|OT| Planet Zoo (Frontier) - Gibbon Architect

[prudis]

Planet Zoo -website

Build a world for wildlife in Planet Zoo. From the creators of Planet Coaster and Zoo Tycoon comes the ultimate zoo sim, featuring authentic living animals who think, feel and explore the world you create around them. Experience a globe-trotting campaign or let your imagination run wild in the freedom of Sandbox mode. Create unique habitats and vast landscapes, make big decisions and meaningful choices, and nurture your animals as you construct and manage the world’s wildest zoos.

Meet a world of incredible animals. From playful lion cubs to mighty elephants, every animal in Planet Zoo is a thinking, feeling individual with a distinctive look and personality of their own. Craft detailed habitats to bring your animals’ natural environments home, research and manage each species to allow them to thrive, and help your animals raise families to pass their genes onto future generations.

Manage an amazing living world that responds to every decision you make. Focus on the big picture or go hands-on and control the smallest details. Thrill visitors with iconic exhibits, develop your zoo with new research, and release new generations of your animals back into the wild. Your choices come alive in a world where animal welfare and conservation comes first.

Planet Zoo’s powerful piece-by-piece construction tools let you effortlessly make your zoo unique. Every creative decision you make impacts the lives of your animals and the experience of your visitors. Let your imagination run wild as you dig lakes and rivers, raise hills and mountains, carve paths and caves, and build stunning zoos with a choice of unique themes and hundreds of building components.

Join a connected community and share the world’s most creative habitats, scenery and even whole zoos on the Steam Workshop. See your own designs appear in zoos around the world, or discover fresh new content from the Planet Zoo community every day.

 

[lashman]

let's hope the management side of things will be better this time around

 

[Ge0force]

Looks great. I hope there's decent management as well.. Would be day one for me!

 

[Recrees]

If this is even remotely decent i'll be getting it day one. Please be good...

 

[Milena]

I like the zoo theme, I'm really hoping it turns out good.

 

[Mudface]

let's hope the management side of things will be better this time around

Yep, exactly what I was thinking. I'm not that interested in designing parks/ rides/ attractions, it's the spreadsheets I want...

 

[lashman]

Yep, exactly what I was thinking. I'm not that interested in designing parks/ rides/ attractions, it's the spreadsheets I want...

have you tried playing Parkitect or Parkasaurus yet? i feel like you'd LOVE both

 

[Mudface]

No, not played them yet, but they're both well and truly on my list. I burnt myself out a bit on strategy by replaying Caesar 3 and Pharaoh over several months (damn, those games are big), so I've been playing some lighter stuff more recently.

 

[lashman]

No, not played them yet, but they're both well and truly on my list. I burnt myself out a bit on strategy by replaying Caesar 3 and Pharaoh over several months (damn, those games are big), so I've been playing some lighter stuff more recently.

ahhh, i see ... ok then

but yeah - definitely do check them out when you feel like playing some good old park management stuff again, they're both really really great

 

[prudis]

We’re excited to announce that Planet Zoo will launch on 5 November 2019 and is now available to pre-order on Steam!

 

[prudis]

Welcome to The Making of Planet Zoo, a developer diary series in which we highlight the work that goes on behind the scenes when developing and publishing a zoo management simulation game.

 

[Ge0force]

My daughter is gonna love this!

 

[prudis]

 

[prudis]

Welcome Zookeepers to this very special gameplay reveal video for Planet Zoo, launching on 5 November 2019! Join Lead Community Manager Bo and 3 fantastic guests, Community Manager Chanté, Senior Artist Fearn, and Principal Designer Jim as they take you on a wild ride!

 

[prudis]

Hello everyone and welcome to our next Developer Journal! This is where our developers dive deeper into features and aspects of Planet Zoo, that we hope you're interested in! In this Developer Journal, we will be focusing on Franchise Mode, a game mode that is new to the Planet universe!

Please say hello to Game Director Piers Jackson and Principal Designer Jim Stimpson!

Hello everyone! Thanks for inviting us on for a Developer Journal, it's great to be able to share some more information about Franchise Mode!

Jim:
Franchise Mode is our new online mode for Planet Zoo; a franchise allows you to open up a series of connected zoos all over the globe. As you can open your zoos on different continents and in different biomes, you'll face different challenges in each with the temperature and weather!

Piers:
In Career Mode you take on the role of a Zoo Manager and follow a narrative; in Franchise Mode you start from scratch and can build your franchise the way you want to. With only a small amount of cash, you’ll have to make decisions about how you’re going to grow your zoos, balancing the economic needs of the zoo with the welfare needs of your animals.

