Thrillville - Developer Diaries Week Five

The things worth doing are never easy...

Words: GamesRadar US

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Developer Frontier has had experience creating other theme park-based games for the 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.

Jonny Watts, Senior Producer at Frontier Developments

One of the big things about Thrillville is that theme park games are normally the domain of the PC, so the whole user interface needed to be adapted to a controller instead 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!