So it became time to add our second aquatic creature to Beasts of Bermuda (we just decided on a name change from Paleo Playground). The Elasmosaurus is a very unusually shaped predator, with a long neck adept at swiftly catching fish or other small prey with lightning speed. One issue, however, arises when we consider this strange beast. It has a very, very long neck. When I placed this creature into the game and for the first time possessed it, I immediately realized the problem.

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One thing we wish to achieve in Paleo Playground is to let players have choice of both flying and aquatic creatures as well as terrestrial animals to choose from. A flying creature can reach any location that a land-based creature can reach, so the topic of creating relevant gameplay for these is not such a tricky problem. For aquatic creatures, however, keeping them relevant and involved in our game will prove to be a challenge due to being restricted primarily to water-based gameplay.

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Warning! Math is in here, be warned. I try to make it not that bad. If you want to see how storms influence gameplay without reading the math, skip to the section with the plots and pictures! I decided it may be easier to create a mathematical model that outputted procedurally generated weather functions in a program known as MATLAB before implementing it in UE4. This proved to be a very good idea as it quickly complicated, and MATLAB allowed me to very easily tune parameters and generate storm profiles.

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By Predatoria Last weekend I decided it was time to place our Apatosaurus into Paleo Playground. Adding another playable creature to Paleo Playground is often one of the most fun aspects of creating the game, so I try to pace myself regarding creature additions and space them out between other aspects of game development. We are a bit overdue on adding a fourth playable dinosaur. In some regards adding another creature is repeating material already done before, but in a slightly different fashion.

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We just implemented an overeating system to Paleo Playground, and I’ll talk about it here. Yesterday, a player named BeatBox2G had a great suggestion. He suggested, what if players who overate became slower and gain weight. I decided to take this idea and implement it into Paleo Playground! I started brainstorming ideas on how gaining weight could be implemented as a game mechanic and how it would influence your character.

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Today I will write a little bit about a tidal system I’m working on for our new, first official map, Tropical_Island_2_MP. This map will be a series of tropical islands, and for this map I have been working on a tidal system. Here’s a couple screenshots, and please do excuse the fact this map is still very much a major, major work in progress. The tides currently have an hourly period and differ by 7 meters.

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I want to write a bit today about the skin customization system we have planned for Paleo Playground. For a bit of background, I was very impressed with a website known as Evosaur that allows players to create a wide array of different dinosaur skins simply by choosing colors and patterns with dropdown menus. In great part, this is the source of inspiration for the system we are implementing here.

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My test post. Markdown cheatsheet: H1 H2 H3 H4 H5 H6 Alternatively, for H1 and H2, an underline-ish style: Alt-H1 Alt-H2 Fonts Italics * _ Italics _ ** Bold ** both strike through Lists First ordered list item Another item Unordered sub-list. Actual numbers don’t matter, just that it’s a number Ordered sub-list And another item. You can have properly indented paragraphs within list items.

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