Welcome to the first devlog for That Caveman Theme Park Game.

The idea starts with a simple question: what happens when the people running a theme park also have to build a tribe, gather their own materials and keep the fire that holds their settlement together burning?

You might be planning a new attraction one moment, sending workers to a forest the next, then realising that the wood earmarked for your expansion is also tonight's fuel. That connection is the heart of the game.

Captured in-game: a growing park around The Big Fire after dark. Interface hidden. Work in progress.

Wandering settlers are looking for a home. Give them space in a cave and they can join your tribe, help with construction and learn professions such as woodcutting, mining and hunting.

Visitors arrive for a day out. They have their own preferences and limited spending money, and they pay in stone. The stone earned from a ride or a meal goes straight into the same stockpile you use for construction.

So a successful attraction can help fund the next cave, training building or defensive tower. Your park and your settlement grow together.

Its warmth determines where you can build, and keeping it fuelled is essential: if The Big Fire goes out, the tribe's story ends.

Small Fires extend the usable area from within The Big Fire's reach, but they need wood too. Lose a Small Fire and buildings left outside the remaining warmth close until you restore coverage.

There are no roads or paths to lay. People move across the landscape, while warmth, travel distances, resources and safety give you reasons to think carefully about where everything belongs.

You can select a worker, drag a box around a group and issue direct orders, or let residents get on with their automatic duties. Pause whenever you need time to read, plan or work out your next move.

Workers gather resources and carry them to storage. Trees can be replanted and take time to grow; ordering an early harvest gives you less wood, but might solve an immediate shortage. Later, extra Resource bays can cut the journey home from distant work areas.

Those are the kinds of choices I want the game to create: practical decisions you can see playing out in the world.

Dinosaurs can frighten guests, damage buildings and kill people. Hunters and staffed arrow towers help defend the park, while recovered meat and bones feed back into its economy. Losing visitors also hurts your reputation, so opening another attraction means thinking about how to protect the people using it.

The landscape opens up different possibilities too: fishing and canoe rides by the lake, a waterfall log flume, and a timber coaster built around the mountain. Expanding the park should give you new places to manage as well as new things to build.

This is a game in development, and future devlogs will take a closer look at individual systems, new work and the changes being made along the way.

If a prehistoric park built on the work of your own tribe sounds like your kind of management game, add it to your wishlist and follow the page to stay with its development.

What would you concentrate on first: a dependable settlement, a spectacular attraction, or keeping the dinosaurs at a safe distance? Let me know in the comments.

— TheCarloBird