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Taky
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« Reply #80 on: January 23, 2018, 04:12:02 PM »

Someone on twitter wanted Stargate sunglasses, so I obviously had to oblige.


More substantial updates so - we have a bunch of new features about 80% done across the board so just not quite ready to show.
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« Reply #81 on: January 25, 2018, 05:28:57 AM »

This week is the 2nd pass of how we handle privacy. At the moment the system is pretty cool, but just not clear enough so we're taking a few steps back to consolidate some ideas, and maybe integrate some new ones.

My question for people though: how would you think the privacy of exhibits should work in such a case; ie. how dino's behave, how it should change their feelings, or "score" value? I'm curious what people's gut reactions are.

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« Reply #82 on: January 26, 2018, 11:04:44 AM »

In full today / this weekend in going through our bug list. Holy crap it's long. Sad Anyway, performance pass on shaders. The torches at night were killing us, and now they're silky fps smooth.

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« Reply #83 on: January 28, 2018, 05:25:00 AM »

Update #8 : Exhibit Mechanics & Optimization

Alpha Version 2
Definitely slowed down this week; spent a few days trying to find a bug due to dropped FPS in the build. Thought a memory leak? Turned out laptop was overheating and silently throttling down the video card. ughhhhh. Hopefully back on track this week.

Shader Optimization
First pass of the game involved many cool shaders, unfortunately, sometimes they aren't as efficient as they could be. For example our fire shader (from a combination of layered noise masks using 3d cylindrical meshes) was very cool, but pained our profiler; so it got a 2nd pass and now is silky smooth.


Privacy
Privacy is an aspect of exhibit design. Depending how you shape your exhibit, and where the walk paths, along with what goes in the exhibit, will change the privacy profile (represented by a privacy heatmap). There are a lot of factors that go into this, along with Dino behaviour based off the privacy profile. With that said - we're doing a 2nd pass on the logic here to make it more clear to the player (and to ourselves).


Tiered Shelters
Here we're playing around to see how we want to tier dino shelters. Do we have synthetic or only natural? And how does one tier a shelter? Is it privacy before protection from the elements? Does "naturalness" trump all? Lot's of chatting about this one. We've gotten some great feedback from our Discord community.

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« Reply #84 on: January 28, 2018, 01:00:10 PM »

The game is looking great! I love the style!

Do different dinosaurs have different privacy requirements? I can imagine some dinosaurs are more friendly and social than others.
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« Reply #85 on: January 29, 2018, 02:59:08 AM »

My question for people though: how would you think the privacy of exhibits should work in such a case; ie. how dino's behave, how it should change their feelings, or "score" value? I'm curious what people's gut reactions are.

Gut feelings of the kinds of gameplay I would expect as a player knowing only the flavour of the mechanic:
- shy dinosaurs to move into private parts of their enclosures, and more outgoing/friendly dinos do not care/gravitate towards the low-private areas
-shy dinos who can't achieve the kinds of privacy they want should become unhappy/stressed
- visitors become unhappy when they cannot see the dinos they came for because those dinos are constantly hiding (maybe because there are no ways to view those dinos without them realising/feeling self-conscious)
- therefore there is a balancing game of letting dinos have the level of privacy they want while also making it easy for the visitors to see them, which I think has the natural conclusion of 'high-level' and 'exotic' (exotic for a park full of extinct animals Cheesy) dinos being ones more inclined to wanting privacy, requiring more finesse, careful planning and expensive enclosures (in terms of clever view-port designs to accommodate the dino privacy vs visitor accessibility).

Unrelated: I love watching that fire torch do its thing, quite pretty to watch Smiley
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« Reply #86 on: January 29, 2018, 12:47:43 PM »


Gut feelings of the kinds of gameplay I would expect as a player knowing only the flavour of the mechanic:
- shy dinosaurs to move into private parts of their enclosures, and more outgoing/friendly dinos do not care/gravitate towards the low-private areas
-shy dinos who can't achieve the kinds of privacy they want should become unhappy/stressed
- visitors become unhappy when they cannot see the dinos they came for because those dinos are constantly hiding (maybe because there are no ways to view those dinos without them realising/feeling self-conscious)
- therefore there is a balancing game of letting dinos have the level of privacy they want while also making it easy for the visitors to see them, which I think has the natural conclusion of 'high-level' and 'exotic' (exotic for a park full of extinct animals Cheesy) dinos being ones more inclined to wanting privacy, requiring more finesse, careful planning and expensive enclosures (in terms of clever view-port designs to accommodate the dino privacy vs visitor accessibility).

