Behind the Scenes: On the Big Screen

Hayo Park Managers!

Hop on the tour, and keep your arms and legs inside the bus as we take a quick ride over to our Development Backlot! Today we're taking a peek behind the curtain at how our talented team designed and built the glamorous Silver Screen Pack for Planet Coaster 2.

Planet Coaster 2 Silver Screen Water Tower

From Storyboard to Screen Ready

Our story starts, like most do, at the beginning! When we were first considering what we'd like to next bring to Planet Coaster 2, we knew we really wanted to create something centred around the movies. The movies are a core part of lots of theme parks across the world, and we know just how popular the Studio Pack was in the original Planet Coaster (we've seen your comments on Reddit!).

For each DLC, we start the process with concept art, narrowing down the overall direction of a theme, before we gather lots of reference imagery together on big boards. We'll then sort all these images into proposals for ideas, and at this stage of the process we'll also create an overview sketch. This brings together all the broader ideas and condenses them into a single image to give us a better look at the theme as a whole, including full environment paintings that show buildings and sometimes the initial ideas for entertainers and rides.

Planet Coaster 2 Silver Screen BTS Scenery

When looking at the Silver Screen Pack, the general imagery and ideas we had were focused on the Golden Age of Cinema. This particular era actually inspired a great number of real life theme parks, with many of the themes and ideas still a core part of these parks to this day! We looked at a whole range of buildings and iconic locations from across the 1910s to the 1950s to bring together classic designs from across several iconic eras.

When considering the building pieces and accompanying scenery items we drew a lot of inspiration from Art Deco architecture. We wanted to give players something more vintage, as a counter balance to the 80s to 00s theming of the Studio Pack. Part of this process was also picking out the details that make a theme really recognisable to players, like the curved trims and the geometric patterning that are key to Art Deco's architectural style, while also maintaining our Planet Coaster look!

Once the Game and Art Directors are happy with the overall ideas for the pack, we start by breaking down the overview imagery into a big list of assets that we will need to create the pack, beginning with the standard kit included with each DLC, like bins, benches, lamp, walls and roofs. We then work down the list one at a time and pass along approved concepts to each discipline of the development team. These ideas can then be used to make our detailed 3D models, textures and materials, becoming final scenery pieces that players see in game.

Once all the lovely new building pieces have been finalised, next we work on creating some of the fully designed placeable blueprints that players can use in Planet Coaster 2. Just as it's important to create a versatile selection of scenery pieces, we also create a selection of blueprints that can be used with different themes. Our aim is to make each theme really accessible for all levels of builders in Planet Coaster 2, whether you want to quickly build a movie magic inspired land or you want to get stuck in with the nitty gritty of building areas from the ground up!

As the Silver Screen Pack is so architectural, creating the scenery pieces could be a little bit of a challenge for us at times. We used a really wide range of surface materials and textures, and had to create some very unusually shaped scenery that we'd never done before. However, some of our favourite building items came from creating the Silver Screen Pack, such as the decorative film set pieces that match perfectly with our brand-new Entertainer Cornell Butterworth!

Creating a Blockbuster

The biggest thing we consider when selecting rides for a pack is our players' expectations and requests. A lot of the rides in the Silver Screen Pack are ones that rely pretty heavily on theming and player involvement to craft memorable guest experiences, so we want to ensure we give players what they have been asking for with plenty of amazing scenery and audio/visual assets to go alongside them.

We chose rides for this pack that are well-known family-friendly classics seen in theme parks all over the world, like Ground Control. The other new rides are the New-Gen Flying Coaster, Slot Car, the Cinema Room and Fourth Wall, all of which have been long-requested by our enthusiastic community. There are some really unique elements to the coasters, ride and experiences in the Silver Screen Pack that we worked hard to develop, like the intricate boarding system of the New-Gen and the complex tilting platforms of Fourth Wall. We're sure they will become instant favourites in your parks!

The Cinema Room was another must have for this DLC. This is an indoor 'ride' that PC players can upload their own videos and audio to, creating amazing guest experiences they won't forget soon. It not only fit with the theme but also allows our players to have a new type of high capacity guest activity in their park that doesn't take too much space. Perfect for guests looking for a calmer day out at your park!

There is more than just the 5 brand-new rides in the Silver Screen Pack. We've also brought back two of the most popular rides from the returning Studio Pack; Remotion and the Big Screen Tour.

When bringing returning rides to Planet Coaster 2, we follow a similar audio and visual process to new rides but we have a little head start! The first step we take is always to gather references from across a variety of places, such as real life theme parks, to make sure the movements of our rides are authentic to any real life inspiration when they come to Planet Coaster 2. We also take a look at our own player feedback, since we know so many of these returning rides are beloved by the community, and our aim is to always deliver the same level of quality for all our rides. Just like with our other ride in Planet Coaster 2, all the rides in Silver Screen, including the returning ones benefit from the 'Attach Scenery' feature so you can customise each train with scenery pieces.

We knew we had to bring the Big Screen Tour back (what is a movie-themed park without a backstage tour?)! These kinds of tours were the early basis for a lot of huge international theme parks so we can't wait to see how you add them to your parks. Whether you theme it around your very own PlanCo films or you give your guests a look at the inner workings of your coaster park, we'll be keeping an eye on the Workshop for all your ideas!

A Corny Character

One of the key visual components of any DLC is the fun Entertainer we bring with each new theme. For Silver Screen, we're introducing Cornell Butterworth, our popcorn-headed director!

We love him just as he is, but he went through many iterations before we got to his final style, including potential designs where his head was a clapper board or a camera. We went through all kinds of outfits, glasses and hair options, and even a concept where he drove around on a motorised directors chair, before we landed on the beloved corny design that has made it into the Silver Screen Pack.

