adding countershading can instantly spice up any character's design

One of the games I bought while in isolation was Prehistoric Kingdom. Which is basically Planet Zoo, only with (accurate! Don't get me started on the fucking Jurassic Park/World movies/games!) non-avian dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals like mastodons, woolly rhinos, and cave lions.

The game's still in early access, but I've read that much of it is functional, so I bought it on sale. I just fired it up tonight to see what it's about and figure out how it works. Which was a little bit difficult because the recent major update of it broke the tutorial, so the tutorial is currently disabled. But as it turns out, at least in terms of landscape sculpting and building stuff, much of it works an awful lot like Planet Zoo -- only with added (and awesome) scaling functionality, not to mention being able to turn off the grid and to paint entire swaths of trees/shrubs instead of placing things one-by-one -- so between that and the in-game help, I could figure out most things.

And then I bred myself some psittacosaurs, shown in the pic, because they're among my favorite non-avian dinosaurs, and plopped them in a habitat....and....Well, a bit of nerding ahead. But before I get to that, I give the game a thumbs up so far, and it has tons of potential ahead of it. I'll probably put the game in unlimited, creative sandbox mode and just check out and build for every dino species in the game before going back and actually playing the game in its challenge mode, where you have to unlock stuff and don't get unlimited money.

Now for the nerding. My psittacosaurs promptly escaped from their habitat because I didn't bother with any natural barriers to block the invisible fences I laid. LOL But that's OK because I just wanted to see what they looked like in the game, given that we actually know a lot about what they looked like in real life in terms of soft tissues and pigmentation and such.

And it turns out that they did a pretty good job with the psittacosaurs! They got the dorky bristles at the base of the tail and the bizarre-o head correct. And they got the countershading right! That is, darker on top and lighter on the belly, which is typical for animals that live in dense forests. We know that psittacosaurs had this because there've been some specimens preserved with soft tissues, which included skin which included preserved melanosomes, so we could find out about the coloration of these buggers. So, the devs got the countershading as well as the subtle stripes/spots correct. I'd say they still look a bit too shiny/plastic-y, so they probably need to crank down the speculars a little, but otherwise? Pretty damn good.

I'd read that the developers of this game were trying to be more scientifically accurate, as opposed to...you know what...but I'm still pretty impressed. Can't wait to see if they did a similarly good job with the dilophosaurs, which are my favorite non-avian dinos. (Fucking Jurassic Park...Dilophosaurs are not tiny, venom-spitting frilled lizards, for fuck's sake, and yes, that was well-known in the early 90s, so there's no excuse!)