My role and biggest challenges
I joined the project at the very early stages, when it was still in a part of pre-production and I was hired as both someone who is strong on balance/system design, but especially for my strong knowledge of the Tycoon and Management genres.

As such, I was put in charge of creating the Gameplay Pillars and the Aspect Visions for major aspects of the game, including the Management Aspect, Challenges and others. Most notably I worked out the target audience and Personas in collaboration with Bandai Namco’s target group research data and I lead several feature teams to prototype key aspects.

The biggest challenge on this project was the project’s main goal of “Freedom”, meaning instead of traditional Theme Park games, players were not supposed to have heavily restricted Coaster building based on Coaster type, but instead the player was supposed to build whatever they want. This caused quite a bit of an issue as that means that all challenge was removed from building them. I worked out a system in which it worked the other way around: Instead of the Coaster restricting the player with negative reinforcement by either not allowing something or it not functioning, instead the player was to be rewarded with positive reinforcement in the form of modifiers/tags that boost the attractiveness to certain audiences if the player build a certain way. These bonuses where also supposed to have some mutual exclusivity, meaning you had a reason to build various Coasters.

Additionally, due to the popularity of community elements in Planet Coaster, I was put in charge of designing the social features of the game, including coming up with a good alternative to regular multiplayer (which was out of scope). I ended up suggestion an innovative system that utilized sharing save games with a live stream in restricted areas.

Due to my deep knowledge in different areas, I created multiple training workshops for the rest of the design, UI and tech team in:

– improved data management and workflows
– training workshops: UI/UX Design based on Donald Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things”, Data management/System Design
– Leading multiple feature teams for prototyping major aspects of the game
– creating the aspect visions and target group personas based on target group research data

Biggest Accomplishments
– Strengthened the Vision for the entire team
– Able to design major innovations for the genre in Attraction building, Social Features and System Design
– Overhauled the Data-Workflows of the production teams to be far more efficient