Jim:
Yes, the economy is slightly different too. While cash is local to a zoo, our secondary currency of Conservation Credits are Franchise wide, so you can earn them in one zoo but spend them in another (we’ll talk more about these further down). We have also introduced a new type of objective; Community Challenges. These are where you will need to work together with other players to achieve a global goal, which could be something like "Release African Elephants to the Wild".

Piers:
One of the key differences with Franchise Mode is that it’s an always online experience and this opens up the possibility of trading animals with other player’s franchises. We built trading into Planet Zoo to simulate the activity that real-world zoos undertake in maintaining stud books and moving animals between zoos to maintain genetic diversity. In Planet Zoo, trading allows you to list your animals in a Trade Centre. Other players can then purchase and adopt your animals to add to their own collection and help maintain their genetic diversity. Naturally, you can also choose to adopt animals from other player’s franchises to further your zoo too.

Jim:
Trading animals with other players is great for expanding your zoo and can be used as a great source of income too. When you list your animal you’ll be able to set its price in Conservation Credits, so if you want a fast sale you can set it below the market average. The price you set for your animal will depend on a few factors: the species of animal, its age, and more importantly its genetics. If you have an animal with great genetics, then you can charge top dollar for an animal!

Piers:
So to explain the differences in currency, cash is brought into the zoo by guests and is what they use to pay the entrance fee, make donations, and purchase items such as food and drink. Cash is mostly used to pay staff wages, look after running costs, and building of the zoos infrastructure, but it can also be used to pay for the adoption of some animals. Conservation Credits are our second form of currency and they are earned by undertaking certain objectives; these are the primary form of currency in animal adoptions and trading.

Jim:
Personally, I’m looking forward to how you will work together as a community in order to complete Community Challenges. I think there’ll be a real call to arms to complete the challenges and I can’t wait to see that. We’re planning a variety of different challenges, so it will be interesting to see how you react to them.

Piers:
For me, the most exciting part is knowing that we still have something secret to share about breeding. I cannot wait for you to discover it for yourselves!

Jim:
Your reactions have been great so far. I’m looking forward to the reaction to the small details that we’ve added to the game. I love it when someone discovers something or works out exactly how something functions by themselves.

Piers:
Having now had the opportunity to speak to some of our future community at trade shows and having heard their ideas for what they want to build with Planet Zoo, I’m more excited than ever to see these ideas come to light.

Developer Journal: Franchise Mode

---

Hi all,

We often talk about how incredible our community are. Whether it’s designing the most amazing creations for the workshop or sharing your passion in one of the many hubs and communities around Planet Zoo, community breathes life into our games.

That’s why this Beta is so important. Being able to have thousands of people playing, testing and giving feedback ahead of launch is an incredibly powerful process and one that we as a team always listen to and consider.

We’ve seen some feedback and discussion regarding Franchise Mode and the fact that it is always online. As we mentioned in our previous post, Franchise Mode working online is an important requirement in order to utilise all of the community and online features. HOWEVER, we are also aware that many of you would like to have the option to play a Sandbox-style gameplay mode which includes many of the Franchise features that offer a greater managerial challenge, in an offline experience.

That’s why we are pleased to say that thanks to your feedback, we will be increasing the number of game modes at launch from 3 to 4 modes. We will still keep the Career, Sandbox (which will include a number of options such as no breeding, no ageing and no animal death etc) and Franchise Mode but we will be adding a fourth.

This all-new, currently unnamed, mode will allow you to enjoy much of the Franchise experience, without the online requirements.

This new mode will still include a full economy with both dollars and Conservation Credits, guest needs, Research, Education, animals and more all with the ability to create your zoo, with your vision from the ground up. Naturally, with this being an offline game mode, there are certain features that will only be available in Franchise Mode. These include: Trading between players, Leaderboards zoos and Community Challenges.

This addition to the game is directly thanks to your feedback. The Planet Zoo development team are always focused on making sure the experience for our community is as great as it can be and we’re excited to be able to bring this additional game mode to all players as part of the Planet Zoo launch on 5 November.

We hope you continue to enjoy the second week of our Beta. It’s been a fantastic experience from everyone on the Planet Zoo team to see so many incredible videos, creations and comments. Please do remember to continue submitting bugs and issues on our issue tracker to help us in the run-up to launch.

Many thanks!

Planet Zoo - Franchise Mode Feedback

 

[prudis]

 

[MJunioR]

First update is out

Hello Zookeepers!

It's been two days since Planet Zoo's launch and your initial reaction has been phenomenal! We've been loving all of the creations, screenshots and animal details you have shared! We're so grateful for the feedback and reports you have been sending in and the team has been working hard to resolve as many issues as possible.

