Thanks)
I think it’s a great idea to show “big zoos”, i will defenetly try it. Maybe also show only “distant” zoos and zoos which are near each other only show when hover. But it will probably create not great UX for the player.
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Hello and welcome again to another dev diary.
My animals
Small changes were made to the look of the animal detailed view. Mating calendar was remade to show more clearly in which months this animal specie can get pregnant. Also it got bigger) Currently unused Encyclopedia button was removed and new free space was used to move down some elements. And it should look better than before. Maybe in the future Encyclopedia button will return but in way of small button with info icon, we’ll see.
Before
After
Breeding Calendar
I’ve been busy rebuilding Breeding menu and My Zoo menu. For better understanding when animals can breed i’ve added calendar where player can see which animal in which month can breed. It kinda similar to the calendar from My animals, but here will be all animals (if player has at least one male and one female animal of this specie)
It seems i will need to add filter to the calendar, to show “some” animals. But this task for another time.
Also i looked into the code i have written for breeding system and i do not know how it worked all that time). For example i messed up with Golden Eagle and it could not breed 
. There was also some other errors, but i fixed them all (hopefully). In any case that’s all for today.
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Kalispera @russelkgd I think you should not let encyclopedia out because game like your that has info usualy to players like to read things and info about the animals or zoos , as is a game come from reality.
Thanks keep up the good work and come vote to my poll when you have time 
No no, Encyclopedia still exists and player can access it from Pause menu and Main menu. I just removed button from this screen)
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Hello and welcome to quick development update.
Campaign
This week i was reorganizing game’s documentation, tables and content. During this process i decided that i need to change “first” non-tutorial mission in the Campaign. That’s lead to adding two new missions to a total of 11 missions. Of course it’s not the final number, and some of this missions has only idea and text description and they are not payable in the game. And even some of them are based on mechanics which are not in the game)
Except two tutorials missions all missions based on real life events and that’s why seeking for an idea for one mission i found idea for another one. Mission can be based on construction of the biggest Aquarium in Europe or on black bear cub saved from wildfire and who became a “living symbol” of U.S. Forest Service campaign for preventing wildfires.
Players Profile
While preparing for Steam integration i also decided to finally create players profile to track campaign progress and unlocked achievements. It will be also used to unlock achievements and maybe to store some additional data. I again have no clear opinion on to lock campaign missions or not. By locking i mean that if player didn’t finish mission 4, he can’t start any further missions 5,6,7 etc.
And that’s it. Til’ next week 
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Looks nice, mang! I would probably change “grownup” to “mature”
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Thanks. Yes, i suppose it would be better change to “mature”
Yep. It’s friday again. I missed last friday, because i was busy with other stuff and nothing new or at least nothing new that i can speak of was up. At any case, let’s go.
New demo
I would like to announce that new and free demo will be available during Steam Autumn Festival, starting from October 7. And after that, links to the “old” demo, posted here will be deleted, as its no longer represent current game status.
New content
In anticipation of new demo and release in early access i have been adding more content to the game. Right now, 30 zoos and 37 animals are ready and 3 more animals left to add. Big expansions with birds and water creatures will be added later.
My zoo update
My Zoo menu wasn’t very informative and to get basic details you have to go in submenus. I have updated this menu and, yes, i can admit that it looks too “heavy” right now. So this will be fixed in next redesign 
. More details, more icons, more clear buttons naming and template for future “Research” update.
Before
After
Rating update
Zoos rating was created as one “entity” and player can only see this number and position in Global rating. So this was addressed also. Rating was splitted into sub ratings: Animals, Conservation, Capacity, Research. And total ratings its just a combination of all this ratings. Basically you can guess how this ratings are calculated from their naming. Conservation -> more endangered animals more rating, Animals -> more animals more rating, etc. To represent this changes, rating menu was also redesigned.
Before
After
Finances
I finally created Finances menu, where player can see how income and spending are calculated. Later player can loan money and take part in various marketing programs. Also here he can set spending for maintenance (decrease chances of animal escape) and for medical (decrease chances of animal getting ill)
That’s all. See you next time. 
