extremely performance heavy to edit and adjust it on runtime.
This made it so we weren't able to fully implement and finish terraforming. When terraforming the performance hit was so magnificent that at times it could take 5 - 8 seconds for the game to respond again. We found some workarounds that reduced the freeze to around 2 seconds (still not acceptable) but this meant that the game was becoming heavier overall. Eliminating the freezes completely meant that we had to remove the ground foliage (grass) and that didn't sound like a realistic solution. The only real solution we could find is not using the default unity foliage system and creating our own.The downside to this was that creating such a system was going to be a very time consuming task, but in our eyes a necessary investment of time. Thank you for allowing us to take our caffeine addiction to unhealthy levels and get this investment of time completed.What we fixed and what it does for YOU!Creating a foliage system is very hard because you are dealing with rendering a lot of objects.
We are talking about a couple hundred thousand, maybe even a million small objects in your screen, and this on top of everything that was already in the level like buildings, dinosaurs and other scenery. We have looked into many possibilities and systems that were made for other games and came to the conclusion that the only possible way to render so many objects was to cluster them into large batches. Using a special technique we were able to even render a lot of batches at the same time instead of rendering them separately. The performance difference gained from this technique on the CPU can best be visualized in a graph:In this graph you can see how taxing the rendering of a number of objects is on the CPU. The higher the draw calls the heavier it is.
You can see that our solution only uses a few draw calls to render a very large amount of objects compared to the default way of rendering (Note that this technique only takes a great deal of stress away from the CPU, the GPU will still have to deal with a lot of geometry as normal. So this is not a magic solution that allows us to render everything we want in insane quantities).Even Though this sounds awesome in terms of performance gained, it would not have been game development if this didn't have its downsides. Using this technique meant that we had to come up with a lot of creative solutions to still reach the level of diversity and freedom as that you would normally have if you treat everything as a seperate object.Another requirement was that this system had to be very performant when it comes to making edits on runtime like terraforming and even removing and adding grass. TerraformingTerraforming is a very important feature that allows you to shape the landscape of your park the way you want to. Previously we weren't able to fully implement this feature like i explained in the previous section of this article.Our new terraforming system allows players to:. Raise terrain. Lower terrain.
Flatten terrain. Create lakes and riversI made a small in engine video of the terraforming system for you to enjoy:you can see the functionality behind the terraforming system is fully implemented. The task remaining is to make sure the terraforming works together with all the other systems. For example the terraforming should raise the dinosaurs and visitors up and down if you brush over them. And we have to figure out a way to make sure that you can't mess up your buildings and paths with terraforming. UIUpon the release of the early access version of Mesozoica we got quite a lot of complaints about how our UI is very confusing and hard to get used to.
WE have heard your voices about the UI and we took them very seriously and decided to completely make a new UI from scratch. To make sure we are doing it right at once we are developing our UI in iterations.
We are currently working on iteration 4 and throughout the iterations the UI changed alot for the better.We are going over all the different iterations to show you how the UI progressed:Iteration 1The first iteration was the initial setup of the UI. This version was meant to layout the base of the UI. Unfortunately we forgot to take pictures of the UI iteration progress so we had to look back in our chat history and could find some images (they aren't the best quality though).So let's look at what we changed in our new UI design.
Compared to our previous design that was mainly build up out of small windows, we wanted to make our UI more consistent in terms of layout, therefore we chose to use a static toolbar at the bottom of the screen that is used to open the side window you see on the left. We also added text to the right side of the buttons in the toolbar to make them easier to understand. The issue with our last UI was that we had a lot of icons that didn't really make sense, using text fixes that. On the left in the toolbar you the information that should always be available to the player, for example the amount of money you currently have and the dinosaur/visitor count.To make sure that the large sidebar isn't in the way of your view we are going to offset the camera center when the sidebar is open:This way the UI is never in the way of what you are trying to look at.Iteration 2In our second iteration we wanted to blend the UI more with the game since we felt like the UI was to separate the the game itself. After trying out a couple ideas we came to the conclusion the blurring the game behind the UI and making the UI a bit transparent was the best solution.
To make sure we could realise this without a significant performance hit we played with the idea in engine and came up with a performant way to blur the game behind UI elements. After that we went back to the drawing board to update the UI based on this idea. This is what we came up with:Iteration 3 / 4In iteration 3 and 4 we basically tried to design all the remaining windows and make sure all the information that should be available to the player is there. Let's look at a couple images from the UI (these images are NOT from ingame but are design concepts):Iteration 5For iteration 5 we want to involve the fans.
