How Frontier leveled up movie games with Jurassic World Evolution | Tech News

For the most part, movie games suck. (Insert long conversation here.) But NBCUniversal wanted a good game to go with the launch of its Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom movie (which opens on Friday, June 22, in the U.S.). So it approached Frontier Developments, a United Kingdom studio with a long history in theme park games.

David Braben, CEO of Frontier, saw the Jurassic World deal as an opportunity to bring back high-quality movie games. And last week, the company launched Jurassic World Evolution. You can see some of the company’s experience with Planet Coaster in the game, but it has the added complexity of making sure your park guests don’t get eaten by the prime attractions.

Frontier’s game is the spear tip for the console and PC. But Universal also launched a Jurassic World VR arcade game, an Oculus VR experience Jurassic World: Blue, and Ludia’s Jurassic World: Alive mobile game as well. Braben believes that big media companies such as Universal and Comcast are waking up to the potential of games, and he hopes that Frontier will be in more demand in the future as a result. I spoke with Braben at the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) game trade show in Los Angeles last week.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: David Braben is CEO of Frontier, maker of Jurassic World Evolution.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

David Braben: I feel like we’ve brought back film licenses. I don’t know if you know, but Universal came to us. I think hopefully they’re very pleased. They seem to be very positive. This was probably two years ago.

GamesBeat: They knew that this was a good franchise for you?

Braben: Well, the new film was coming, so it was logical to do something associated with the film. We wanted to do a dinosaur game anyway, and it was such a logical time. I think the team did a fantastic job. They really care. You try to find a kid that doesn’t like dinosaurs, that’s pretty hard. We’re all big kids really. There’s a lot of love for this. We just hit the 25th anniversary of the original film.

The game is not tied into the Fallen Kingdom film. We’re set in a time between the two films. But we reference, very closely, all of the history of the other films. The early signs are that people really love it, as far as the feedback on Steam reviews, YouTube reviews. They’ve been really positive.

Our animation team has done such a good job. The dinosaurs match the film’s really closely. It’s actually funny looking at the film now. I saw the premiere last night. Looking at the detail on the dinosaurs in the game versus the film, I’m confident that we’re up there. Some things we’ve got, the way the water comes off the dinosaurs, may be even better than the film.

GamesBeat: Did you make use of assets from the movies?

Braben: We did to some extent, yeah. Our assets are the same resolution as the film. They’re not anything lower. Our engine can really push a lot of polygons. The other thing is, we have to comply—in a film you can choose where an animal’s going to walk and they animate to that route. With us, they can walk on any terrain. They’re not walking on the flat. They’re walking on very uneven surfaces. There are lots of challenges.

If you think of a brontosaur, with huge feet, those feet have to align. We can’t just plunk it down like that. It has to be at an angle. It affects all the joints in the leg. There’s lots of complexity there that you don’t tend to get in other games with straightforward foot-planting.

GamesBeat: I’m sure you’ve all become pretty big dinosaur experts.

Braben: That’s right. But with all of these things, it’s nice—you build the technology and that helps future games. A lot of the things we did for Elite Dangerous benefited Planet Coaster, and then a lot of the things we did for Planet Coaster, particularly as we’re rendering millions of objects—the engine’s become very efficient. With this, think of all the trees we’re rendering, all the detail, which is all user-created content. That’s a challenge, particularly on console, and yet it still runs at a decent framerate.

GamesBeat: Universal has gotten very aggressive. This feels like a big re-entry into games, with Jurassic World VR and the mobile game and everything else coming out at once.

Braben: We’re seeing Universal and Comcast looking at the future a lot. If you look at the figures on how important games are within the entertainment industry, $116 billion revenue last year—we’ve overtaken TV by quite a margin. They’re looking and thinking they want some of that.

GamesBeat: I guess because they’re different platforms, these games aren’t necessarily going to cannibalize each other.

