Overview
Originally released in late 2016, Planet Coaster was a success and it gathered a large, thriving community. Allowing the player to create the wildest theme parks and coasters, the time has come to bring it to console, both current and next-gen.
Development
Starting from the original Planet Coaster, porting a PC title to consoles comes with substantial challenges. In addition to the expected issues with having to provide controller support, Planet Coaster is an unbound game: the player can keep making more and more complex scenes, even if the memory is exhausted. Consoles, however, do not allow for swapping and will just crash if memory runs out.
Additionally, we’ve rebuilt the entire user interface. The original user interface was created with Scaleform, a now unsupported piece of middleware. To move technology forward (and since new hires aren’t exactly fluent in ActionScript and Flash), we’ve started using Gameface. This has required a considerable time investment, both from the Shared Technology Group and the User Interface team, but the result has certainly been worth it.
Planet Coaster Console is shipping on the next-gen consoles (Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5), so we’ve also had to add support for those to the Cobra engine. Again, this has been a subtantial time investment across multiple teams, but the game looks stunning on the new hardware.