We made a Google Form that you can use to comment on our UI design so far:on these comments we will make iteration 5 and showcase the result once its updated. SoundWe have been working on improving the sounds of our dinosaurs and visitors. We started with the dinosaur audio since we felt like that was the most important task. Previously our dinosaurs only made sounds on events like attacking or intimidation, this of course is very unrealistic since animals of that size almost always make sounds.
Think about sounds like: footsteps, breathing, growling, etc. We made a list of audio that every dinosaur should have:. One shot growl(s). Ambient breathing loop(s). Action audio.
Intimidation. Attack. Get hit. Drink.
Eat. Sleeping. Get Hurt. FootstepsWe think that with these audio files per dinosaur our dinosaurs will feel a lot more alive and natural. We put together a demo video with the new sounds:also put some audio on soundcloud to showcase audio:encourage you to comment on the audio here:the audio for the dinosaurs is created and ready to be implemented once we find the time.
Next we will work on audio for our visitors, we will go over this in future posts. Concept artWe decided to hire a concept artist since we felt that the experience and atmosphere that Mesozoica currently has was lacking. Because we felt that it was impossible to make a drawing with enough attention payed to both the dinosaur and visitor side of mesozoica we decided to split it up and make 2 drawings, with one drawing focusing on the dinosaurs and one on the visitors. After we found a concept artist we did a lot of polls to make sure we understand what our fans want in terms of experience and atmosphere. This document was the result of that:on this document our concept artist came up with this sketch:Even though this sketch nails the atmosphere we felt that the camera angle and position were to close to the ground and dinosaurs. Based on these instructions our concept artist came up with this new sketch:This was a lot better, however we asked that he showed a bit less path and a used a wider field of view for the final image. Base upon the instructions and the last image the concept artist went and painted the final image and here it is:feel like this is exactly the look we should aim for in the future since it nails all the aspects of our poll document.Now that we have the dinosaur concept art done we are currently working on the concept art for the visitors.
Here is an image of the current state of the visitor/building image:what are we going to do with this concept art? In the past we have been struggling with not having a visual reference of how our game should look and feel. We kinda were working in the dark because we didn't have the funds to hire a concept artist. Now that we have funding from the early access we have the opportunity to visualize how we want our game to look.
With this concept art we are going to try to change the look of our game to match the concept art. This may mean that we will have to create (note that we don't have the fundings yet to hire artists to make all of this, so we hope that we can find people that are willing to help us out of love for the project or that we raise enough money in the future to realize all this):. New terrain.
New nature assets. New buildings and modular pieces. New fencesVisitor concept artBeside the concept art for the atmosphere and buildings we decided to invest in creating concept art for new visitors. Currently we feel that our visitors are lacking personality and believability and the first step in solving this is designing how we want the visitors to look by creating visual reference.
We will tell more about the concept art for the visitors in future posts.TestingLooking back on the past we decided that we need to have longer test periods to avoid buggy releases. Previously we released versions that were tested just for a day, and that is way to short. Our now policy on releasing is that we don't release versions that havent been tested for at least a full week until no more game breaking bugs are found. This may take more time but should result in higher quality gameplay down the road. Future plansWe quickly went over what we have been doing, but now let's talk about our future plans. Our short term goal is to update our game by adding the system discussed in this article, so:. Terraforming (Done).
Creating rivers (Done). New foliage system (Done). Smoother dinosaur movement (Done). Bug fixesAs you can see we the only thing left for the new update is making sure the new system are correctly implemented and done cause bugs by testing.
We need a couple days to make a testable version of the game. After that our minimum testing period of a week starts. Based on how the testing is going the release date of the next update will be determined.
To avoid missing release dates we will determine the next update date once the game is running stable and we can pick a date with confidence.UI updateAfter the upcoming update the UI is next. We will based on the designs made, create a whole new UI system. This will make the UI look alot better and the game easier to play. Details on the new UI update will come after the upcoming update. In the meantime we will keep iterating through our UI until we are all satisfied with the way it looks.InvestmentsAs mentioned previously in this article we are investing heavily in concept art since we feel like concept art is the first step in fixing the visual problems of our game.
You might wonder why invest in concept art and not in programmers, animators, modelers, etc. Well based on the amount of money we raised during the early access period of mesozoica we decided what is possible and what is not possible with the money we raised.
We rather pay for resources that we would never have access to and spend more time ourselves working on the time heavy work than invest in quick/cheap ways to speed progress. We felt like the visitors were the biggest visual problem (apart from the AI which we are going to fix ourselves). Meaning we are going to invest in:. Concept art for visitors / atmosphere and buildings. 3D modeler for visitors. Animator for visitorsHoping that the new updates and investments will raise enough money for future investments to realize the atmosphere and building concept art.PollsWe also want to let you know that we are well aware of that the fans want improved.
