Hello again everyone! This dev blog talks about the recently completed Kentrosaurus, our demo updates we’ve pushed out this month, as well as our new Podcast!

Kentrosaurus

We had a blast creating the Kentrosaurus, and are super excited to soon bring it to the demo. This little stegosaurian is covered in sharp spikes that will likely cause damage to anything that attacks it! It currently has two skins completed, and about half of its animations finished. Check out some of the screenshots below!

Day-Night Cycle Demo

As we mentioned last blog, we have been working on our Day/Night cycle tech and we finally have it in a place we’re happy with. We released it as a demo patch, so if you have access to the demo please be sure to update and check it out!

In the demo you can fly through a small part of our map and dynamically change the time of day and cloudiness. Check out the video below for a quick peek at it!

AI Spectator Demo

This month we released the AI Spectator module, available to play in our Demo! In this mode, players are able to watch our AI dinosaurs roam around a small part of our map, eating, drinking, sleeping, attacking, and fleeing from one another. Thanks to some amazing feedback from people who tested this demo, we have improved it with a few patches since the initial release!

A few of the things we’ve improved this month are:

• Fleeing logic. Dinosaurs will now check their sides and also sense if their source of fear is behind them and try to get out of its line of sight and hide.
• New Improved Drinking logic to better find water sources.
• Started Implementing Carnivore Hunger logic to search for a corpse to eat. If none are found they will seek an enemy to kill to eat.
• Started Implementing Herbivore Hunger logic to search for nearby edible plants and eat them.
• Improved searching for targets. When line of sight is lost, dinosaurs will search around the area it last saw the target. If the target is not found after a few cycles, the dinosaur will return to wandering and give up the chase.

We also have worked on improving our AI Spawner. It will spawn AI randomly based on species spawn chance and amount. The spawner will only become active when a player is within it's spawn radius to save resources thus improving performance. It will also despawn AI once a player leaves the area, storing their species, location, stats, and behaviors to later to be respawned exactly how they were without the player noticing they were gone. The AI Spawner has been made with performance in mind, and will be flexible and easy to use for modders in the future!

Podcast

We’ve started the Alderon Games podcast this week, as well! In this show we talk about Path of Titans development, and also touch upon the daily life and struggles of being part of an indie video game dev team. This is our first time doing a podcast, so please bear with us if there’s any audio imbalances! In this episode we answer some of the questions sent in by the community and share a little about how development has been going this week. You can send in your own questions at https://podcast.alderongames.com/contact

You can check out our podcast on Spotify as well! https://open.spotify.com/show/4QFGA6U8GDdXAzosbwYiZT