Screenshots
Watch trailer on Steam ↗Captain Contraption’s Safari Park
Pill Bug Interactive · Published by Pill Bug Interactive
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
A pixel-art roguelite safari park sim. Clone lions, medieval knights and sentient trucks into a park with no fences, then route your visitors past the chaos. You control the paths, the buildings and your robot staff. The one thing you don’t control is the animals.
Simulation, Strategy · 2027 · More free games
Design your own safari spectacle by cloning unique creatures like lions and knights in Captain Contraption’s Safari Park. Navigate chaos as you build paths and manage staff, all while letting the animals run wild.
About this game
From the two-person team behind Captain Contraption’s Chocolate Factory comes a pixel-art roguelite park management sim.
You’re a robot historian. Humanity is long extinct, and you are studying it the only way you know how… by cloning the creatures you found on a hard-drive, releasing them into a safari park, and selling tickets to your robot friends.
There are no fences. There are no enclosures. Nothing stays where you put it.
Every creature acts on its own instincts. Herbivores graze and breed while Predators hunt them. Populations rise and fall, and rise again. Put a dragon nest downwind of the field your goats call home and watch what happens. Your job is to stay one step ahead of an ecosystem that doesn’t do what it’s told.
You don't control the animals. You control the visitors.
You build the paths, your guides follow them, visitors follow the guides. Get the route right and you have paying customers. Get it wrong and you have free food for the new dinosaur exhibit.
Every park ends in ruin. So you can learn and try again.
Sooner or later the food chain inverts, time runs out, or something gets loose in the gift shop. When a park falls that park ends, but the study doesn’t. This is a rougelite, meaning you earn currency each run to unlock: new creatures to clone, new attractions to build, and new systems that promise a little more control.
The archive of creatures is extensive… but poorly labelled.
As you get deeper into the game you’ll unlock more of what humanity left behind.
Lions, tigers and other creatures that behave roughly as you expect.
Medieval knights and orcs who settle their disagreements in public.
Sentient push bikes.
All of it runs on a mysterious green goop. Feed goop to a cloning vat and you get a creature. Feed it to a field and you get wheat. When something dies your Recycler Robot turns it back into goop (if something else doesn’t eat it first). Run out of goop, or money to buy goop, and the whole park starves.
We're Pill Bug Interactive, two chuckle heads in Wales making games. Wishlist Captain Contraption’s Safari park and we'll tell you the moment the demo is live.
Note on AI use during development
Every asset in this game was made by a human. The game started out as the idea of “Asset Safari” around the concept of buying sprite packs from artists, which is what we have done. The music, sound and writing is also all human generated.
I (Sean) use AI coding assistants: GitHub Copilot and Claude Code. I've written software for years and I teach games programming at university, and I use AI tools the way I use a profiler or a compiler. They helped build web tools Dave and I use to balance the ecosystem across long simulations, they're very good at finding edge-case bugs (I'm looking at you, pathing system), and they write the boilerplate for things like save states and UI. I never ship code I haven't read and thoroughly tested.
No content in this game is AI-generated, and no generative AI runs while you play.
Steam's disclosure question is about AI-generated content that ships in a game, not tools that speed up development, so we've answered no. But we're telling you about the tools we have used anyway.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit, version 21H1 (build 19043) or newer
- Processor: Intel Core i5-4460 / AMD FX-6300 (4 cores, 2.5 GHz)
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: DirectX 11 feature level 11_0, 1 GB VRAM (GeForce GTX 750 Ti / Radeon R7 260X / Intel HD 5500)
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 3 GB available space
Supported Languages
*languages with full audio support
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
More creature details, More performance, and bug fixes
Hi everyone!This next update is coming earlier than I expected, but one of our players noticed a potential game breaking bug which I've now fixed and wanted to get out there. It means two big new changes have also come with this, more information about creatures and multithreading!Creature Inspector: creatures now explain themselvesThe old creature panel showed you four percentages and one state word. Every number on it was about the creature; none of it was a reason a creature was doing something. The two questions we kept seeing players asked were "why is that chicken running away from the food?" and "what is stopping my creatures breeding?" which were both unanswerable. They're also not the same shape of question, so they now get different answers.A reason line. Under the state word, a plain sentence saying why: "Running from a Wolf", "Walking to a berry bush", "Cannot see any food, and has not found any yet", "Being pulled back to its territory". Fear beats hunger unconditionally in the sim and always has … chickens running away and starving wasn’t a bug it was a feature… and now the chicken tells you this.A breeding checklist. Breeding is four gates ANDed together plus a mate that meets the same checks, and a sentence can't carry that. The panel now tells you which term failed: too hungry, too tired, too hurt, no mate in range, no Chicken nearby was ready to breed, the nearest ready Chicken was no longer ready."Show what it sees". An overlay for the selected creature: its vision ring, its home territory leash, a line to every single thing it's currently reacting to, the heading its steering actually produced, and faded ghosts of the food and prey it remembers… drawn with the real sprites of what was there, fading on the sim's own memory clock. When the ghost is gone, the creature has genuinely forgotten the thing. A history strip. Most of what you want explained has already finished by the time you click a creature. The panel keeps the last few things the creat...Read full article on Community Announcements (Sean)AnnouncementsOfficial
Playtest 5 Open for Everyone!
