Feature Focus #2 - Bringing a Big Game to a Small Console

Jens Erik

Senior Community Manager
Frontier
Dear Park Managers,

We hope you're as excited as we are about Jurassic World Evolution: Complete Edition coming to Nintendo Switch! It will be with us in just a few months, and after the fantastic response to the announcement in August, we wanted to share some more details about the game.

In this Feature Focus we'll be looking at the work that goes into bringing Jurassic World Evolution to a new platform, and some of the challenges we overcame along the way. Thank you to Head of Technology Matt Simper for providing insight and his experiences for this Feature Focus, we really appreciate it!

The Technical Side of Things

On a basic level we're adding a new console to our shared in-house engine; Cobra. All of Frontier's games are developed using Cobra, and we've developed and evolved this engine since 1988! It might sound like a straightforward process when we put it like that, but it also comes with some challenges.

When we add a new console to Cobra we're basically telling the engine how the various systems should work on that console. For example, we need to tell Cobra how the new console should load data, render graphics, save progress, and so on. Once that has been completed, the game may need some additional tinkering. A new console will occasionally do things differently compared to other platforms, and handling that well in-engine can be quite complex.

To give you an example: At its core the Nintendo Switch is a handheld device. Because of its portable nature the console itself is less powerful than other platforms. In that case we needed to optimise the game to run within the capabilities of the console. It turned out to be a great opportunity for us to take another look at the game's inner workings and figure out what needed to be optimized and how we could go about it. The game still needed to look, sound and feel like it does on PC and the other consoles. This is our first internal developed Nintendo Switch release, and the team has learned a lot from working on Jurassic World Evolution: Complete Edition.

A Big Game on a Small Console


Jurassic World Evolution: Complete Edition is a big game on a small console. And we're not just talking about the size of the dinosaurs or the parks everyone's building! You get a fully updated game, with two years of updates and improvements, and all DLCs released after launch in 2018. Naturally we want the game to play as well and look as good as all the other versions. That takes more than just coding. Luckily we have a great team working together who are able to make that happen.

A lot of the art and audio content was updated to fit the new limits while still looking and sounding great! A lot of the rendering systems were replaced with different techniques that were faster, but still kept the visual quality of Jurassic World Evolution. The game will still look as crisp as it does elsewhere. The team also had to optimise, and sometimes rewrite, different game systems that help simulate and animate the dinosaurs and the world around them. It takes a lot of work, but we're also very proud of what the team has been able to achieve. From the outset we've aimed for parity between the “base” consoles running Jurassic World Evolution and Nintendo Switch running Jurassic World Evolution: Complete Edition.

The Nintendo Switch is unique in that it has both a handheld and TV console figuration. Our aim has been for there to be virtually no difference between playing in Handheld Mode and Docked Mode. For example, we expected we would need to improve the UI and text for the screen in Handheld mode, but it just worked! The screen on the Switch is excellent and the UI came out really crisp and easy to read.

We hope you've enjoyed this look into how we brought Jurassic World Evolution to the Nintendo Switch. It's been an interesting and educational journey, and we're really proud of what the developers have been able to accomplish.

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more updates about Jurassic World Evolution: Complete Edition, releasing on 3 November 2020.
 
I am really glad that there are talented people out there that are able to port such games to a console that is in regards of power, a bit weaker than its competitors. I bought switch mostly for the activity/party games, otherwise I play on PC, but it will be amazing to be able to play JW:E from my sofa for a change. (y)
 
The Cobra engine really sounds amazing. Reading about it here and in the Planet Coaster Console Edition thread, it feels like it is getting more optimized with each tinkering session from Planet zoo, to Planet coaster console edition, and now JWE Switch.

With RCT3 and JWE coming to the switch, the switch is looking to be quite the portable sim-management machine! 😃

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Out of morbid curiosity, I did try streaming the game onto my PSvita a few years back to get a look at how the game would function in a handheld device. It was fun but it was being streamed, to which the image looked flat and the signal is not consistently strong. I am going to love the game if it could natively run in a handheld. Only 2 months left ✌️
 
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