Once we've gone through concepting for an Entertainer and finalised the look, we need to translate their personality to their movements! We all love getting involved in bringing our packs to life, so our fantastic Audio Lead was asked by our Animation Team to do the motion capture for Cornell. We had him dress up in a mocap suit, covered him in sensors and got him to don a giant cardboard box to mimic the restrictions of a person in an Entertainer costume (we didn't have any human sized popcorn buckets to hand).

And of course, we can't forget an Entertainer's voice! How else will they interact with your guests?

We decided we wanted to pick something fairly distinct for Cornell, to help him stand out from some of our other American accented Entertainers. Inspired by the iconic film directors and actors from New York, we wanted to make sure Cornell Butterworth had a recognisable accent! Our vocal recording sessions are always a lot of fun but Cornell's Voice Actor really embodied his personality so well that we were laughing through the whole session. We can't wait for players to see how fun and unique Cornell is, as he ambles around your parks.

Quiet on Set!

To create themed areas in your parks you need more than just amazing visuals and fantastic rides (if we do say so ourselves)! To build the ultimate experience for your guests you also need to think about the sounds of your theme parks too. For the Silver Screen Pack our Audio Team composed a star-studded line-up of 9 cinema-inspired music tracks, 30 movie-themed ambient sounds and over 80 epic sound effects.

To start the process of creating new music tracks for Planet Coaster 2, we first collect together inspiration in the form of playlists. This means focusing in on the same era of inspiration as our visual theming to ensure we're in the right frame of mind before we get to designing and composing the tracks themselves. For music and audio inspirations in the Silver Screen Pack, we stuck quite firmly to the period of the late 1940s to the 1960s. This allowed us to give Silver Screen a unique musical identity, separate to the Studio Pack, which references more 1980s - 2010s film & TV music. Beginning with music from well known films of the time period, we then researched what inspired those tracks and established where the different elements have come from. From there we'll form a long-list of potential music track ideas and share them amongst the team to see what resonates with everyone. As part of this process we'll also pitch use cases for each track, such as a piece that could be used as the entrance to a Silver Screen themed area of a park, or alongside the Slot Car ride.

We also take a look back over the player reception to music from our previous DLCs! We'll see what are the most used tracks by players, which ones have been most liked, and if there are any gaps that could be filled with new music. This informs our decision about which tracks we'll move forward with. The fantastic reception we got to the music in the Parades Pack really helped shape the vision for Silver Screen and beyond!

Once we've narrowed the tracks down to our top choices, they get a placeholder name, something that describes the essence of the music in just a few words. Examples from this pack are Golden Age Orchestral which became 'Silver Screen Premiere' or Hollywood Bustle Jazz, eventually becoming 'City Street Bustle'. Next, we invited one of our fantastic external composers to take on the track (They always say yes!). We are lucky to work with a incredibly talented group of individual composers that bring our ideas to life, allowing us to give feedback and work together until the track is finalised. Once it's finalised, the tracks get a real in-game name and it can go into Planet Coaster 2 via our audio middleware Wwise.

Working with our incredible composer Ross Fortune, we went back and forth on a few early musical sketches and collaborated through several very different versions of 'City Street Bustle'. There were slower versions, jazzier variations, and even a mean sounding boss battle track! It was a wild ride before Ross sent over an early version of what players can hear in the final musical piece. 'City Street Bustle' was probably the most ambitious of the tracks for Silver Screen because it is our first music track to feature 4 live musicians! Having not tackled jazz like this before, the final result for this piece of music is thrilling, delivering a track suitable for any coaster, ride or area.

We also completed some uplift work on the Studio Pack music in Planet Coaster 2 to make them more dynamic on rides and coasters. Previously, all of the Studios Pack music from the original Planet Coaster existed as full tracks with no sections or loop points. For Planet Coaster 2, all music that can be selected on speakers, coasters and rides is split into sections, most often Intro, Loop and Outro. This allows music to end more naturally during rides.

For flat rides, when the final ride sequence begins, we trigger the Outro so the music transitions smoothly and finishes in time with the ride. On coasters, we do something similar, triggering the Outro when the first car enters the station so the music can draw to a natural close as the ride comes to a stop. The Studios Pack music wasn't set up this way, so we carefully sliced the tracks into seamless Intro, Loop and Outro sections that work with the new ride music system.

The process differs slightly for the sounds we created for the rest of the Silver Screen Pack. For triggered Sound Effects and ambient sounds, we started by looking at the concept art and noted down any clear themes or pieces that inspire audio, for example, red carpet equals movie premiere ambience! We also, once again, take a look at our players' expectations and see what they have been building to try and understand what direction they're likely to take their creations in with this new pack. We always want to create audio for speakers that can support players' creations as best as possible.

From here we compile a list of triggered SFX and ambient sounds, checking there is no overlap with existing sounds and then we can get to creating! We use Reaper, a digital audio workstation, to create our sounds and utilise a large collection of sound libraries. However, we very often record our own audio too, using all kinds of foley work. We will then use custom Reaper scripts to export our audio straight into Wwise, our middleware (sound engine). All of the game's audio runs through Wwise while the player has Planet Coaster 2 open, which allows us to control playback, mixing, and interactive audio behaviours in real time.

Planet Coaster 2: Silver Screen Pack is Coming on 19th August

Well, there you have it folks! What a production! We love developing brand new themes and rides for our players to enjoy and we put a lot of time and effort into making those initial ideas become a reality.

This has been one of our favourite packs to create so we can't wait to see how you use the fantastic new scenery pieces and wonderful new audio tracks when it launches on the 19th August!

While you wait for the show to begin, keep up to date on the latest about Planet Coaster 2 by following our social channels, subscribe to our mailing list or take peek around the website.