pipelines that get things on to the screen as quickly as possible. We actually made a conscious choice to keep everything simple, which has served us incredibly well throughout the years. In the end, our tool chain couldn’t be much simpler. Photoshop for art, Visual Studio for development, SVN for version control, Cubase for music, and an ancient licence of Sound Forge for audio editing.That really is pretty much it, which echoes my sentiment from earlier of “keep it simple”.


constant forward momentum that Forager gives you, along with freedom to progress in whatever way you felt you wanted to go, was something I wanted to recapture in Let’s Build a Zoo.


WHO WERE THE ARTISTS WORKING ON THE GAME?


All of the art in the game was created by just two people, Yvonne Goh and Cindy Lee. Cindy has been working with me since we first started the company. She actually does design and art, and is an all round super genius. The wonderful thing about working with someone for that long is that we know how to communicate and work together with an insane level of efficiency. Yvonne has been with the company for around four years. Among other things, she drew all the characters you see walking around the zoo! She was also responsible for putting the art into the game, which meant regularly editing code and testing things here and there in the game.


WHAT WERE THE ART TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES USED? We use XNA to build our games, and always have. (I still have a copy of Visual Studio 2010 running on my PC since Microsoft phased out support years ago!). I wrote a kind of engine on top of XNA that is used and shared across all of our projects. The standardisation of the way we do things allows us to iterate on ideas very quickly without thinking too much about architecture. I have always just focused on building


WERE THERE ANY UNEXPECTED DIFFICULTIES? The game was far from smooth sailing As a company we were pretty close to bankruptcy when we first started development. This meant we had to hack the game code on top of an existing game, just to save time and try and find a publisher as fast as possible! While mostly it was fine, there are a couple of systems that really cost us time further down the road. The size of the UI proved to be a really difficult thing to deal with, we decided early on that we wanted every pixel of the UI to be perfectly snapped to the resolution of whatever screen it was being played on. The issue is that 720P to 1080P is like a 30 per cent increase in scale, meaning that the UI would get really big, or really small. As a result we ended up spending a really long time on layouts for different resolutions, and actually load different fonts depending on your selected resolution.


DNA SPLICING MUST’VE BEEN A HEADACHE. WAS IT?


What was a flippant joke. “Why don’t we have cross breeding” led to me saying, “great Idea, I will code it now!” Within a couple of hours the system was mostly working, however my procedural “guess where the head goes” wasn’t really the best solution. The perfectionist nature of Cindy and Yvonne resulted in them wanting to hand place every single head on every single body! I kept wanting to jump in and make their lives easier, but they were intent on leaving me to work on the game while they soldiered on. Almost 500,000 combinations and one month later, everything looked fantastic. Now we have an archetype system, so everything should be a lot easier moving forward! Obviously I should have done that in the first place… but sometimes we just end up in less than ideal situations!


February 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 63


Below: “This is the first mock up and concept art of Let’s Build A Zoo. It looks close enough to the released game, although we were experimenting with the visuals of what we can do with enclosures a little more here.”


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