Thrillville - Developer Diaries Week Four

Missions, Marketing and More

How "good" your park is depends on how much money you have got coming in and how happy your guests are. To help you on your way through the game, your Uncle Mortimer (oh yeah... Thrillville also has a real story) provides pointers for you in the form of missions to do in each park. These might range from challenging a guest on a particular attraction/game, hiring and training some mechanics, making friends with some guests, building a new coaster and so on.

You can progress to the next park by successfully completing a certain number of the missions. For example, from the first park you only need to do 50 percent of the missions. In each park there are about 25 missions, so you can do the type of things YOU enjoy and still play the game through.

Early on, you may simply be asked to do one or two direct things to finish a mission.Later in the game, the focus becomes more indirect, so you'll have to learn how to manipulate prices, market your park to attract more guests, and generally think your way through some of the objectives.Everything you do in your park has an effect on its rating.How you do on each mission is rated, bronze, silver or gold. In each park there is a park value mission, and in order to finish the game, you have to complete all missions to gold.So just when you think you've cracked it, those "little" park-value missions suddenly take on a whole new significance and will have you trying every trick in the book that you've learned on your journey through the game to complete them!

And That's Just Career Mode...

So, Thrillville's Career mode offers a massive variety of gameplay types for you to choose from, enjoy and master, all seamlessly integrated in to a vibrant theme park experience. But there's a deeper level of play that allows the game to become greater than the sum of its parts, as you try to use the skills you've developed to make your whole park successful.

I haven't even talked about the Party Play mode and Tourney mode, where you can dive straight in to any of the minigames and play with friends or construct tournaments from them... or the Turbo modes of some games that you unlock during Career mode, or...

...Well, anyway. Heed this warning: Thrillville is so deep, you will be playing it for far longer than you ever imagined, both in Career mode and as a party game.And the team who made it will still be playing it as well!