Hi everyone!We have opened up the playtest again and are changing the way we run it. Instead of a fixed weekend test we are just going to keep the playtest open. As a small team we find it hard to get the word out about our games and having a playable version of the game on Steam (even if it is a beta) really helps. The plan is still to hold back updates until there is some significant change, so please keep sending us feedback using the normal channels (in-game survey, email, discord, steam forums).This is the biggest update the game has ever had… Since the last playtest build the park has grown actual terrain there are now two named maps (one available in the demo) with a star-based progression between them and the deepest pass on creature behaviour we've ever done. Creatures now sleep, flocks behave like herds of individual animals instead of one blob, fights actually end, and dragons fly.A lot of what's below came out of new balancing tools we built for this update… we are now able to simulate thousands of full runs of the whole progression and see where players get stuck before you do. Almost every number in the game has been re-tuned as a result. The simulation tool is just a simulation though, so if the numbers feel off let us know.Main ChangesMaps:There are multiple maps and each map has its own hand-authored terrain (water, forest and mountains). There are two maps each with its own name, terrain and a minimap preview on the level select so you can see what you're getting into. More will be in the final game.Each map now has three star objectives instead of one final objective. Completing one banks a star and the run carries on, completed stars stay on the list so you can see what you've earned while chasing the rest.Stars persist across runs. The level select shows the stars you hold, and later maps unlock once you hold enough stars across your whole save. A locked map tells you exactly what it costs and how close you are ("0/1 stars to unlock") instead of...Read full article on Community Announcements (Sean)AnnouncementsOfficial
Playtest 4 Open for Everyone!
Good news!Captain Contraption's Safari Park Playtest 4 is live and available to download and play until 29th July. We decided to do a few more playtests before we push forward with the demo.The changes in this build are quite big. The goop economy has been rebuilt from the ground up, you can now sell buildings, dead creatures are no longer wasted, and runs get longer the better you play. There's also a serious performance pass ... big parks should be a lot smoother.Thank you to everyone who filled in the surveys. Almost everything below came directly out of your reports. We will be running the same survey again for this playtest so please provide feedback if you have time.Headline ChangesRecycler Robots Dead creatures are no longer a dead loss. Every Population Control building now ships with a Recycler robot that collects corpses and converts them into goop, and you can buy more. Bigger creatures recycle into more goop. Corpses wait politely in a queue if all your recyclers are busy, and they won't rot away while a robot is on its way to collect them.You Can Sell Buildings Made a mistake? Every building can now be destroyed for a refund (with an "are you sure?" so you don't do it by accident). Fields Work Completely Differently Fields used to charge you goop for every single meal, which meant every animal you owned was quietly losing you money forever. Now:Fields charge a flat goop upkeep per minute, and grow their crops for free.A field that can't pay its upkeep goes dormant and stops regrowing, your herbivores starve visibly instead of your bank draining invisibly.Fields come pre-stocked, so they start working immediately instead of waiting on a delivery robot.Adjacent matching fields discount each other's upkeep ...building in blocks pays off.Bigger animals eat more. A dragon takes up roughly 2.2x the field space of a chicken. Field capacity is now per crop and shown in the UI.Your goop spend now follows the number of fields you choose to build, not the number o...Read full article on Community Announcements (Sean)AnnouncementsOfficial
Playtest 3 is a wrap!
Hi everyone,Playtest number 3 is a wrap! Thank-you so much to everyone who took part. This was the biggest of the three and we've already had some really useful feedback. If you played but didn’t get around to filling in the feedback form, you can still do so here:https://forms.gle/5uR1usZekb2Q3UTK9(It’s the same form that was accessible in-game.)The next step for us is to look at all the feedback and analytics and use those to give things a bit of a polish ready for the demo release. Along with tweaks based on your feedback I've been convinced that putting some actual safari park animals in our safari park might be a good idea for marketing... ...guerrilla marketing. Best wishesSeanRead full article on Community Announcements (Sean)AnnouncementsOfficial
Open Playtest THIS WEEKEND ONLY
Hi everyone,The playtest for Captain Contraption's Safari Park is now open for everyone.You can go to the store page and add the playtest to your library and check it out. The build is essentially what we will be releasing as the demo after we look through all your feedback. There are two sets of species to unlock, some buildings and a few passive upgrades.The playtest will end on Monday 6PM UK time so be sure to jump in now.If you do check it out, and you have time, please fill out this survey so we can make the game the best it can be. Survey Link: https://forms.gle/eyj1iqJEBrjrHYaz8Thanks and enjoy!SeanRead full article on Community Announcements (Sean)
