The Making Of...
How Frontier created the best animals in the business, without letting production run wild
How Frontier created the best animals in the business for Planet Zoo, without letting dev run wild
Format PC
Developer/publisher Frontier Developments Origin UK
Release 2019
Even as a player of Planet Zoo, it’s hard to keep everything running smoothly – the needs of employees elbowing for room with those of thousands of customers, the careful balancing of revenue with education and welfare programs, attempting to squeeze some practicality out of the wonkily-built custom habitats you spent hours fiddling with early on and are stubbornly clinging to. And then of course there are your zoological residents, the lemurs and orangutans and constrictors all richly realised in tooth and claw, bringing to mind that old cliché about working with children or animals.
So it comes as something of a surprise to discover that Planet Zoo was developed in about two years, initially with a very small core team, in a process that everyone we speak to characterises as smooth. As we look at a screen bustling with things that seem like they’d make the game a nightmare to develop, we have to ask: how?
“It’s not like this is new territory for us, in terms of trying to represent animals in a convincing way,” art director Marc Cox says. But the last time Frontier Developments put out an entirely new zoo game (at least, one whose inhabitants aren’t prehistoric) was 2013’s Zoo Tycoon, on Xbox 360. The leap in fidelity is remarkable – Planet Zoo’s creatures practically invite you to push the camera in as close as it’ll go, to examine every single fold of skin and characterful ear twitch – but it brought new challenges. And the fact that you’re able to do this with the camera at all? Well, that was one of them.
“Most games where you’re building animals, and animating them, it’s from a fixed distance,” game director Piers Jackson says. “You’ll be on the ground looking at these animals, you understand what it is you have to create in exacting detail. We’re dealing with a game where the player can get very, very close to the animals, but can also pull the camera into a management sim position and have an overview of this entire massive zoo.” On the other line, Cox laughs nervously, and adds: “You’re reminding me just how scary a proposition it is, Piers.”
Building a menagerie that looks and feels realistic, whether you’re reading the movements of skeletons from great heights (“this is the heaviest game we’ve ever done for animation, by far,” Cox says) or poking at individual furs, is no small feat. Research was a huge part of the process, as you might expect, but not all species are created equal in this respect. “A lot of these animals are critically endangered, they can be quite solitary and elusive,” Jackson says, “so getting animation reference or even audio reference can be quite hard.” One thing Planet Zoo had on its side here was that its character team were coming off the back of making Jurassic World Evolution, where they’d been tasked with reanimating creatures from millions of years earlier – they weren’t about to be fazed by a scarcity of reference materials.
The single biggest challenge the team faced wasn’t actually the animals themselves; it was the user-created environments they’d be living in. “It was integral to the game to have the animals naturally traversing over landscape, but on top of this the animals needed to adapt to the customisable terrains that the player created,” executive producer Steve Wilkins says. This traversal included freely swimming, clambering up and jumping between pieces of scenery – each of which could be broken down into its composite parts, Lego-style, then reassembled into whatever shape the player fancied. “How do you create a world where [players] will build climbing frames in ways we hadn’t thought of, then put a Western chimpanzee in there and watch it climb around?” Jackson says. “As far as I’m aware, no one had ever tackled some of these problems.”
Finding the solution was simply a process of experimentation – as Jackson says, “we learned as we built the game.” But this experimenting was made easier by the solid foundations beneath the team’s feet. “It would have taken us an awful long time if we hadn’t been building this in Cobra and building off the back of Planet Coaster,” Jackson says. “An awful lot of the codebase” was worked up from Planet Zoo’s predecessor, he says, “and that got us a long way.”
Notably, though, Jackson himself didn’t work on Planet Coaster. He joined Frontier in 2017, after the closure of Guerilla Games’ Cambridge studio, where he’d spent more than a decade working on Little Big Planet, Killzone and MediEvil games. So while Planet Zoo might have been familiar territory for Frontier, it was something of a departure for the game’s director.
As Cox sees it, Jackson’s arrival revitalised the formula Frontier had pinned down with Planet Coaster almost as much as the introduction of wildlife to these player-built parks. “Piers drove it back into being much more about the simulation,” he says. “I’ve always worked on games where you’re relying on the player generating everything.”
Cox’s role, meanwhile, was to provide continuity. A Frontier veteran of over 20 years, he’s worked not only on Planet Coaster but also Zoo Tycoon, Jurassic World and Kinectimals. “Marc understands the backbone and the DNA of what makes Planet Coaster the game it is,” Jackson says. By which he largely means the creative aspect – Coaster enjoyed a long-lived community, focussed on the remarkable creations that were possible with its building blocks. “If you look at the way players use the game, it’s in much more of a sandbox open-ended way,” Cox says.
When it came to Planet Zoo, says Cox, the aim was to satisfy three camps: “the casual player, someone who wants to get more into the simulation and then the creative people as well.” To that end, more emphasis was put on Career Mode, turning it into a narrative-driven campaign, along with a Franchise Mode that let players trade animals online. Jackson describes the latter as an attempt to “engage our community in a different way to them sharing videos of their creations”.
