🦇Developer Journal - Twilight Pack🦇

[PeppyPepp]

Thank you for sharing this with us! It's always so interesting to see how the game is developed. Can't wait to get my hands on the pack!

 

[Peythur]

Thanks for the Dev Journal! It was fun to read again and with that I would like to thank the Dev for doing splendid work again! Planet Zoo just got again a bit better in terms of animal roster, building pieces and management features! Bravo!

 

[eviltiger13]

Good interview. You could feel the struggle and appreciate the effort. But they forgot to answer one big question. Which I am sure the whole community wants to know...

What is the significance of designing a whole new exhibit type for just one animal? Does this mean we can expect more bats in the future? Or other animals like flying squirrels suitable for this exhibit?



See I did not ask about birds.

 

[Michael77]

Good interview. You could feel the struggle and appreciate the effort. But they forgot to answer one big question. Which I am sure the whole community wants to know...

What is the significance of designing a whole new exhibit type for just one animal? Does this mean we can expect more bats in the future? Or other animals like flying squirrels suitable for this exhibit?



See I did not ask about birds.

Since the beginning of Planet Zoo I was hoping that we will get flying animals one day. Now we have them. 'Cause of the work they have invested and to see that it's possible to programm flying motions I'm sure that birds will come in future. I think we will get them in spring the time where birds were singing the whole day long
Additionally I think that butterflies will come also.....

 

[PenguinPal]

I always enjoy learning about behind the scenes development, so thanks to Victor, Kyron and Arron for sharing your journey and efforts at developing the WE and its current occupant, the Egyptian Fruit Bat. I'm currently really enjoying them in my game and appreciate the efforts you put into making this possible. The bats and the customization that is possible for the new Exhibit have actually exceeded my expectations. Thank you!

 

[Firestar97]

After we’ve found our key information and references for our Egyptian Fruit Bat’s skeleton, movements, and behaviours, we work very closely with our art and animation teams to decide on a pose for our model. Once we have our model produced by our incredibly talented character art team, we can then use our research and the tools at our disposal to create a realistic skeleton. For our skeleton to move our model we need to do a process we call "skinning" first, where we paint an influence of movement from a bone of our skeleton to a section of our model. This helps us isolate parts of the body to only move when we’re moving a specific bone. Our research on how an animal's skin moves really helps with this so we can look at something like how much movement the bats body has when the wing or a leg moves and then recreate that in our own animals.

Of course, our rigs also need to be able to realistically move the skeleton so we create control setups to move the different areas of our skeleton - kind of like we’re putting strings on our animals, and the animators are the puppeteers! This is something we work very closely with the animation team on as there’s a lot of testing involved to make sure that the animators can work their magic and create their amazing work.

This sounds really cool. I hope we'll get to see a Video of this someday

At first when I saw them actually moving I was extremely disappointed due to that weird Animation where one flies in a really small Circle but when I saw in other Videos that there are also way more realistic Animation Loops I got really excited for them again. I hope there are lots of awesome Animations for them. I can't wait to build a Enclosure for them. Maybe I'll even already build a temporary Exhibit for them when I can play to quickly get a Look at them before I start to create the Building they will live in because it will be a Dome shaped Building (unless I come up with a third Design Idea that will be even better than the first two) and those always take a lot of Time to build. I hope I can also create a nice custom Billboard for them because they will live in a Science Center and I want to teach my Guests about Echolocation (maybe also Pollination due to the Fact that the Egyptian Fruit Bat is one of the Bat Species that also pollinate Plants)