Hell Creek Tyrants unisex t-shirt

The Hell Creek Tyrants, perhaps the only sports team you truly care about now.

sulc.us/tyrants

Design by David Orr

Though science marches on, let us not forget the inspiring visions of the creative minds that came before us.

“No Hard Feelings”, 2018

Been working on this for almost 2 months now and I can finally show it off with the reveal of @saurian-game‘s new T. rex design! I’ve loved all the Saurian rex designs, and I’d like to think they don’t take this whole redesign thing personally.

Major props to @grimchild for the Herculean effort he put into this newest rex reconstruction as well as for giving me some help while still putting this piece together.

 Please check out the official blogpost from earlier today on all the reasons and work that went into this big, beautiful, purple boi here:

https://sauriangame.squarespace.com/blog/2018/9/20/tyrannosaurus-redesign-2018

We have a bit of a grab-bag for you this week. A little from the programming side and a little from the art side. The former have been working hard on building the systems for the playable Triceratops, and we are excited to show off some of our progress on that front.

Henry

I’ve taken a little time off for the sake of my sanity and productivity, and most of the work I’ve been doing still involves refactoring and other non-visual stuff, but I still have a quick update. One of the underlying systems that needed refactoring was group spawning, and also group generation; this is mostly done. 

As a result, there should be a pretty significant amount of variance in the makeup of mixed-age Triceratops groups you encounter / spawn with. Another refactoring focus was group-related behaviors, which now need to accommodate age-related variances in behavior. 

One example of this I’ve started implementing is in herd grouping behaviors – rather than using group leaders and group ‘center of mass’, etc. as the adults do, hatchlings and juveniles will try to maintain a radius around the closest adult (regardless of sex or herd seniority). Here’s a quick WIP clip showing both of these in action.

Jake

Although it isn’t the only thing on my agenda, I’m excited to show off this animated Thoracosaurus. Not countingMosasaurus,Thoracosaurus is the second largest predator in the game, it’ll be a terrifying addition to the in-game ecology and the final crocodilian to be added. 

Though its primary diet will be fish,Dakotaraptor certainly would not be safe around them. It’ll also be the first crocodilian I get to animate so I’ll be doing my best to geek out over all the details and make sure this big boy feels authentic. 

 I’ll be trying to finish up its movement set as well as start rigging another Hell Creek predator in the coming weeks. Stay tuned! Big things are on their way.

Ale

Hey all! This week we’ve been planning some factors of the playable Trike, among those are background reworks and stuff we’re not ready to show yet, but, we can give you a little sneak peek of the new social display menu.

As many of you know, currently you press a key, [F] by default, and you do a threat display to an animal close to you. Since the Trike is going to have more complex social mechanics than Dakotaraptor, we’ve decided to overhaul our current system for social displays. Below, you can seea mock-up that our talented artist Chris Masna came up with.

Tom

I had been working on what I think is a really fun new animation with Anzu, but couldn’t get it done in time for the DevLog unfortunately. Here’s a little sneak peak:

So, in light of this, here are a couple of Pectinodon animations I did a hot minute ago. Looking back at them now, I’ve improved a lot since these were done, so I think I’m going to have to do another pass over these older ones before we move on putting Pectinodon in the game.

Here we have a social display, like a good portion of my Pectinodon animations, it was based on shoebill stork. It was the process of working on this animation that inspired that decision. 

While looking for interesting bird social displays, I found that shoebills do this interesting thing where they bow to one another while shaking their heads. I chose to imitate this but also include the tail-fan, an additional asset the troodontid has over the avian.

This second animation is an idle variant that all dinosaurs in the game have, the body shake. All the previous shakes have been pretty static. However, when watching videos of cassowaries I noticed one show this behavior, where it would outstretch its neck and shake itself in a horizontal posture. I figured this would be a more interesting way to tackle this idle.

Community Spotlight

Header image by community member Althaddus.

This week we have a couple of fanart pieces!

Count Lazuli

Palaeotaku

Finally, here is a really lovely screenshot by community member Wilderness.

The visual art side of the project doesn’t have anything complete enough to show off this week, but the programmers have been hard at work, as has Xico. Plus, we have another new programmer join the team!

Ale has been a long-time friend of the team, and a valuable moderator for us. She is also a very talented programmer, and we are thrilled to have her join the development team.  Please give her a warm welcome!

Ale

Hello! For my first devlog I’ll be tackling our plans for rehauling the current scent/tracking system. There’s a bunch to go through so let’s go!

The new system will be made with a bigger focus on tracking individual animals. To that end we will be adding new animal specific markers like footsteps, blood, droppings and other species specific behavioral markers. Once one of this markers is selected the animal’s path will be highlighted a different color to make tracking easier.

You can see a little work in progress in the video here where I’ve got some facets of the new tracking system working with the current in-game system. Most noticeable is the ability to keep tracking as long as you hold the scent key down, the desaturation effect when tracking and the change in color when a track has been selected.

I’m excited to keep working on the rehaul, wish me luck!

Syri

Hello, Saurian fans! For the past couple weeks, I’ve been working on fixing a bunch of multiplayer bugs and making all the wheels spin.

I do have something I can show off, though! Here’s a placeholder lobby UI for hosting and joining games which will be replaced with better looking stuff once a proper designer gets to it.