7 Likes
Kalispera @russelkgd in the last one with finances where you say total sum will do calculation of income and expenses yes? and give the amount? + or - yes? thanks keep up the good work
Kalispera I mean at " total sum is added " is there a calculation of + and - to see player what left for him every month? thanks
The player will get total sum, which consists of income and spending. So if spending is more than income, the total sum will be subtracted from current player’s money. Otherwise it will be added.
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Happy friday evening everyone 
New animals
Someone on twitter said that we have wrong image for Hamadryas Baboon and he was right) So we have to redrawn that one. Also we draw new animals: Meerkat, Emu, Ili pika, Ring tailed lemur, Asian small-clawed otter, Snow Leopard and Asian water monitor.
Finances
Work continues on the finances menu. Right now i m working on ‘Marketing’ part. Here player can take part in various marketing strategies to attract more people to the zoo. Campaign missions will have specific strategies and for sandbox they will be just generated. For example a collaboration between airline and zoo, like animals will be painted on planes or used in advertisement. So player is paying some amount per month and get increase, for example, of +5% of overall zoo income. Or make lion a mascot of some company and this lion will get x2 income. I hope to finish it next week
Sounds
We are also working on brand new sounds for almost all aspects of the game, from transitions to notifications sounds.
That’s all. This week was full of internal staff and management, so see you next week.
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Welcome, welcome to a brand new friday devlog.
WOW. More Animals? YES
So there is 50 animals right now and by the end of development their number will be 100. At least i want it to be like this and i have no idea how i will balance tham all) Meet Chinese pangolin (very rare), Serval, Tasmanian devil, Binturong and Bat-eared fox.
Marketing
Now player can take part in marketing\advertisement to promote their zoo. It’s almost done, i just need to finish implementing strategy generation function for each game. From list of companies will be selected only companies available at that time, so you can’t join cross promo with Pan Am in 2020, cause it’s already closed. In first implementation companies won’t be based on zoo’s country, but in the future i really want to add that, as it will be strange to promote Russian zoo with Bank of America or australian airline)
New demo is coming in less than a week, so i will get back to work to present new mission with this marketing feature in time for it. But there is a possibility that mission won’t be ready in time. At any case that’s all for today.
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Today is start of Steam Autumn Game Festival
And i have two things that i wanna share with you:
New demo is already available
It contains four tutorial missions and two regular ones. One is from the july demo about restoring Berlin zoo after WWII and new one about Smokey Bear - a living mascot of U.S. Fire Service. Also it has more zoos (30 in total) and more animals (50 in total). I should note that it is still WIP, but I hope it got better since the july demo. Demo will be only available during Festival from October 7 to October 13. You can find button with demo on the page.
Zoo Economy will be published by Crytivo
We were in touch since august and finally came to a deal. This is a great news but it comes with new considerations on marketing side. Considering all options we came to a decision firstly to delay release, as november is very full with big AAA releases and even new consoles hitting the market. Of course Zoo Economy is not a direct competitor to all of them, but they can influence coverage which will reduce possible sales in the end. So the new release date will be in Q2 2021, probably march. And secondary it will be a full release, not Early Access. Mostly because this delay will give me enough time to implement what i want and there will be no point in Early Access at all.
And last but not least, today will be also a live stream, where i will play and talk about the game in more details. It will start at 18:00 UTC. So in less than an hour)
That’s it for today. Play the demo, have fun and share your feedback.
6 Likes
Well, that been a while since the last post. During and after Steam Autumn Game Festival i started working on a new build with some feedback from players and new art materials.
Map
Map was okay, but i wanted to make it better, add some variety to it and animations. So now i have not one map in the game, but four! Each of them represent one season of the year and they are changing based on game time: if it’s december, that it’s winter map, if august than summer map etc. Player can turn off dynamic changing map and select any style he wants. Maybe i will add other styles, not related to year seasons. Map is changing via simple alpha value change. It’s kinda boring and i will probably change it to something more interesting. But for now it’s okay. I’m still tweaking map images, so i will only post one of the maps)
Winter edition of the map.
Icons
Almost all icons were redrawn to be more consistent and light. Also i finally remove circle buttons from main UI and now everything is round-squared)
Animals
Yep. more new animals. As fact we already drew 80 animals and only 50 are present in the game. Mostly because i hate balancing numbers 
. Meet Capybara, Ostrich, King penguin, Aldabra giant tortoise and Chameleon.
Zoos
And we redraw zoo icon on map. Also along with exchange animals icon it now shows high relation icon on map.
That’s all folks. See you next time.
6 Likes
Well, i should state that it will be probably a biweekly devlog now) I have been very busy lately, so not so many time was left for blogging.
Map
Again! But this is one of the main screens, so. I can now show other map styles for the world map:
Summer edition of the map:
Autumn edition of the map:
And spring:
You can see that we added mountains to maps as well as some relief. To answer the main question about different climate zones in northern and southern hemispheres, i will say that this is still a game, so it may not be 100% accurate, but the main reason is that “real” mapping in the seasons is not so colorful and goodlooking. We tried to do it right way, but it looked boring, so we came up with this solution. And here is the gif with seasons changing:
Animals
We hit 100 drawn animals and we will pause drawing for some time. Mainly because it’s not clear right now if we need more animals. Behold: Tapanuli orangutan, Mariana fruit bat, Bali myna, Giant anteater and famous Fennec fox.
That’s all. Stay safe, see you in a two weeks.
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It is another friday and I’m ready to share recent progress on Zoo Economy.
Encyclopedia -> Zoopedia
Encyclopedia appeared in some of the first builds. Reason for it was, that some information about animals and zoos was already collected and stored. It was used for gameplay and why not use it for education? As it wasn’t MVP and was a side ‘product’ for game, not much attention was paid to it. In first iterations it was just list of animals names, latin names, zoo names and foundation dates. More focus was put into game itself. It looked something like this:
With new main menu, design was slightly changed, adding search option (due to increased number of zoos and animals), filtering and selection screen. Animals and zoos was put in one form, with selection to toggle between animals and zoos encyclopedias. As you can see they have same base, with different information. More information, but still not enough.
Problem was that for animals there are much more information. And encyclopedia can be used in game to learn facts about animals to better bread them for example (of course some information is available in breeding menu). So they have to have different bases. And in my traditional manner, in final redesign I address all these issues. And I really hope that it will be final redesign of main menus. Cause it also happening for settings, campaign and sandbox menus right now.
So, now Encyclopedia is Zoopedia. It has one more category - Hints. Right now it is empty, but by release it should have valuable information for player, hints, additional tutorials etc. Like civilopedia in Civilization series.
Filtering and search options stayed the same, but animals list is now class based, so all mammal animals will be in one category. It helped to remove class filter option and made list more structurized. On the right you can see big block with ALL information about selected animal in the game. It features not only conservation status, lifespan, rate, income, housing, but also mating information and small text description.
Zoos list is also structurized but by their continents. Zoos does not contain much more information than the previous version, only addition was to add text description about the zoo. It was time consuming to collect the data, but i think it worth it. I’m glad how it turned out in the end. Only one thing is missing - button to toggle between animals, zoos and hints. I couldn’t not find place for it in this design.
Animals
And to finish this post, as usual some new animals. Meet Crested porcupine, Kea, Brown greater galago, Aardvark and Eastern barred bandicoot. I have a pretty nice achievement for the last one 
That’s all for today. See you next time.
7 Likes
Wait. Friday? December? Oh no. Time flies fast. It is almost last devlog in 2020, so without further ado, get ready for new campaign menu.
Campaign
Couple of devlogs ago i have posted updated version of campaign menu. Already then i wrote that i will update it again. So following my plan to update whole main menu last time (
) here is the latest and I’m pretty sure the final iteration. Some small changes will be ofcourse applied for special missions, but overall UX will be the same.
Now we have mission type selection. It is similar to zoopedia type selection about which I wrote last time. In tutorials you will select tutorial missions:
In missions - historic based missions:
And in special - limited-time missions. Inside each type you can see mission selection, larger image of mission, title and small description. Now it supports scrolling. In my opinion it looks much better then last iteration and more ‘clean’. Special mission looks a little bit different:
Also you can return to mission type selection 
which was lacking in zoopedia. And here is the retrospective on different versions)
First iteration was simple blocks with image and short description. Other information was shown in briefing, so player will only know main details when he starts mission.
In second iteration scroll was added as well as arrows to move list of missions. No main info here.
Third iteration removed arrows and as new main menu animations were introduced, mask for missions were extended to the right edge of the screen.