We did polls on this subject and can be seen in this document:aren't sure yet what and when we are going to tackle subjects, but we want to start with the biggest ones and work our way down.Thank you,Mesozoica. We want to apologize for the lack of recent updates/hotfixes, in our quest to fix the major issues we have found the solutions we have been seeking to more than one problem. It's these new solutions we are now working on implementing!First and Foremost we are pleased to announce that terraforming is making a comeback. We fixed the issue causing terraforming to be lag centric and have included fun items such as FOILAGE BRUSHES and RIVER CREATIONS! We feel that the massive performance upgrade will also be noted in this coming update. In short, the flow of this solution was as followed, Fixed Grass - Better Performance- Terraforming enabled- Rivers/Brushes createdDinosaur AI fixes are the second big ticket item.
We have included realistic sleeping schedules, and a fan requested Herbivore's eating foilage action for all herbivores! We believe our fixes to the AI not only fix the glaring issues we had in the past but also bring back some believability into the game.Other notable additions are as follows:Complete UI remakePark management and progressionDinosaur audio so that a dinosaur is always making sounds like breathing, belly roar, etcWorking on concept art for new modular pieces and figuring out the desired style of the gameWe want to thank everyone for being patient as we fix these significant issues. A large part of production will start when the first steam payment arrives so we can get additional help making our new buildings/adding other sub-features! Hello everyone!Apologies for the silence,We have been working primarily on making sure progression is stable and consistent!Adding companies brings variety and player choice.Adding employees generates players quests that they must choose from. Morality over money?New GUI bring more info to the player. More info harder tasks.However all of these new items dont bring progression which is why we have been taking so long on fixing PROGRESSION above all else.Your company will limit you to the number of dinosaurs you are allowed to have as a safe guard (we dont give start up tons of money unless they prove it). How you increase your cap space which will eventually be infinite is by leveling up your relationship with your company!The leveling up process is very direct and simple to follow however forces the player to make tough quest decisions (morality) which have rewards/consequences.Again thanks for the patience, were working on support for different screen resolutions and continually fixing performance bugs.WE FEEL as if we have truly fixed the issues with AI.
We will soon see if that is the case or not! We are currently fixing several large RAM related bugs with the blueprints and editing the GUI to finalize it eventually. We wanted to be transparent and showcase the lengths that have been made by the team to respond to the community regarding improving the game correctly!Again the images attached are WIP and can change however it's essential for us to show everyone that work is being done daily to improve the game! Also, we have a live vote going on via facebook (Four new animals and a lot of changes are coming, and we appreciate the patience as we improve the overall game before we go crazy with adding new content.
We cannot stress enough how grateful we are for the patience shown by the community and the continued support post our rough launch!We wanted to post a progress WIP update to show that we are not only listening to community feedback, but we're taking action on it.To Start GUI:Gui arguably was the most significant turn off for players and ex-players. To fix this, we stripped our old GUI down and remastered it to be more friendly and to decrease the number of clicks it took to get to what you want.
We also increased the amount of visible information given to the player. A great deal of this information was not shown out of simplicity however that was obviously a mistake post review of community feedback.Attached is a WIP meaning Work In Progress image of our current HUD, meaning it could change pending some final changes and feedback! We heard your guy's complaints on the original hud, and hopefully, you guys can see were making drastic changes.Another drastic change other than the GUI that we talked about was visitors. We've decided that going for a more low poly route than something hyper-realistic would play more into what the game is about! Attached below are the first 20 people were going to implement to replace our janky original models. We have also replaced the gangster walk with something more lifelike and engaging. Again this shot to the top of our list of improvements due to community feedback thanks to you!Finally, we decided to take a good hard look at our AI which needed a great deal of love and attention.
Not only have we looked at ways to improve/end the bloodthirsty herbivores but we have looked into adding eating from trees and bushes to provide a more lifelike experience for AI. Attached is a little clip of just that happening excuse the death animation at the start! This is combined with our new outlook on feeding animals both herbivore and carnivore as we are ALSO adding lowpoly feeder animals to make better creating carnivore habitats engaging and fun! We are currently looking at adding a Cow/Goat combo and testing to see how those two first animals are used and if there are any bugs involved.quality of life improvements will be followed by significant bug fixes to the Blueprint system causing massive amounts of lag and adding additional setting to the settings menu to allow for more tinkering with your computer to better run/showcase the game!Our next major update will be focused more on the game and adding in any additional features core to the gameplay and is titled Operation Jericho! We are actively seeking to improve the game and constantly looking get more feedback on what we can improve and change! I wanted to make everyone aware that our Operation T update is more or less our Re-Launch. The Game is really rough right now and as developers we are MORE than aware.
