DINO MINDER
More to come soon!
About Dino Minder
Personal Project | Unreal Engine | Ongoing
Dino Minder aims to explore the management realities of reintroducing extinct creatures would entail at a small scale.
- Development Started in July 2025 -
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This project has only recently started being developed and as such is currently quite sparse.
Updates occur as progress happens, with newer sections containing development thoughts.
Context
After leaving teaching I've been looking for something hefty I can chip away at in my free time and settled on a dinosaur management game after meeting some industry friends at Gamebridge 2025. My intention is to leverage it as a good demonstration of my C++ knowledge and continued practice since my earlier projects some years ago.
Dinosaur Behaviour
Before settling on a behaviour implementation structure (FSM, Behaviour Trees, GOAP, etc) I've been doing some research into utility layers as I'd like agents to feel more autonomous compared to my earlier work.
Bucketing behaviours is an attractive approach since I'm aiming for a needs-based implementation for the animals, which seems to be a common idea from the implementations I've read about in The Sims and Zoo Tycoon 2.
Building Conservation Enclosures
Current tests for the prototype rely on forcing Unreal's spline mesh tool to generate at runtime and using the navigation mesh data to determine enclosed spaces, defining them as animal enclosures.
Further Notes:
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The performance hit for each generated spline point is not sustainable.
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Dynamic navmesh generation for the creatures may not hold up long term.
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Considering a ground layer navmesh with steering behaviours for avoidance as an alternative.