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[nathy after dark]

Are you still updating Twitter and such? I have no idea ever since I quit, free and clear! So yeah maybe I'm the only one out of the loop on this now, haha.

I agree with heavy-duty fence upgrades. Like the door of the hut in Secret of Monkey Island that they upgrade every time you escape until it's reinforced metal. I hope someone else remembers that

[bryku]

A Zoo Tycoon, but with lovecraftian stuff - awesome thing for me.

Keeping my fingers crossed for this one!

[Cranktrain]

Thanks bryku!

Are you still updating Twitter and such? I have no idea ever since I quit, free and clear!

Don't blame you nathy! Yeah, still updating twitter every now and then and it has its own @eldritchzoo account that tweets gifs and stuff. Youtube is the main place for updates though.

until noooow

Just created a discord server for the game. Come and hang out with nice people and not miss any updates.

[nathy after dark]

Maybe I'll check it out!

Interesting phenomenon how so many projects, groups, and even individual people are using Discord servers to promote their content. Anyone know when and why that started to become a thing? As a user, it's a little weird because my list of suscribed servers quickly gets gargantuan and I never really have time or attention to interact with any of them. But I'm a special case, being an increasingly technophobic content creator and not a typical consumer of games and other media.

[Cranktrain]

Interesting phenomenon how so many projects, groups, and even individual people are using Discord servers to promote their content. Anyone know when and why that started to become a thing?

No, I get it, Discord is a bit strange, to me especially the servers that have thousands of people but are pretty quiet in spite of that. I think it's a reaction partly to the unorganised chaos of twitter, and a progression of 'old-school' phpbb-style forums like these. IRC and chatrooms has been around forever but Discord made it so accessible, and also effective as a broadcast tool. I'm apart of a number of Discord servers and they function as a notification service for me. It's certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but I think that's okay.

----





I launched a brand new trailer a few weeks back! Totally forgot to write about it here. It got picked up by Rock Paper Shotgun, and I got a post written about my game on Eurogamer for the first time, that was cool. And my Steam wishlisters have doubled since June, and that's really nice to see.

I've also just done another devlog video about these new hypnotising llama monsters that featured in the trailer, and also a new speeding-up-time system:





In my last game, The Cat Machine, which was also made in Unity it was very easy to add time speeding up, setting Time.TimeScale directly was good enough. The Eldritch Zookeeper's approach to this needed a bit more hand-holding. As well as manipulating Time.TimeScale, I'm also altering fixedDeltaTime, to change how intensely the physics all gets calculated. If you leave the fixedDeltaTime the same (0.02, usually, and by default) and you increase Time.TimeScale to 4, your physics calculations are four times as much per frame, and every visitor/monster has rigidbodies and colliders, which can be quite a CPU overhead. So I increase (non-linearly) fixedDeltaTime as the Time.TimeScale increases, and I account for the difference in the movement and animation updates, so the game simulation speeds up, it acts as similarly as possible, but it also doesn't massively increase the computation required.

It's tricky to get right! But being able to fast-forward and not hang around waiting for something to build, or be researched, or to have enough money to buy the next big thing you want to buy, is just a nice thing to have around.

[nathy after dark]

So exciting about the press coverage and the wishlisters! I'm excited to play it.

[Cranktrain]

Thanks Nathy! And here's another update, just for you!

One thing I forgot to mention in the video is just how better recent changes to the day-and-night cycle make the game look! The nights are darker, making building lampposts (and future illumination structures that I'm working on) way more important to build. Visually, the game is more interesting as the colours and shadows and light level changes every few minutes as time progresses. The amount of light that lampposts put out during the winter when the snow is on the ground is actually substantially less than in the other seasons, because otherwise it blows out the white of the snow and sorta hurts my eyes, a bit.

Also, I've now done 20 video devlogs! That's a nice round number.

[Cranktrain]

Another update:

Adding new things to the zoo is the most fun, especially when they're things you can build. Fences, ice cream shops, feeding troughs for the monsters and lampposts for light have been the core 'buildable stuff' for a while, and I'm keen to expand it massively. These benches and bins are the latest ones, and seeing visitors interact in these very different ways is nice - but I'm just getting going, I'm immediately moving onto new buildable stuff next. Whenever I have to do any 3d modelling like this I have to remind myself how to use Modo and how to UV unwrap everything. The benches and bins share a UV map, I think I want to start sharing textures more than I am, if everything has it's own texture the amount of per-object shader stuff the CPU has to send to the graphics card is not going to be great. Something to keep an eye on.

The ticket booth is part of a rethought visitor flow, if the gate is shut then the visitors don't queue but wait around for a little bit outside. If the zoo remains shut, they just wander home. Right now the zoo is shut right at the start of a new Scenario/Mission/Whatever I end up calling them, and you have to open it when you're ready, just like Rollercoaster Tycoon does.

[nathy after dark]

At this stage, I think I'm updating this thread just for you.

No coincidence that a new update comes out on the same day that I finally check TIG after months!