Xico

Since the majority of Saurian’s sound design is done and ready to be implemented as we shuffle along on steadying our mechanics, NPCs and playable dino additions, I’ve been focusing on working on the dynamic aspects of Saurian’s music. This month I tackled Combat Music’s intros and outros, that should signal the player when a tussle is about to happen or conclude. Since we don’t plan on having Combat Music to play every single time you engage in combat (why should it trigger when you’re facing a weaker threat than you?), these two little nifty additions should be a good indicative of when you’re about to fight for your dear life, making these encounters more memorable and engaging down the line.

This was not an easy task to achieve for the outros, since it needs to make sense musically at any given point while the main track is playing, for this transition to make sense. Fortunately, I started with some of the more complicated tracks when it comes to the number of instruments at play and found a good solution for the majority of them. I think this will make the songs more memorable and diverse, instead of just having the volume fading out when the combat ends.

I am now exploring some immersive audio tools that I can’t wait to show you guys, once Saurian is further along its development schedule.

(Our editor recommends checking out the full DevLog for Xico’s intros and outros)

Tom

I don’t have any completed animations to show this week, but I had Jacob render out a work-in-progress version of this Anzu drink I’ve been working on. This onestill has some more work to do, but the major movements are all in there.

Community Spotlight

Our header image this week is by SummerDragoness.

If you want to have your art or screenshots featured in our DevLog, the best way is to submit to the Screenshots and Fanart channel on our discord.

Here is another nice shot by Ioioiee, from our server:

To finish it off, some fanart of our mosasaur snacking on some crunchy mollusk boys by Big Trike Boi:

With setup out of the way, progress on playable Triceratops has begun in earnest, plus animation has begun on a new animal.Lets get into it.

Henry

Since Jake and Tom finished up all the animations for the Triceratops growth stages, I’ve been busy implementing them and reorganizing to accommodate them. In addition to refactoring and improving existing systems, such as the camera, I’ve been adding new features like proper foot IK and social calls. Before I speak about the latter, here’s a clip running around as a bab. For such an ugly baby, it sure is adorable.

By now, I’ve refactored and rewritten the social systems to a point where I can begin to show some new behavior, albeit a simple one. In general our design philosophy has strived to use minimal UI, and so we hope to continue that trend with our social systems.

While we will be introducing new pieces of UI for social interaction (such as the interaction wheel), one thing we can avoid using it for is group membership validation. In the old system, social groups (which Dakotaraptor largely does not experience, instead being limited to AI) would always be created instantly and invisibly–however, that’s not very player friendly.

Now, if you want to create/join/merge a new group, it’s done through social displays. You can see it in this quick video where I make a new Triceratops friend.

As you can see, my new friend returns the social call to me to let me know it also wants to be friends, and then starts tagging along with me once I get too far away from it (since we’re BFFs now, much unlike Jake and I in real life). If an AI makes this call to you, you will also be able to decide whether or not to accept your new friend. 

While this mechanic manifests simply for the uniform subadult groups, it will involve more complex dynamics with adult/child patriarchal herds, in which the leader will have more agency. Hopefully, it’ll be pretty cool. I’m already finding it enjoyable to feel like I have a friend in Hell Creek, not just horribly negligent raptor parents.

Jake

For the last few weeks Tom and I were wrapping up the remaining animations needed to make Pectinodon game ready. Most of these were turning animations and the like, nothing ya’ll haven’t really seen before, so nothing really stuck out as far as render material was concerned. Hopefully by next dev-log we can have the Pectinodon functioning in-game, and I’ll be hard at work on the next creature.

Tom

For the majority of my time since last devlog, I have been helping finish off the animations for Pectinodon. However, since those have been done I have moved on to Anzu. 

Since we’ve shown off our work-in-progress Pectinodon a couple of times now, I figured you might prefer to see a new dinosaur this week. I have wanted to work on this guy for a while, and he will be my little project I will plug away at whenever I don’t have work on more immediate updates to do.

The most prominent animation I did was the social display, which is a notable point of research in oviraptors like Anzu. Many species show a fused structure at the end of the tail that is hypothesized to anchor large display feathers on the tail. This tail fan is preserved directly in CaudipteryxandSimilicaudipteryx. From the latter we even have a growth-series that show the fan developing as the animal ages:

Developing tail-fan feathers in a juvenile Similicaudipteryx, from O’Connor et al. 2012 Homology and Potential Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms for the Development of Unique Feather Morphologies in Early Birds.

It has been officially suggested in the literature that oviraptor tails are uniquely adapted as display structures, so this obviously had to be utilized. As Chris had also decked out our male Anzu with colorful wings and large white feathers on the underside of its neck, I wanted to use those too.

I watched a number of bird mating displays, but these were actually mostly too stiff, or the animal hopped and moved around too much. At the moment ours have to be stationary for the AI behavior, but I may talk to Henry about changing this up when we get to working on Anzu as a playable character. This is what I ended up doing.

I purposely animated it to look best from the perspective of a female Anzu, so the tail fan points down somewhat over the animal, and the male bows down and lifts his head to best show off the white bushy “beard” on his neck. Jacob didn’t render it from the optimal angle even though I told him to. 

The mouth movements and animation length are purposely synced to Xico’s awesome and hilarious Anzu mating calls, which unfortunately you can not hear because Jacob is a sloshy bucket boy.

Community Spotlight

Our header image this week is by Discord member Neytiri, and displays their first kill as an adult Dakotaraptor, and this wonderfully moody screenshot by eriFenesoreK: