Except for the times when nothing
happens. The parade runs on a voluntary
basis, and some days the penguins don’t
feel like it. It’s the accepted cost of running
a park ethically.
The Planet Zoo team has faced similar
issues playing their E3 demo. Sometimes,
when the camera sweeps over the
Serengeti-inspired safari park they’ve
built for the occasion, the crocodiles
drift languidly across the water in
photogenic fashion. But just as often
they stay in bed. And occasionally, a
reticulated giraffe interrupts a monologue
about the flexibility and depth of the
game’s building toolkit to plop a big pile of
stools in close-up. If nothing else, it’s a fine
demonstration of Frontier’s physics at its
smallest scale, as brown lumps jostle and
thud to the dirt below. “We are working
with live animals here,” senior developer
Liesa Bauwens says. “They’re pretty
much impossible to script.”
Thankfully, there are places where the
behavioral simulation at the
conservationist heart of Planet Zoo turns
out to be a perfect showcase for its
creative tools, too. Take the chimpanzees,
whose high intelligence makes them
demanding residents.A smart way to meet their enrichment
needs is to install a climbing frame. As
befits a semi-sequel to Planet Coaster,
these frames are marriages of function
and form that can be built any which way.
The walls and roofs of nearby buildings
can be co-opted as part of their structure,
and the chimps will clamber all over these
player-defined walkways as if they’ve
always been there. “It’s no boast to say
that the technology behind the
locomotion system is cutting edge,”
Bauwens says. “Nobody’s doing anything
like this, and it’s extremely difficult.”
The procedural chimp parkour is the
result of over a year’s work by a team of
coders. If that seems excessive, it reflects
Frontier’s determination to fold the
creative potential of the Planet games
back into its management side.SURVIVAL OF THE CUTEST
Planet Zoo is an advancement on
Frontier’s last management game,
Jurassic World Evolution, too. Turns out
real-world animals aren’t made by
researching special rocks you find at dig
sites. Instead, when a mummy springbok
and a daddy springbok love each
other very much, they share their
genetic traits. These genes
determine not only the patterns in
animals’ fur, but their size,
immunities, fertility, and ultimately the
length of their lives.
“We follow our animals’ complete life
cycle from birth to death,” Bauwens
explains, “leaving space for both
celebration and mourning.”
Inbreeding can compromise good
traits, and so sorting your animals into the
right social groups to rear their young
becomes another layer of management.
It’s a matter of self-education, and it
extends to the guests too. In a first for
Frontier’s management games, you’re no
longer merely appealing to base
desires—for food, drink, and well-situated
toilet facilities—but also a desire to learn.
“All of these things are a massive
undertaking,” Bauwens says. “When we
combine the complex animal AI, new staff
systems, guest behaviors, and a large
economic rebalance, all these factors
contribute to Planet Zoo being a
standalone game.”
Jeremy PeelE
dinburgh Zoo is famous for its penguin
parade. At 2.15pm, punters step off the
paths to make way for the King, Gentoo
and Rockhopper birds, who march on by
the exhibits with their wings stretched out at their
sides, as if left in the default T-pose by an animator.Breeding and procedural chimp
motion create animal magicPLANET ZOO
WHEN A MUMMY SPRINGBOK
AND A DADDY SPRINGBOK LOVE
EACH OTHER VERY MUCH...RELEASE
November 2019DEVELOPER
Frontier DevelopmentsPUBLISHER
Frontier DevelopmentsLINK
http://www.planetzoogame.comNEED TO KNOWNEW
INFOMore than anything,
this lot want to learn.Planet Zoo
PREVIEW