That being said we have applied 4 big solutions in Operation T that seek to fix the big issues.Edit: The update is planned for next week! That depends on a good amount of different factors. Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which we explore the wilds of early access. This week, Fraser s doing his best John Hammond impersonation by caging up dinosaurs and displaying them in exchange for tourist cash in dino theme park sim Mesozoica.This summer, Frontier plans to launch Jurassic World Evolution, a licensed dino-park sim. I can almost understand, then, why I m already playing Mesozoica, another dinosaur-themed management sim. Absent a big license like Jurassic Park, developers DreamInCode B.V. And Squadron Interactive might be keen to beat Frontier to the punch.
This early launch is not likely to have the effect they intended.(more). Operation TouristOur first major update to mesozoica is not based around the dinosaurs in-game (while they will get some love) our significant primary expenditure of time and effort post-launch will be on a mini milestone we are going to call Operation Tourist.
Operation tourist is pretty basic when we break it down.The first and primary focus I'm sure most of you can guess is the visitors. While not very lovely to look at the back end for advanced Ai is there as well as interactions. We have 40 new visitor variations and models that will be uploaded with Operation Tourist. This is combined with brand new animations for both male and female guests. The purpose of this primary focus is to bring back the fundamental resource of tycoon games 'visitors.'
Lawyers to feed your animals will SOON follow.While the new 40 visitors an entirely new visitor animations are the highlights we are confident that some of you are going to be glad to hear that we are doing a very HEAVY GUI overhaul along with Operation Tourist. We will be laying the groundwork for the tycoon features many of you will expect but will probably not be able to guess the complexity. While we won't post the initial designs once they bypass the final Kickstarter testers approval, we will post the new gui HERE to do the last check.Other improvements will be to the Dinosaurs which will be more social and use more sounds/animations rather than cycle the three primary barbaric function of 1) Sleep 2) Eat 3) Kill. The new sounds will open up a new door for immersion as we're focusing on footsteps and other 'animal noises.' Ai will be a constant theme as we continually seek to fix bugs and add to the AI to make it more believable. Another unique item we plan on adding is the COW, yes a cow that serves as the first moving food source for carnivores.So we have three main topics of Operation Tourist 1) New visitors/animations 2) New GUI 3) New sounds/better Ai.However, we wouldn't feel accomplished unless this FIRST big update had FOUR new dinosaurs with it as well. We are not counting the Stryaco as we removed it in a bug and hopefully will add it shortly.
So you theoretically can expect five animals.We want to thank everyone for the patience and understanding that this is our baby and are not done with her. We will continue to update the game and add support for as long as we plausibly can.
Over the next couple days, we will be making a development map for everyone following the project to better explain the improvements to Mesozoica over the course of Early Access. We have spent the time post-launch fixing bugs and will continue to do so, however with the map officially passed by the entire team comes a change in priorities.
Mesozoica – A full featured dinosaur theme park tycoon simulator in which you focus on the construction and management of your dinosaur wonderland. From choosing your starting company to your prime attraction, everything lies in your hands.Animals: From the Mesozoica to Cenozoic era, prehistoric animals such as the Tyrannosaurus Rex and lesser known Mamenchisaurus will be waiting for you to adopt them into your park.Babies: Every dinosaur starts out as a tiny little critter, bonding you to your dinosaur from the start. Watch it go through it’s life stages and explore your world.Control: By taking control of your animals you can experience what it’s like to be a dinosaur! Attack, eat and drink to keep your dinosaur’s needs in control.Modular building system: Let your imagination run wild with the modular building system, in which you can create reusable blueprints to use in your park. Nothing is too crazy, amaze yourself!Blueprints: For those who want to jump straight into the game, a wide range of blueprints will be available to use, so you can focus on what you think is important to you.Customize: Almost everything in Mesozoica can be customized to your liking, may it be color, texture or size!
You can really make the park of your dreams.DNA System: With over 14 animals in the game you can use the state of the art world map to find, purchase and extract DNA from dinosaur fossils. Next to the wide range of dinosaurs there are more than 140 skins ready for you to explore!Black market: Don’t want to wait and have better things to do than digging? For the right price you can purchase your fossils straight from the black market, guaranteeing success.Dig site: The old fashioned way of getting dinosaur DNA. Select your favorite digsite, send your digging squad and wait for them to find your new dinosaur!Community creations: Get creative and use the modular building system to build, share and download blueprints made by the community and Mesozoica developers, giving you more freedom in your own park.Import: Download other blueprints from your friends and import them into your park, giving you more content in a breeze.Export: Created a beautiful dinosaur exhibit? Export it and send it over to your friends, allowing you to share your creations with the world!