We've now rolled out our first update for Planet Zoo, designed to fix some of the most immediate issues which have been raised. Please don't worry if an issue you have reported isn't listed; we are still hard at work on your reports and feedback and will have more updates coming soon! Please take a look below for the full update notes:

Stability
Added several crash and stability fixes, including -

• Crash when deleting pick up based enrichment item while an animal is using it;
• Crash when moving staff buildings;
• Crash when moving animals to quarantine;
• Crash when selecting the Inspector notification;
• Crash when signing up to newsletter;
• Crash when deleting shops;
• Crash when moving exhibits;
• Crash when animals are released to wild;
• Crash when using 'locate' button from objectives;
• Crash when switching between fullscreen and borderless.

Scenarios

• Fixed some objectives in Scenario 3 of Career Mode auto-completing.

Franchise Mode & Main Menu

• The newsletter sign-up is now hidden during the welcome screen. This will prevent any issues from signing up before creating your avatar.
• Fixed issue with profanity filter not allowing players to create franchise zoos. We have also improved messaging regarding this issue.

Staff

• Fixed issue with multiple mechanics not repairing vandalised objects efficiently.

Animals

• Various improvements have been made to climbing (Sorry flying bears!)

UI

• Zoo tax is now shown on the Zoo Overview menu to give you greater information on your finances.

Guests

• Fix for guest avatar heads disappearing.

Rendering

• Fix rendering issues caused by ultra wide displays.

General

• We are aware of an issue where the wrong image is displayed for the Community Challenge (it should be the tigers!). If this is the case, please restart your Steam client as it's a caching issue; do let us know if the issue persists!

As mentioned, this is only the first of our post-launch updates for Planet Zoo. We'll be sure to keep you informed regarding the next ones! Thank you again for your continued support and feedback!

 

[prudis]

 

[prudis]

seems like the economic simulation of the online-market between Zoos went well

In any case, the fact nobody is selling for cash has put CC at a massive premium: those who had got in early on endangered, prestige or hard-to-breed animals are now hoarding them, only selling them for wild sums. Prices have soared, making gorillas, tigers and the rest completely inaccessible to new players, while Pandas have become virtually mythical: beasts that might as well be made from pure diamond.

What was left to new players, with literally nothing on sale for cash? Well, those animals that fell into the Venn diagram intersection of “low prestige” and “unendangered”, and were thus were neither hoarded, nor subject to the same rapid inflation as all the big ticket mammals.

It turned out “low prestige”, “unendangered” and “fast-breeeding” boiled down to three creatures: the Indian peafowl, arguably the crappest animal in the game, plus ostriches and warthogs, which had the added bonus of being happy to cohabit, for more efficient mass breeding.
...
So where does all this leave us? In a vicious cycle, where the more people grind out the Big Three, the lower their value becomes, and the more of them people need to grind to afford anything else. A market dominated by dozens of pages of the same creatures, dotted with the occasional chimp or elephant, listed for a comically unattainable price.

Oh, and to make matters even more splendid, the animals people are selling on are the ones with genetic mutations that make them undesirable for further breeding – they might be highly susceptible to disease, tiny, incredibly short-lived, or even completely infertile. These sell for the lowest prices as well, naturally. Starting off as a new player, then, with your tiny pool of CC, you’re going to be spending a lot of time scrolling through pages and pages of dying mutants, desperately seeking something that won’t horrify your guests, and might have a chance of breeding.

Planet Zoo has become a warthog grind

Thanks to some emergent issues with Planet Zoo's in-game market system, new players are finding themselves trapped in an unending cycle of warthogs.

www.rockpapershotgun.com

 

[EdwardTivrusky]

lol, people eh?

 

[prudis]

Are you ready for an ice-cold adventure in a wintery wonderland? Join Bernie Goodwin in two new chilling Scenarios as you tackle the challenges of the northern hemisphere. With over 200 new building, scenery, and foliage pieces there's also lots to get creative with!

And of course, Planet Zoo: Arctic Pack features four brand new animals to take care of: the Reindeer, Arctic Wolf, Dall Sheep and Polar Bear all come with new challenges and specific needs - be sure to check the Zoopedia for tips on how to keep them happy and healthy.

 

[prudis]

Welcome five iconic new animals from the South American region to your zoos: the Jaguar, Llama, Capuchin Monkey, Giant Anteater, and the Red-Eyed Tree Frog. Each of these animals come with their own set of needs and habitat requirements, and it will be up to you to keep them healthy and happy in your parks.  

Construct an Aztec temple park entrance, theme your habitats with treasures from civilizations past, build your very own rainforest and give your zoos a distinct South American style – there are over 250 new building, scenery, and foliage pieces to choose from and get inspired by!