Animal growth stages

[tigris115]

So, IMO, the younger animals in the game are in need of fleshing out in terms of behavior and how they affect the gameplay.
I saw this game called Prehistoric Kingdom that has a slow transition for an animal growing from a juvenile into an adult through shape keys

I think having the following growth stages with the appropriate interactions will make the game's animals feel more fleshed out.

Baby/Infant: This is when animals are at their most vulnerable. In the case of mammals, babies will be predominantly suckled by their mothers. In the case of animals like apes and anteaters, you'll often see the babies clinging onto mom. In the case of carnivorans, they'll often be stashed somewhere in a corner.

Juvenile: While still relatively small and cute, they'll be much more independent, likely weaned around this time. Depending on the animal, some can be sold

Adolescent: This is when 2 things happen. First, they're gonna be picked on a bit by the dominant male as they're seen as competition. Second, you'll see their adult features coming in. Male gorillas get gray hairs, lions get the mane coming in, etc. This is when you can start putting them on the market.

Adult: Basically the adults we have in the game already.

Elder: Basically the same as an adult animal but you'll see them become a bit more tattered/long in the tooth. They'll also get sick/tired more often so catering to their needs will offer a challenge.

 

[Villa11]

^this. But I want to add one thing .
Make animals breed more often. Instead of: waiting for baby to become adult at age X, even though the female could mate every Y years (with Y already being mentioned in the zoopedia).
Change it to: when an infant grows up to juvenile/adolescent (dependent on species), allow for the mom to have another infant.

I think both go hand in hand

 

[Dinocanid]

Adolescent stages are something I really hope is added at some point, because in some animals the baby model looks ridiculous next to the adults after a certain point. Wolves for example, look like a couple-months-old puppy until about 4 years old (which is already strange, they should look like adults around 2), but in addition to that the puppy model scales up as they age closer to adult. This results in giant baby models that are the same size as the adults and it just...doesn't look very good.

More life stages would add to visual varieties as well. Adolescents are usually leaner than adults and noticeably younger, but don't really look like babies anymore. Old animals actually looking old would be interesting too

 

[tigris115]

This is a good reference for how to age a lion.

Train Yourself

Below is information on criteria for aging lions. Download a PDF version (click here) .

www.agingtheafricanlion.org

 

[RabidOkapi]

I would absolutely love this, and was really hoping for it upon release. It was something I thought was going to add a layer of depth and reality.

However, now that it is not here, I find it hard to believe that this could happen. This would involve making different sized rigs, animations, fur patterns, etc for the growing animals. The sheer amount of time this would cause for every animal is something I highly doubt being plausible.

I don’t think we can say we want more DLC animals, more coat variations for every animal, and more stages of development per animal.

I’m not even remotely close to a programmer or game designer, but I have a feeling the task of adding multiple stages for each animal would be almost like creating a new animal.

I want to clearly state that I think all of those things would be incredible. I would love to see wolves grow and have different variations between a 5 month old and a 16 month old, I just don’t think that this is feasible with everything else people are asking for.

 

[NZFanatic]

Currently the babies are all very inconsistent. I had a mixed habitat with wildebeest and sable antelope, and it was glaring when they reproduced - the wildebeest baby looked almost newborn, but the sable antelope calf looked like it was eight months old. I'd advocate for this idea just to bring things more in line.

 

[LN]

I think it's fine the way it is at the moment.

 

[Chante Goodman]

Thanks for your feedback all. RabidOkapi does a great job touching on why this won't be happening, but I'll explain further. Adding in more stages of growth means the team will need to create more skeletons/rigs, meaning more animations, animal models, audio and more. It's simply not viable for us to do this post-launch, not just because of the cost and time it would take, but also for technical reasons and the effect it would have on players' games.

 

[tigris115]

Yea I'd imagine that would be a massive pain. Thanks for the answer. Tho is there not a way that some form of compromise can be reached to at least create the illusion?

 

[llldasuselll]

I think these growth stages will have the most effect on the animals which have long growth-times or/and big size difference between adult and juvenile. A compromise could be to only add this feature to animals like: the big primates and the elephants. Since in real zoos, these are the animals which you notice the different generations the most. For example: in real life female elephant herds you see a lot of different sizes. In planet zoo you only see very small and large to very large (because of genetic diversity), but nothing in between (medium sizes). It feels weird having a 14 year old elephant still being very small. Like I said this only feels weird with animals which have long growth-times. This could be fixed by using small models of the adult animals for the almost adult animals as a compromis.

 

[Darkhorse1]

While its understandable as to why the rigs aren't there, it's also disappointing. Besides the size, I miss the goofy scrappy manes on the young male lions. It's a pity we can't just have them move to an adult rig after a year, but only be classed as full adult after 2 or more, to more accurately express the sizing difference of real life, having baby cubs or pups that are nearly 2 does seem very odd

 

[tigris115]

Honestly, I think that this can be pulled off with just one phase for adolescents as that's the only one that really matters in this context. To simulate an elder animal, you can just have the beast go pale and increase the rate of sickness and how tired it gets, which should be relatively simple things to implement.

 

[AceTheOutcast]

A big thing is that many animals become full-sized way before they are sexually mature. For example, wolves are fully grown in size around age 2 (or younger), but aren't sexually mature until 3-4 years old. There is a big gap in time for all of the animals to still be small pups, cubs, calves, etc. The workaround for this could be that animals mature at the age they would look like an adult, and then when they reach sexual maturity this is when alpha dominance mechanics would come into effect and the offspring would need to be moved out of the habitat. This way there doesn't need to be any new models of the animals or new animations, but still gets across a realistic stage of when an animal actually is full-grown.