AppQuantum deconstructs Dinosaur Park — Jurassic Tycoon: How the game stands out from the crowd
Introduction
Disclaimer: The article was written and published in August 2022. Some details have changed since this time, but the main points are relevant.
Today, Codigames is one of the most successful companies in the Idle Tycoon mobile games market that regularly experiment with various settings and contents in their games.
This article is dedicated to their project Dinosaur Park — Jurassic Tycoon.
Since the launch of its early version, 0.9.1, the game has been modified many times before version 1.9.5 was finally released worldwide.
The information was collected and analyzed by AppQuantum’s game designers.
Together we will try to understand how the game changed over time and determine why that happened.
A brief introduction to the project
Dinosaur Park — Jurassic Tycoon — is an Idle Tycoon-like simulator game taking place in a dinosaur park where players organize expeditions to find new species, look after creatures in enclosures, carry out research, develop their park, and maintain a flow of visitors.
Gameplay is based on typical mechanics, well-known among Tycoon-simulator players:
- Constructing and upgrading buildings
- Managing resources and finance
However, we can also notice some unusual and even experimental solutions here.
Pillars of Codigames
Speaking about other Codigames projects, some similar mechanics can be traced in all their games. And Dinosaur Park is no exception.
People — the central resource
In such games, players can earn money by producing and selling products. In Codigames’ projects, the process of making money revolves around people. All the earning facilities here can be improved with the help of visitors.
Upgrade ranks
Typically, in such games, there is a steady algorithm to upgrade your facilities: a player presses an upgrade button, pays an amount in the soft currency, and then gets more soft currency per minute. Here the process is gradual — after completing a specific pool of improvements, an earning facilities’ ranks get upgraded. After the progress bar is updated, a player gets a new pool of upgrades. This benefits mainly the visualization rather than the gameplay process by giving a stronger sense of achieving a new level. A similar system can be seen in Law Empire Tycoon and Idle Supermarket Tycoon.
Laboratory of improvements
Some Codigames’ projects have a special menu where players can improve a certain characteristic without upgrading their earning facilities. For this purpose, either soft currency or hard currency is used.
What’s new in the genre?
Some game elements can easily be called experimental. We will observe those that we consider the most interesting.
Money Vault
Law Empire Tycoon — another project by Codigames, also contains this mechanic — the maximum amount of money a player can earn in the game. After reaching this limit, a player has two options: either to spend money ASAP or to upgrade Money Vault — a special building for increasing the maximum amount of earned soft currency.
An established money limit is a rare case in Tycoon-simulators. Mainly it is done indirectly.
Apparently, by doing that, the developers make players return to the game more often, so they don’t lose their profit.
Upgrading Ad placements
Several improvements in the laboratory section increase bonuses for viewing ads, e.g., a soft currency placement and a visitor placement will give you more soft currency and increase the number of visitors, respectively.
That seems like a clever move. Players are already used to clicking on the “watch ad” button, and there is no need for extra explanation. While adding additional bonuses for watching may attract more attention to placements. Advertising becomes a link in the chain and a part of the game mechanics.
Buildings completion and ranks research
We’ve already described Codigames’ ranking system for upgrading buildings. The developers decided to make this process slightly more complicated this time: after completing a specific pool of improvements, “completion” of an earning facility becomes available. It costs a certain amount of in-game money and takes some time, providing a place for an additional monetization point through advertising placement to accelerate the process.
Also, to get certain ranks for a building, you need to conduct research in the Laboratory menu. Naturally, it also takes time and costs money.
Objectives
Besides quests typical for the genre, the game now has Objectives. These special quests require a player to complete several regular quests. For beating this Objective, players get an exclusive dinosaur, significantly increasing their profit.
What was changed?
The game had been significantly changed before it finally went global.
Major changes have been made to facilitate the gameplay. The old gameplay might have seemed too confusing and complicated for the casual players who constitute most Tycoon simulators' audience.
There is a strong possibility that the developers faced the problem of the game having poor metrics during the acquisition of traffic. For this reason, some aspects of the game were modified, and some were completely cut out.
Expeditions
The expeditions mechanic used to be more complex: the player had to unlock areas with new dinosaurs and assign a team to participate in the expedition. New areas were supposed to get unlocked with a special currency that could only be earned by catching dinosaurs of a certain size.
Now, after opening the expedition section, players simply choose how many dinosaurs they need to find. The more dinosaurs a player wants to catch, the longer an expedition lasts. The size of a caught dinosaur now only increases the earnings of soft currency.
Laboratory research
The developers redistributed trees of changes — many points were moved to other sections. They also removed the upgrades trees, which influenced the mechanics that had been cut from the game earlier. Such a fate befell the improvement of expedition members, for example.
Enclosures and dinosaur management
In earlier versions, dinosaurs used to be characters rather than just a decoration obtained to get profit. The player had to monitor their condition carefully, feeding them on time and in the right amount. Otherwise, dinosaurs would die.
And even if a player were doing everything correctly, eventually, a dinosaur would get older and die, and his bones would go on display in the Museum, making more profit for the park.
Now there are neither death nor museums.
A player simply needs to upgrade the feeder for dinosaurs so that the toothy friends won’t run out of food. And even if they do, we doubt that it will affect the game in any way.
In addition, dinosaurs that you no longer need can be left in storage or let go (be sold)
What we got in the end
Today the developers have decided on a more convenient variant of their Tycoon simulator. The gaming process is now more or less similar to the ones we see in other projects: players turn to casual games to experience some positive emotions. Such games don’t take anything from a player. On the contrary, in Tycoon-simulators, numbers are constantly growing, bonuses are continually increasing, and the game continuously compliments the player.
This makes the removal of some mechanics seem perfectly reasonable.
Imagine a player spending time capturing, feeding, and looking after a dinosaur to see it eventually die. No one would ever want to see the creature you’d been taking care of die, even if that’s just a pixel dinosaur in a pixel theme park.
In other words, this mechanic might have negatively affected the emotional state of a player.
Not to mention that this system was obviously overloading the cycle:
Conclusion
We had an impression that the developers had no intention of releasing the original idea.
If you look closely at all the changes, it seems that Dinosaur Park was supposed to be a testing ground for many mechanics and solutions, to delete those that turned out to be less convenient.
Therefore, keeping an eye on this game will be especially interesting — there are probably more experiments ahead. Although playing this game may be pretty pleasant even now.
It’s hard to say whether the game will become a hit like Prison Empire Tycoon. However, based on the first month’s numbers, the project seems quite promising.
AppQuantum will continue telling you about new promising mobile projects, so stay tuned!
