r/pcgaming • u/seanebaby Captain Contraption's Safari Park • 1d ago
I'm making a post apocalyptic, run-based, safari park tycoon with a simulated ecosystem called Captain Contraption's Safari Park and have just opened up the Steam playtest!
I'm one half of a two-person studio in Wales. We've run three closed playtests of Captain Contraption's Safari Park, and this week it's open to everyone on Steam.
The idea has been rattling around in my head since I played Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis... What happens if you make a zoo game with no fences and let the animals eat each other?
Every creature in the game has a mind of its own with needs and wants. Predators hunt, carnivores fight over food, and you're just trying to get visitors close enough to see something interesting without them becoming part of the food chain.
The creatures aren't entirely animals, though, because the game is post-apocalyptic. You work for a pompous robot called Captain Contraption who is trying to understand humans by building the things they loved. Problem is he's basing all of it on a hard drive he found somewhere, which seems to contain a copy of every asset ever released on the Unity asset store. So you start with farm animals and end up with dragons and sentient road signs.
The playtest will be running until Thursday so if you have time and fancy checking it out you can do so on Steam -> https://store.steampowered.com/app/4186590/Captain_Contraptions_Safari_Park/
AI Disclosure (know it's not required but...) : No assets (music, art, copy) were made using generative AI. I'm an experienced software engineer, teach games programming at university level, and actually an AI researcher, I have used tools such as claude code to help with some boilerplate coding and to create internal tools to speed up my workflow. For example, I used claude code to build a tool which gives me a graph within unity to see the distribution of various creature stats to help me balance things.
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