You’re trying to hit a lot of goals at once, as well as contain any crises that break out. As he puts it, “The player can have all three in progress at any one time, yet while these are active there’s also the process of managing the progression and expansion of their park as well as the management of their dinosaur welfare – and on top of that there’s always the possibility of something going wrong, such as a dinosaur escaping!”Īs well as catching and securing dinosaurs that escape, and managing your loop of macro-tasks, you’ll also have to hit your outlined targets in the main storyline (“Release two herbivores into an enclosure” or “Get a park rating of three stars”) as well as manage one-off contracts that can come in at any time (“Sell a dinosaur with a rating of 120” or “Take a marketing photo worth $10,000”). Once these macro elements were put in place, Newbold and his team began thinking about other things to throw at players. You end up egging yourself on – just one more dig and then it’s time for bed, you might think to yourself, but then your dig comes back and you really want to extract the genomes… Then the genomes add up and suddenly you’re able to incubate a new dinosaur… and before you know it you’ve played for another hour.
And this, from a player’s perspective, makes it easy to justify continual play. These little tasks – digging, extracting, incubating, releasing – don’t take long to do on their own. Read More: Jurassic World Short “Battle at Big Rock” Is Unleashed These are then expanded over a longer period of time and combined with other gameplay to create the overarching structure of the game.” “Firstly, we look at the mechanics and loops that work in the macro time such as a few minutes.
“We tend to design gameplay loops in two stages,” Newbold explained. The overarching gameplay loop – which sees the player completing a number of challenges on an island in order to unlock another island, and then completing challenges on that island to unlock another island, and so on – was one of the first things we talked about.
It wasn’t long before I was recommending the game to my friends, and they ended up sinking significant chunks of their festive free time into it too.īut how does a company craft a game that is quite this engaging? Keen to talk about my obsessive dinosaur-wrangling, I reached out to Jurassic World: Evolution’s game director Rich Newbold to pick his brain about just that.
The theme-park building game from the Cambridge-based developers at Frontier has a compelling gameplay loop that sucks you in and doesn’t let you go, as you figure out how to run Jurassic World without all hell breaking loose. Over the Christmas break, I became absolutely obsessed with Jurassic World: Evolution.