It worked, at least, in the sense of turning players into ruthless animal traders. The game’s release was followed by a huge warthog boom, as the mode’s simulated economy bottomed out and the market was flooded with low-value fastbreeding species. What’s especially strange
“THE SINGLE BIGGEST CHALLENGE WAS THE USER-CREATED ENVIRONMENTS THE ANIMALS WOULD BE LIVING IN ”
about this incident is that the entire concept is based on the behaviour of real zoos – albeit without the Pumbaa gold rush, as far as we can tell.
“The idea of a studbook, that came from understanding how real zoos actually work,” Jackson says. “They don’t let their animals inbreed, they keep track of them, they exchange them with other zoos.” It’s one example of how Frontier’s meticulous research – speaking to zoo managers, keepers and vets – fed directly into the game design. “I didn’t actually even know that they put animals on contraceptives until we talked to zoos. That’s something they do for population control – and so population control becomes part of our management sim.”
As Jackson sees it, when making a simulation game, design decisions will naturally be led by the real-world situations they’re seeking to simulate. Finding a balance in the game’s management layers, so that animal husbandry can be slotted in alongside the guest flow and revenue management aspects from Planet Coaster? Well, Frontier could simply look to the real thing for inspiration. “That’s, frankly, how zoos actually work in real life,” he explains. “They nearly all work as charities, and they’re nearly always on the borderline of bankruptcy. It’s getting guests in that generates the money so they can actually look after the animals and perform their conservation activities.”
But doesn’t this ever get in the way of creating an entertaining final product? “Authenticity in games plays an integral role, it helps with immersing the players into a game experience,” Wilkins says, “but it shouldn’t be to the detriment of the game itself.” According to Jackson, Planet Zoo’s biggest departure from reality isn’t one you’d necessarily think about. “It’s time,” he says. “Game time is weird, and there’s no way of getting around it.” Each in-game year passes in 15 to 20 minutes (a couple of seconds per day), which requires a lot of abstractions to make everything readable to players. Zoos are open 24 hours a day, egg-laying animals give live birth, life spans and working hours are “accelerated, stretched, distorted.” But our favourite oddity here has to be the visitors. “When you analyse it, some of our guests are spending years and years in the zoo,” Jackson says.
As we marvel at Jackson’s apparent time manipulation powers, the secret to developing Planet Zoo relatively quickly and without incident becomes clear. It’s the exact skill we lack when managing a zoo of our own: careful planning.
The project started with a “very small” core development team, dedicated to answering in advance all of the “awkward questions”, as Jackson calls them, that they were likely to encounter along the way. “To have that that time and that thought space is really important before you start ramping up into full production. It’s easy to steer the ship when there’s very few people on it. Once you set off into production, you’re very committed to what you’re doing.”
Research trips to zoos helped bolster the initial design decisions, then that theory was put into practice with “primitive prototypes to get the basic animal sim up and running,” Wilkins says. “This helped the design team balance animal behaviour and experiment with timings for keeper maintenance.” Not every game can be made this neatly, of course – over the years, we’ve heard about plenty that were found halfway through development, by accident or because the devs were willing throw out most of their work to date. But with accumulated decades of experiencing making management sims and virtual zoos, Frontier was able to accurately forecast its own destiny.
“The fundamental design we came up with at the start is still with us and has not changed,” Cox says. Jackon agrees: “We didn’t have to significantly pivot at any point and go, ‘We need to completely radically rethink what we’re doing here’.” There weren’t even any major cuts along the way, he says. “There were a few ideas that we held onto – some of those have appeared later, in DLC. But there was nothing significant that we had to remove from the game because it didn’t work.”
It’s not just the game that remained steady. Cox says the team had “virtually no crunch at all” on this project. “Weirdly, with a game like this – with the amount of effort needed for the animals to make them realistic, the tons of animation, all the audio that goes with it – it’s probably the biggest game we’ve ever done. And so you would naturally think, we’re never going to get this done, we’ll be working through the weekends. But we didn’t.” And the reason? “Planning, planning and planning.”
The team don’t take it for granted that a crunchless process was a possibility. Wilkins admits that understanding “how integral a good preproduction phase can be” is something he’s seen take shape at Frontier gradually, over the course of many years. “In the past, we would go from project to project and you would almost not touch the ground,” Cox says. “There’s no time to really do things the way you would like to.”
The moment this really changed for Frontier arrived in 2016, with the release of Planet Coaster. After two decades working with everyone from Atari to Microsoft, the studio declared it was going fully independent, and would be self-publishing all its own games in future. “It helps a huge amount,” Cox says, and Jackson agrees: “The move into selfpublishing has allowed Frontier to establish and set its own destiny, and to work to its own beat.” So it’s not just about having a solid plan rolled out in front of you, or good foundations to build on – you also need to be given the space to make these things possible. Now, if only we could figure out how to apply all this to that pesky zoo of ours.