Last iteration finally brought more information to the mission selection screen, but something was off.
And now everything is fine and looks good
Animals
As always new animals: Common bottlenose dolphin, Red-and-green macaw, Southern three-banded armadillo, Markhor and Japanese macaque.
That’s it for today. Coming up next: sandbox menu redesign, end of 2020 and plans for 2021.
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Well. Maybe the last post about Zoo Economy in 2020.
Sandbox
Sandbox was created as alternative to Campaign mode with ability to customize game rules, select starting zoo etc. And as final act of my redesign i have completed it. It was most complex UI element in main menu and it additionally require integration with several game systems. So now it looks like this:
If follows base design of rest of the main menu and It now features new customizable elements, space for future elements and as part of it player can now select how many zoos he\she wants. In future I would like to allow player to even select other zoos, which won’t be possible with old design.
Number of zoos was increasing, as new ones were introduced and it was starting looking like around 40 zoos is maximum optimum number of zoos on map. With more zoos it can probably became a tech problem, but now it mostly esthetic and gameplay problem. By default 30 zoos will be set, but if player wants it can be changed.
Sandbox retrospective
This how it looked in previous version. Giraffe was nice, but he was taking some valuable space, so i had to sacrifice it.
Customization was lacking space and wasn’t future prove.
Zoo selection stayed mostly the same, but now it includes selected continent and has more space for zoo name.
Other versions were pretty much the same, just with less customization options.
Zoos generation
As now player can select number of zoos I needed some sort of a system to generate subset of zoos (if it less then total number of zoos). Additionally i wanted to make zoos as distance from each other as possible to create more diverse look on map. And it created some challenge. Each zoo has it’s own position on map and my first idea was to select player zoo as base point and calculate distances from player’s zoo to every other zoo using simple euclidean distance. Then sort distances, select max distance and add this zoo to the subset. Then repeat this process until we found our desired subset. To account for freshly added zoo, distances now calculates for players zoo and all other zoos already added in subset. Each zoo which is not in a subset keeps total distance to zoos in subset, then sorting, selecting zoo with max distance, addition to subset etc. Something like this:
- Add Player’s zoo to the empty subset
- Calculate distances from zoos in subset to all zoos NOT in subset
- Sort distances and found most distant zoo from zoos in subset
- Add most distant zoo to the subset
- Repeat 2-4 until desired number of zoos are in subset.
- Profit!
Problem 1
Using just player’s zoo as first base point we will create the same subset each time for same player zoo. I solve it by adding as second base point random zoo. It is some sort of seed. With enough number of zoos it can generate many unique subsets. So point 1 became:
- Add Player’s zoo to the empty subset and add 1 random zoo
Problem 2
Selecting most distant zoo created another problem. If we have player’s zoo at position 0, zoo A at position 1000, zoo B at position 500 and zoo C at position -20, current algorithm will select zoo C, not zoo B which is more distant from player’s zoo and zoo A( which are in our subset). It is happening becasue total distant for zoo B will be 1000 (500 from player’s zoo and 500 from zoo A), but for zoo C it will be 1040 (20 from player’s zoo and 1020 from zoo A). More distant zoos in subset will add ‘weight’ to nearest zoos from other zoos in subset. I didn’t quite fix this problem and i see it as temporary solution. Now i select zoos with average distant from each other. Mostly it generates good results, but sometimes can create bad ones:
- Sort distances and found average in distance zoo from zoos in subset
Some examples (subset of 10 zoos):
Honolulu zoo (No zoos from Oceania, but subset is mostly nice)
Budapest Zoo (No North America zoos, most squeezed)
Budapest Zoo 2 (Now whole America without zoos)
Perth Zoo (A lot of Oceania zoos, which is not very nice)
I would like to hear your thoughts and maybe ideas to improve current algorithm.
Plans for 2021
I’m finally planning to release the game next year, somewhere in spring, but delays can of course happen. Around 50% of content is ready and about 60% of all mechanics. As some things are more or less polished i can easily add new content and implement rest of the mechanics. Anyway i have two more things which I really want to share with you in the 2020. But you have to wait a little bit
It was the last devlog of 2020, next one will be in January. So see you there. Happy holidays everyone. 
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