Primeval Age

??/10:

Primeval Age (PA) is a browser based Art RPG game centered around dinosaurs, one would naturally draw comparasions to a game like Flight Rising, but it functions and relies on user content. The dinosaurs all have bases that the users have the freedom to fill in as they please to a degree. It also claims to be friendly to all skill levels, how good it is at being that is... questionable in my opinion.

Gameplay

The main gameplay of Primeval Age lies within doing art or writing of your dinosaur doing a certain thing such as hunting, foraging living their lives, etc. Through these actions you recieve the site's main currency and random items, which may include random eggs. However, these actions require a dinosaur character, how do you get one you ask?

The Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs in PA can only be obtained by recieving a geno from the adoption center, hatching an egg, or trade/buying a dinosaur from another user. They allow newbies to recieve a random geno from their starter pairs that stock the adoption center, but only make this clear on the external weebly, which new players will not go to first if discovering it randomly on say, toyhouse.

The art for the bases is done very well, it is interesting that every species gets a feathered variant and a bald variant. So if you want, all of your dinosaurs can have dinofuzz.

Genos & Imports

The issue, I find comes into having to design them, because no matter how much Primeval Age claims it is friendly to artists of all skill levels, it is not. It can feel frustrating when designing whichever species you choose to pick a geno of via the adoption center or as your newbie egg to have to open up to FIVE tabs on each marking with ten million little rules you have to follow for your geno to become an offical import and be allowed to play.

image

I have had a ton of trouble getting genos with markings accepted, because it is never clear to me when a color is too saturated or how exactly to draw something, because i was using their own examples and figured I could do whatever with it.

Dinosaur A Staff Review of a design by staff member Runokani that reads 'Hello, just some fixes! - The dun color is too saturaded, it would need to be more duller! for examples of the highest acceptable saturadions you can find the swatch from here: https://primevalage.weebly.com/base-coat-and-colors.html - The tears has a lot of smaller spots, they would need to be more bigger/thicker and resemble more like the spots of king cheetahs rather than random/misc blobs. right now some of them resemble more like freckled and dalmatian. Everything else is fine! *General import approval reminder: If when you have uploaded the fixed version for the correction it seems like the image does not update to the new version you uploaded try clearing your cache! it'll be your browser keeping the old image for faster load times, the new images should be already correctly updated but oftentimes you need to clear the cache to be able to view the updated image!'

While this would seem like not a huge deal, PA relies on terms that art schools use. I have had issues getting a geno accepted because I, in repeated attempts to do it, couldn't actually create a gradient edge, because I don't know how. I don't know what they are, and you're just expected to just know.

Cryo Geno A Staff Review of a design by staff member ABeardedDragon that reads 'Hi! Some things to change: - The skin is a little too contrasting. There's a 15 point difference in value/brightness while the max is around 10! - https://primevalage.weebly.com/skin-coloring-guide.html - Dun must be darker than the base colour and is also currently too saturated, the max saturation chart can be found here - https://primevalage.weebly.com/base-coat-and-colors.html - It appears you forgot to colour the nails and nostrils! - Cover would need more blending to make a soft gradient edge, right now it's more feathered. - https://primevalage.weebly.com/cover.html Please resubmit with the updated version! General reminder that you might need to clear your cache to see the updated version, it'll still go through fine if you don't though!'

My frustration with getting a marking wrong is one thing, but it is another thing entirely when the one of the rules linked, DO NOT MENTION the rule sited for denying the design. They do not mention it now at the time of writing (wayback) or when i submitted the design (22 September 2023, 00:30:15 UTC). This skin rule is a strange rule to expect low skill artists to be able to follow, with only an art program, depending on which you use, you won't be able to percisely choose brightness values as easily. I used firealpaca + medibang when making these genos, i only have a color wheel or a color bar to work with, and no brightness value listed in firealpaca. With medibang I only get a colorbar and 0 and I mean 0 information about the color. I get the rgb and hex value in firealpaca ONLY, I consider this to be an obtuse way to enforce this rule, some artists use solely mobile devices to draw art, such as medibang (which can use the psds provided) and those may not provide these values normally. Ultimately forcing these artists to go out of their way to use external ways to follow this rule.

Addtionally, this skin rule feels far too limiting and I'm not convinced the person who came up with it has ever spent time reconstructing a dinosaur. You can pick out reconstructions based on animals some of the markings come from, and they will be illegal according to this rule. You would not be able to make a raptor that looks like the one in prehistoric planet, no matter how much you like the grey skin and white feathering.

The velociraptor from Prehistoric Planet with two feather sections and a head section circled in red, giving the hex colors and rgb values.

I have been trying to replicate a legal example (with the info that this mod may be going a little too dark/light) and the fact that brightness applied to color VARIES from program to program is telling enough. In photoshop 10 brightness gets close, but in firealpaca, it's 5 brightness that gets close.

Pa-Color-Brightness-Range

I could almost replicate these palette on my own, but i couldn't get it to be perfect, so unfortunately my examples with the prehistoric planet raptor will probably be slightly off, but this mod might have been going with too many points in brightness in the first place.

Prepla-Legal-Pa

The greys here are the legal palette the prehistoric planet raptor might be allowed, the brown is what the legal palette of the feathers would have to be to allow the skin to be legal. It goes without saying that this is an insanely limiting way to design a dinosaur.

However, this might be nitpicky, after all we only have very few cases of colors being perserved in fossils, so why not bring up the most notable case of this: sinosauropteryx.

Reconstructed Color Patterns of Sinosauropteryx. Based on the distribution of pigmented plumage in the study highlighting the level of the countershading transition from a dark dorsum to light ventrum. Scale bar represents 100 mm.

(Source: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31197-1, Authors: Fiann M. Smithwick, Robert Nicholls, Innes C. Cuthill, Jakob Vinther)

Sino-Legal-Pal

If even reconstructions of a real life dinosaur doesn't follow this, then it is completely fair to take issue with this rule, especially when it is difficult to actually follow if you don't know what range your art program's brightness is to create your legal palette.

While this whole article may look like a whole lot of bitter complaining, PA is supposed to be all skill levels friendly, and that does include me, who basically does art like a caveman in comparison to other people. If your color rules and marking edge rules are insanely specific like PA's are, you need to be prepared for when people might not know how to do things. And you especially need to keep your game resource website fully updated so that confusion doesn't arise, and run into situations where you can only learn about a rule by having your design rejected. Also, the discord server does not mitigate this, it actually makes it worse, because important information, like how you should color your dinosaur's skin in comparison to the feathers should not only be in a discord server that can get deleted, shut down, get brought down in a outage, etc. Not even to mention if you don't use discord and don't want to.

The discord being a bandaid fix on the information issue is also compounded by the way the mods will just say "join the discord server to get an early rough pass on your design" but in my experiece, they didn't have any night shift mods for when i would usually be working on my dinosaurs. So I would have to wait hours for a response, and sometimes you will just get completely ignored. I think they might have one now, but they didn't at the time I made these designs.