Cozy Farming Sim But Make It Dino: How Paleo Pines Blazed a Unique Path In a Well-Worn Genre with Dinosaurs

gamedeveloper.com:

Four years ago, in 2019, cozy games were on the rise but not yet quite as saturated as they are today. It was the year the original concept for Paleo Pines, and Lucky the Parasaurolophus, was created by Jordan Bradley as part of a game jam. And when this concept was shared on Twitter it clearly struck a chord with many people at the time. A game about cute dinos? Sign us up! The whole Italic Pig team loved it, so we took the concept into production.

Paleo Pines has evolved a lot since then, but cute dinosaurs in a harmonious countryside remained at the heart of it. The game as we know it now, a mixture of farming sim and creature collector, has gone through many iterations, but in fact didn’t always have farming as a mechanic.

For example, one of the earliest ideas we tried was harvesting dino eggs and trading them. Only that didn’t work. In the wholesome world of Paleo, there was no place for stealing dino babies and selling them. Our dinos are free beings – they live on our ranch of their own free will because they’re our friends. Taking their eggs just felt… wrong.

As the team prototyped and pitched various ideas, Paleo still hadn’t found its feet. Then, in summer 2020, we nailed down the core vision: a love-letter to childhood, and those long breezy summers we all remember. This helped tie everything together – mechanically, visually, and in the audio too. Paleo Pines as we know it now was born.

In our high level vision, we locked down our core pillars: finding and befriending Dinosaurs, a sense of whimsical Discovery, and being part of a harmonious and safe Community by contributing as a Settler running a farm. And we stayed true to these pillars from then on, though not without challenges along the way.

And the dinos