[Isle News] DevBlog #52

Filipe - Lead Programmer

This month I was busy reworking the math behind food, which also changed all diet code including the combinations. Now slots no longer need to be activated anymore, the bonuses are scaled with the amount of nutrients until a defined maximum. No more getting full before you receive any benefits from eating what is on your diet! This change also made all balance changes easier for all animals, but also for calculating food in migration/patrol zones. This also allows us to give server owners some control over the food balance in game who may want a more customized experience.

Besides that and the new slot combinations, new mechanics are coming soon such as Gastroliths. These are small rocks that will manually drain food contents from the stomach. This does not affect nutrients or anything other than the stomach value.

Lastly, I also worked on balance changes for mutations, a few have been changed completely, others merely received buffs or debuffs and a lot of bug fixes and improvements.

Ariel - Programmer

In the beginning of the month I worked on the update we recently released, which was mostly just bug fixes, including a funny one where herrerasaurus was able to latch onto the air and just climb up infinitely into the sky. As much as I would like to buff that dinosaur, unfortunately that one was taking it too far.

Other than that I was working on various maiasaura features as it moves closer towards completion. It has different attacks depending on its stance so it’s a bit of work to finish all of them but they’re unique enough to feel worth it and the movement system is functioning well after some bug fixes which I’m really happy about.

Wedge - Sound Designer

I’ve been working on Maiasaura’s calls to get some space and perspective from the Tyrannosaurus. I am maintaining the trilling and warbling from the original vocal signature but bringing them up to the standard expected with Evrima. This is being achieved by using similar sources for the warbles; a mixture of female human screams, pitched down fairly low which creates the oscillation in the sound and combining with the growls, snarls and trills extracted from whale vocalizations. I’m introducing sounds such as pitched down bird calls as well as sounds from animals like tapir etc. to create a bedding to underpin the warbling that gives the sound more body as well as a more musical quality.
The other breath and throat layers consist of gurgles and growls from camels to keep it consistent within the hadrosaur family (as that has been used as the base for the Tenontosaurus sounds as well), along with pelican and flamingo calls which when pitched down heavily give a thick growly animalistic texture that compliments the movement of the warbling. Looking forward to sharing more soon. Thanks!

Bryan - Animator

It’s been a long month with a variety of Dinosaurs. First up was some T. rex subadult animation, getting the animations needed for testing some of it’s mechanics ready before we expand into the rest of the Rex growth stages. I’ve said it before, but Rex is a very different beast compared to legacy and each growth stage is practically a different animal, both in terms of how it plays but also in the amount of work that is going into it.

Maiasaurua requires two sets of locomotion animations and is complete. Players will be able to swap between bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion, each with their own benefit to how the animal moves.

And the Austroraptor locomotion has also been finalized. The amount of feathers on this guy made it a bit of a bear to work with but its locomotion is almost complete. Austroraptor has a pretty complicated rig, which leads me into my final project for the month: Kentrosaurus.

Due to the increasing number of features required in our animation rigs for the month, I decided to use Kentrosaurus as an experimental rig which will hopefully be more ergonomic and robust when the animation team is working with it. The rig is nearly done and shows a lot of promise. I’ve also taken the extra time to build a custom rigging toolset which should make rigging any future animals much easier and faster. With Kentrosaurus, what usually took over a week to do only took a day to complete. Work smarter, not harder.

KissenKitten - Producer

We’re up to a lot currently. We’ve got some changes to diets, changes to migrations, the addition of patrols, elders being integrated, changes to current playables and production still churning on new creatures. There’s never a dull moment.

Work done to migrations, diets and patrols should give you guys more flexibility for how you want to grow your animal and the choices you make during their lifecycle. Moving animals around in more ways so you can potentially have an interesting experience no matter where you happen to be on the island.

We’ve also got some changes in the works for nesting and friend invites. This is aimed towards allowing you easier ways to play with your friends without sacrificing the integrity of the island’s ecosystem or creating abusive gameplay systems. We want to further incentivize nesting on the island in ways beneficial to both parent and offspring and in doing so, help make play with your friends more streamlined and accessible.

Patrols are going to slowly but surely start being expanded to include more ingrained experiences that are varied and make sense for the island and for your groups. No details to share just yet as we want to work out the systems mindfully before unveiling them. But the goal is to give you more experiences that will help the island feel more alive and dynamic. Which is a key component across the board. Which is to make the island itself feel like a living breathing ecosystem. Full of all manner of flora and fauna that you can interact with and in some circumstances, interact with you.

Sticking to that design goal helps ensure that no matter where you are or what time of day it is, a realistic experience can be had. Which will be made all the more apparent when humans enter the game permanently. As each and every excursion beyond the relative safety of a secured facility is truly and genuinely a walk out into the unknown wilds where the creatures of The Isle live out their lives with or without the existence or knowledge of the humans on the island.

Elders are also getting some legitimate work on them which is very exciting as the system will round out the gameplay loop for our animals which has been a long time coming. All creatures will age on the island but the elder is where strength meets experience. For those that have maintained a quality existence throughout their lives, the reward will come in the form of an elder: a peak representation of the species. This is a stronger and more capable age state than a healthy adult. For those creatures ineligible or incapable of reaching elder status, a slow decline into a frail elder stage is all that awaits but the choice is yours.