Unrelated: I love watching that fire torch do its thing, quite pretty to watch Smiley

That's really really great feedback. For two reasons; the current mechanic we have going is very similar to what you've described, AND you gave us an additional idea. A two-fer! Ya - so the push/pull between having your Dino privacy high to guests not being able to see you Dino directly affects the donation size from the guests...or donation at all at that point. We hadn't quite considered a natural gravitation to certain areas - but ya - the Dinos DO have various privacy thresholds ranging by both species / and individual Dino (how they are born) so we'll hook that in and see how it feels.
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« Reply #87 on: January 29, 2018, 12:50:09 PM »

Do different dinosaurs have different privacy requirements? I can imagine some dinosaurs are more friendly and social than others.

Yes! Generally the Dino privacy thresholds are species dependent. Conversely you could see this as their friendliness coefficient, ie. a high threshold to privacy (not needing much privacy) would have Dino's wandering more around guests. With that said Dinos also are born with character traits that can be modified by the player when they are incubating as an egg. In theory you could take a species that is naturally recluse but stack their incubation with items that "boost" their character threshold for privacy (frinedly!)
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« Reply #88 on: January 30, 2018, 11:37:00 AM »

Took feedback from people on Discord & here, and tried to see what Dino shelter upgrades would feel like if they were "built" upon, ie. tier 1 going to tier 3 left to right below. I do like this better. We do plan to have "1 offs" thought. So, we'll have 3 tiered natural sets (below) and synthetic sets, but could have a special "natural T2" shelter that isn't explicitly from one of the main sets.

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« Reply #89 on: February 01, 2018, 01:49:15 PM »

The Parkasaurus Discord server's latest vote chose to get the Oviraptor in the game. Done and done. Next vote is up.

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« Reply #90 on: February 05, 2018, 07:25:42 AM »

Doing 2nd pass on shops to add functionality to make them each unique. Sushi shop is one of my favorite.

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« Reply #91 on: February 07, 2018, 12:12:45 PM »

Made a new shader that gives trees/bushes of a certain height motion from wind.


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« Reply #92 on: February 09, 2018, 11:52:40 AM »

Doing more work on the in game graphs

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« Reply #93 on: February 10, 2018, 08:01:55 AM »

LOL at the # of toilets flushed stat. Love the graph concept.
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« Reply #94 on: February 12, 2018, 02:47:19 AM »

This is looking great, so much detail everywhere! Amazing work Hand Thumbs Up Right
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« Reply #95 on: February 12, 2018, 04:36:09 AM »

Lovely graphs Smiley
How are you rendering them?
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« Reply #96 on: February 15, 2018, 01:24:56 PM »

Lovely graphs Smiley
How are you rendering them?

All using the in editor Unity UI. Granted, we're hitching a bit and performance is not at our ideal - but trying to avoid making anything proprietary because, well, there is only 2 of us.

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« Reply #97 on: February 16, 2018, 09:22:48 AM »

A second pass on our fence highliting shader actually turned out to be more complicated than 1st imagined. Shader needs to know when an exhibit is a "closed fence", and also maintain ability highlite individual fence pieces allow for players easily change exhibit shape. Eep.

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« Reply #98 on: February 19, 2018, 11:50:37 AM »

Working through logic of when a guest refuses to pay to enter park. Based off the current value of the park vs. ticket price, wealth of the guest...day of the week? Weather? It could be an endless calculation. Challenge I suppose is making sure there aren't too many variables where they all get lose in the noise.

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« Reply #99 on: February 21, 2018, 06:33:15 AM »

A college from our first recent internal playtests. I've done this before at other companies, playtests, so I KNOW to expect not elation, or high fives, but rather forehead slapping and groans...never-the-less, it's always painful to go over paytests. Very dis-heartening...and the thing is, I KNOW this is part of the process - I've gone through this before for very successful games, but, it's still go damn depressing. Anyway, this has been my mental health PSA. Smiley

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