Thrillville - Developer Diaries Week Five

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.

For boring technical reasons, consoles don't allow as much space to fit stuff in or as much processing power to run the game as on a PC, where most theme park games are played. As a result, there is a concept of a power limit in the park, and (unfortunately!) you can't just keep putting more and more and more stuff into your park.

So how did we get around this? Just like a real theme park, there's a limit on the amount of electrical power that you can take for each themed area of a park. Each item you have in there makes a certain drain on your available power, until you can fit no more in there. Each thing (stall, ride, coaster, game, whatever) takes a different amount of power, so there are a lot of different permutations. This adds another dimension to the gameplay and is something you need to keep in mind (as well as the financial cost of your attractions) - there are even one or two missions based around it.