Overview
Bringing the Jurassic World from a series of films into a game, Frontier Developments turned its knowledge in making park management games to the worthy cause of having a park management game with dinosaurs.
In the cheerful sounding Las Cinco Muertes archipelago, the player has to bring back to life long-dead dinosaurs, while keeping the various company divisions happy and the visitors spending merrily, preferably without getting uncomfortably friendly with a stray Tyrannosaurus rex.
Development
During the development of Jurassic World Evolution, the underlying Cobra engine underwent large scale updates and quite a few new systems had to be written to deal with the multi-platform nature of the game (PC, PS4 and XB1, as well as the powered-up variants PS4 Pro and XB1X).
Perhaps more interesting than the nuts and bolts of the engine, it is worth mentioning the solution the game ended up using for inverse kinematics for all the dinosaurs: FABRIK, an algorithm developed by Dr. Andreas Aristidou. This provided much better results than something like Cyclic Coordinate Descent while remaining blazingly fast – and it was quite quick to implement the first version. Additional features such as constraints were required to generate high quality results and although those proved to be harder to implement, it was well worth it.