I’m looking forward to doing more rex testing this week to get its features where they need to be so it's safe to knock out its feature mechanic animations for its lifestages. We have to get the mechanic working the way we want first before completing the lifestage animations for those features. That way, we don’t have to redo work should the features need to be adjusted for some reason. Thankfully, with a click of a button and an export, those lifestage animations are done. Praise be! The tyrannosaurus is definitely shaping up to be one of, if not the most production intensive creature we’ve ever made, primarily due to how much it changes over the course of its life. As we’ve been vocal about before and I feel bears repeating now, we are committed to the tyrannosaurs feeling appropriately like a tyrannosaurus: starting off life extremely vulnerable, slowly scaling into one of the most powerful predators to have ever existed. A healthy adult tyrannosaurus in The Isle is going to be a force to be reckoned with and grow into true apex predator.

The maiasaura has also been rounding the corner towards completion. Getting its sounds created and integrated currently. It should also be ready this week for some testing as well to ensure it's on the right track. Which ultimately shouldn’t be too challenging considering its mechanics are fairly simplistic. I’m excited for its inclusion to the roster cause no manner of dinosaur media is complete without a hadrosaur in my opinion. Its playstyle should remain similar to what it was in legacy for those that remember that. It should be strong enough to defend itself from smaller predators but should definitely consider fleeing as an option from larger more dangerous threats. Which is primarily the winning survival strategy for most creatures. Its ability to change stances should hopefully provide more flexibility for its survival. It will be interesting to see how they are utilized in your hands.

At the end of this devblog I’ll include some skins that have been in the works the past few months that were posted on the community discord and some other pieces of development content. Treat each other with respect. See you next time.

Director’s Commentary

Hello Islanders,

When Migration Zones were originally tested, they were left active and always on to ensure that the mechanic was working. This led players from one migration to the next with there being no applicable downtime in-between, resulting in a “Keep moving or starve” gameplay experience unless you could supplement your diet with grazing along the way. To be clear, this was not the intended purpose of the Migration Zones initially. We left these active and constantly cycling to ensure it worked properly and consistently. Migration Zones have been toned down and do not automatically adjust player diets to everything in the location they are summoned, but strongly increase nutrient yields from preferred foods. These also take time to activate, ensuring that a migration is a less frequent occurrence but guarantees a larger overlap of players.

Patrol Zones are limited to an individual or the group that they lead (group members always have the patrol zone of a group leader), which are smaller pockets of exploration areas across the island that can yield food and benefits should a player go there. For carnivores, patrol zones that have or had recent player activity in them that are also part of your diet will activate after a short delay. It won’t guarantee that you go to a zone and just see players running around, but it will give you a staging point for a hunt.

One of the biggest tests on the immediate horizon is going to be disabling Migrations and Patrol Zones entirely. Though these features are important to the survival aspect of the game, do not forget that sandbox is king. These features may not be relevant to other experiences, official or otherwise, within The Isle.
Nesting gameplay is getting the attention it sorely needs. Various nesting areas are being drummed up around the island, some of which are a common design where any animal can reach and nest, but a few bespoke locations may be harder to reach or inaccessible to some animals. These locations will have unique patrol zones designed to help parents raise their young and remain nearby without forcing the parents to struggle too hard for resources. (Final Note: There’s also some testing going on to allow eligible but unbonded animals to use their courtship calls at a longer range, not unlike a mating call, to find other players who want to create a nest and I’m hoping it works out as a finalized addition).

UI update? UI update. “Minimalist AE console interface” is the direction I started in and Seiza has been hard at work with me going over the various screens in the game as we move towards a unified look and feel. I’m happy to say it mimics the style of what is seen in our YouTube videos and I feel that we’re close to the end of any edits and updates to screen navigation. Once this is complete, we will begin filling in the intentional empty spaces with various lore information. Ultimately, it’s a lot less cluttered and more direct on player input. (I know what you’re thinking. Where are the screenshots? Expect new UI media to randomly start finding its way into the Discord and Phase Three in October.)

Just a quick update on the random spawning for official servers: Randomizing the spawn region for players has helped considerably with displacing problematic player hotspots on the map but brought the obvious problem that it made it infinitely harder to find and play with friends. Spawn Codes are being worked on to allow players to join one another as they start the life of their animal. No further information at this time until it goes through testing to fix abuse cases, but I’m confident that this will resolve being able to find and play with friends when starting a new life.

Mutations and their changes have been seen in some older streams. Of course there have been adjustments due to problematic behaviors but some mutations have received more bespoke adjustments to make these choices matter to a player more with more obvious consequences or changes in default gameplay. Something like “Cannibalistic” will require more consideration, as selecting that mutation may alter your coloration to show everyone just exactly what type of player you are. Other mutations that alter percentage values of your animal will be drastically reduced in effectiveness, making way for the Elder system that will allow those mutations to stack in effectiveness (up to point) if you complete a full lifecycle as the animal.

Lastly, this year we will host a limited time seasonal event on the HordeTesting servers. This was a pitch done over an extremely small amount of time that wasn’t meant to interrupt general development, so it is in no way visually perfect but it’s been very fun in closed testing and I hope that you all will enjoy it when the time comes. Just remember, there is no cure.

Godspeed and see you on The Isle.

- Don