LucasArts has released the fourth Developer Diary highlighting the development of what may very well be the perfect theme park building game ever made. This fourth Thrillville developer Diary features Jonny Watts, Senior Producer at Frontier Developments Read on:

We at Frontier have had experience of developing other theme-park based games for PC, such as RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. But Thrillville is different – it’s been designed from the ground up for consoles and handhelds, including PS2, Xbox and PSP. With that comes a bevy of challenges – the most significant of those follow.

User Interface

One of the big things about Thrillville is that theme-park games are normally the domain of PC games, so the whole UI needed to be adapted to a controller in lieu of a mouse and keyboard. Because Thrillville puts you in the park as an actual character rather than hovering above it, and because it has such a variety of fun, console-oriented gameplay styles, this was in the main a very straightforward thing to do – we aren’t the first console game by any means where you control a character’s movement around a park, driving, sniping, playing soccer, doing tricks, etc. But things get a little less straightforward when it comes to constructing roller coasters from scratch…

From the start of the project, we knew building roller coasters on a console was going to be a challenge, as it soon proved to be – we got quite close the first time out, but perfecting it took a few focus groups and a lot of head-scratching! We’ve ended up with a method that lets you “drive” your new coaster through the air using the controller in a really natural way. We think it’s the easiest, quickest and most fun way we’ve ever seen of building a rollercoaster – and we hope you agree!

Gameplay Variety

Thrillville has a massive variety of gameplay contained within it – you can be shooting robots one minute, then doing a dance game, then driving go-karts, and then doing a marketing campaign or taking out a loan for your park. One big design challenge was how to fit all that into a whole that didn’t feel hopelessly forced or disjointed and pointless.

The setting for the game came to our aid here – if you think about it, a theme park is exactly a massive array of varied, fun experiences, so the whole setting for such variety in Thrillville is naturally “right” and not forced or contrived. The only thing left for us to do was to tie everything together so that there is a point to you doing all the different cool stuff. The reason you do things, apart from fun, is driven by the story, and when you’ve finished a game or mission, you get a reward that helps your overall objective of managing your park.

Minigames: Quality and Depth

The minigames give Thrillville rich variety. We had to be careful with these, though – without special care, it would have been easy to make them very shallow and not very fun. As it turns out, all these different games are the types that we love to play. I hope that shows through in the attention to detail and effort that has been put into making them fun, carefully balanced games that are easy to get into yet reward extended play – they are actually whole games in their own right, so to call them “minigames” does them a disservice, I think.

Non-Linearity

The other aspect of such a busy park and varied experience is that we really wanted you, the player, to be the one in control of what you actually did in the park – not the game forcing you to do stuff you don’t want to. So Thrillville is VERY non-linear: you are never “on rails,” and it’s really down to you what you do at any given time. This means that people who may prefer dance games or flirting with the guests can progress just as well through the game as those who like first-person shooters or driving. (By the way, if you like ALL these types of games…you’re in for a SENSATIONAL time at Thrillville!)

Keeping things non-linear but also maintaining a tangible story is a true challenge, and I’d have to say that the glue that keeps the game together lies within the mission structure. Grouped into different types, you only need to complete a certain proportion of them (of any type) to progress to the next park. So you can hang out in your park, doing exactly what you like to do – just like a real theme park!

Player-Created Content

Unusually for a console game, Thrillville lets you get creative. You can put exactly what you want where you want it in your park (even change its color!), as well as design your own crazy coasters, great golf courses and rip-roaring race tracks.