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.