Braben: Right. They’ve certainly said they’re very pleased with where we are. It’s always a good sign when you see people at Universal, senior people, aligning themselves with the game. We’ve built a great relationship. I’m sure we’ll do things in the future. I don’t know if you saw in Planet Coaster, but we put some Universal IP in there. We had Back to the Future. We had Knight Rider and the Munsters, all Universal IP.

Everybody walk the dinosaur.

Above: Everybody walk the dinosaur.

Image Credit: Frontier Developments

GamesBeat: I’m going to be judging their contest for indies. They’re giving indie developers access to all the licenses they’ve never used before. It’s an interesting way to do it.

Braben: Jaws is quite an interesting one. You could do Hungry Shark with the Jaws license. I’m quite amazed, actually, at how film licenses haven’t been much of a thing. Maybe it’s because we see ourselves as being independent and not really needing that support.

GamesBeat: It seems like there was such overkill in the past. They burned everyone out on it for all time.

Braben: And games that didn’t particularly stand out. That was the trouble.

GamesBeat: When you guys were conceiving this, what did you seize upon as what you wanted to do with it? Where was the fun?

Braben: One of the things that was important—the quality of what we could produce would be very close to what the film could produce. That was a key point. They saw what we did with Planet Coaster and Zoo Tycoon as well, with Microsoft, in terms of the detail. If you look at the detail on the skin of the Indomitus Rex there, the way all the muscle structure animates, which we have to understand in order to do the hillsides—it’s the sort of thing that the film animators paid a lot of attention to.

This would be very hard to do in quite a few other engines. CryEngine could do some of the pixel shader stuff, but getting the performance up, so the animation’s smooth, would require quite a lot of extra work. Also, for a management game, it’s very rare that you can take the camera as far in as you can here.

Eat your heart out, Epcot.

Above: Eat your heart out, Epcot.

Image Credit: Frontier Developments

GamesBeat: As far as how much action to throw into it, how did you work that out?

Braben: We put in some things that really—I know people want it, the ability to drive the jeep, fly the helicopter, and the little ball thing, the gyrosphere. You can drive that around. It’s quite nice. There’s a bit of that in video clip. But it’s all of these things. We’re gamers. What do we want? We just put that in. The great thing was having two years to make a game. That’s quite a long time. I suppose the other thing is, we’ve stuck to quite a tight budget on this. Our budget for development is below $10 million.

GamesBeat: That sounds like a fairly small team.

Braben: We had a team of just under 100, yeah. Or just over 100 as we wrapped up. I think we’ve done that with most of our games. Planet Coaster was a similar-sized team. It just means that we can take more risks. Obviously we spend a lot more on marketing. But also it’s trying to show that within the games industry, there’s an opportunity here now for relative newcomers to publishing like us to actually make E3. My worry previously that E3 was going to die. That would have been a shame for the industry. Bringing members of the public in has been good, but also seeing new publishers like us being able to take part in this in a positive way. That’s good as well.

GamesBeat: Are you happy with the level of creativity and diversity in the ecosystem, then?

Braben: Absolutely. We’re in a very good place. We’ve also got a very good pipeline. Our fourth franchise is in full development. We’re working on a fifth one as well. We have a good overlap. It’s very good for staff morale, staff retention, the fact that we have different, quite varied things going on. Elite is entering its fifth year now. We have people who might want to change. Whereas previously they might have left and joined other companies, now we can offer them work with dinosaurs or coasters or another thing. They’re all quite varied.

GamesBeat: Are you more excited about movie-related games in the future?

Braben: Not especially? If you look at our history, we’ve done the odd license before. They’ve been successful. I think we’re looking at a portfolio approach. We have quite a mix. This has done quite well for us and will hopefully continue to do so. We’ll continue to support this going forward. This will be another—hopefully it will last quite a few years. Same thing we’ve done with Planet Coaster, which is now in its second year. Elite is at the start of its fifth year.

The fourth year of Elite Dangerous was its biggest year ever. It’s not like it’s tailing off. That sort of thing is good for the industry, to see long-term success, and from a player perspective to see a game continue to be supported.

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