14 DAY TRIAL // Jurassic Park was one of the biggest movie franchises of the '90's and the team at TellTale working on the video game version has learned from how Spielberg filled the first movie in the series filled with suspense and dread.
J.D. Straw, who is the leading game designer working on Jurassic Park: The Game, has told JPLegacy that, “Our game draws exclusively from the films. The original Jurassic Park film is referred to as ‘a Stephen Spielberg film.’ So we considered Spielberg’s cinematic style essential to the brand. There are many moments where we would talk about how a scene would play out, and little details pop up where we’d say, ‘a Spielberg film would do this.”
It seems that one of the main lessons that the developers learned when watching the movies is that each of the different dinosaur species should have a clear personality, with some human touches.
Straw added, “Velociraptors come across as sinister bullies. T-Rex is an opportunist. Dilos are playful and disarming. We kept asking ourselves, what do the dinosaurs want when they are on screen. Usually it is as simple as ‘to eat something.’ But Jurassic Park dinosaurs are full of personality.”
In terms of gameplay the biggest challenge for the developers at TellTale was to make sure that players got a lot of time to contemplate the dinosaurs in the game before actually having to leap into action in order to get away from them or fight them.
The team also needed to make sure that the exploratory nature of the game could be successfully linked to the plot, meaning that players should always get the whole story even if they fail to do all the side quests available.
Jurassic Park: The Game is set to be launched on the PC, the Mac, the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Xbox 360 from Microsoft on November 15.
A version for the Apple made iPad is also being developed.