How many new animals will there be in Endangered Species?

There are 20 new animals in Endangered Species… 20 very cool new animals I might add.

Florida panther.

How did you select which animals would be included?

We started by creating a list of the coolest animals that we thought our game needed. We kept refining the list until the majority of it focused on endangered animals from around the world and from different biomes. But we did make sure to also keep some of the most popular non-endangered animals or ones that represented conservation success-stories.

You must have had to learn a lot about the endangered animals included in the game. What surprised you the most? Did it have any effect on the game’s design?

Yes, each animal that appears in Endangered Species was carefully researched. In fact each animal has a 5-10 page report generated for it which includes information about their conservation status, where they live, the type of environment they live in, what they eat, common behaviors, lifespan and more. The behaviors of each animal are studied and this has a direct impact on the animations that we need to create. If the animal has any special or unique behaviors then this affects other aspects of the game design. And we definitely learn some surprising things about the animals; for instance the markhor can actually climb trees so when we created trees for its habitat, we needed to make sure that this animal could perform this behavior.

We also introduced the concept of Conservation Areas to the game. These are environmentally sensitive areas that are protected and have restrictions on what you can do inside them. For instance you cannot destroy foliage or rocks or do anything that would alter the terrain inside this area, but you can use them for animal habitats. And while you can’t build normal paths through them, you can build elevated paths or sky tram tours over them.

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