Gameplay Journal Entry #2
This week, I played Planet Coaster (2016) after feeling a bit nostalgic for the Roller Coaster Tycoon series. These are “construction and management simulation games”, more commonly known as part of the tycoon genre. As a kid, I was drawn to these games because I loved how much control I had over the design of the map. When I first played Planet Coaster, it was so exciting to learn how far the freedom of creativity had come for this “series” and I observed some interesting parallels in gameplay with the practice of game development. I noticed how similar scaling, rotating, and moving objects in Planet Coaster was to performing the same operations in Unity and landscaping terrain and placing trees felt not unlike playing with an asset pack in UE4. The options for customization go even further, though — I have not yet tried it out, but you can import any 3D model (.fbx) into Planet Coaster for use in your park using the game’s Thememaker’s Toolkit feature. All player creations, using original models and/or Planet Coaster base objects, can be shared and downloaded by other players through Steam Workshop. Overall, it appears Frontier supports their creative fanbase by providing them with the tools they need to achieve their wildest dreams.
Planet Coaster was published by Frontier Developments for Microsoft Windows in 2016. Cobra engine, Frontier’s in-house engine, has been used for Planet Coaster in addition to other genre titles including Planet Zoo (2019), Jurassic World Evolution (2018), and my childhood favorite, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 (2004). While no two of these well-received titles look exactly the same, they share many core gameplay features (mainly within management and building) and prove Frontier has created a successful model using Planet Coaster as a modern prototype. Their ability to continue raising the standards of this genre while still using and advancing the same engine that played a role in defining it is lends credibility to the Cobra engine’s extensibility.
By some definitions, Planet Coaster can maybe be considered an engine within an engine. “At its heart, the game engine is also a particular way of organizing the structure of computer game software; this structure separates execution of core functionality by the game engine from the creative assets that define the play space or “content” of a specific game title (Lowood, 2016).” If the creative assets are user-generated and/or user-arranged in the play space and interact based on functionalities defined by the engine, then the user has contributed in some aspect to the development process and has used the “engine”, by definition. This extension of Cobra allows it to sort of grow organically without bounds as users are given the option to make major modifications within the games it produces.
References
Lowood, Henry. “Game Engine.” Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon, by A. C. Deger et al., The MIT Press, 2016, pp. 203–209.
