Shawn Stone, Blue Fang Game Designer, answers a few questions about the Habitat Editor feature in Zoo Tycoon 2.
What are you responsible for?
Stone: Animal and zoo research, animal AI implementation, online features design, and Zoopedia design.
How does the Habitat Editor work?
Stone: One fundamental improvement in Zoo Tycoon 2 is that exhibits no longer require a fence to enclose an animal. The game is smarter about what encloses animals. If an animal can't swim, like a ring-tailed lemur, I can plop him on an island and he'll be considered enclosed. If I have an animal that can't get up steep slopes, like a giraffe, I can create a sort of bowl exhibit and he will be contained. I can also create a moat (either dry or wet) around an exhibit to enclose the animals within. This improvement allows for more creativity and flexibility when building exhibits.
There are several intuitive terrain manipulation tools at your disposal for creating exhibits. You can adjust the size of your brush to increase or decrease the area of terrain you manipulate. There are hill and valley tools that allow you to create a raised or lowered area. The longer you hold your mouse button down, the greater the change in terrain will be. The cliff and ditch tools allow you to quickly create either steep cliffs or ditches of consistent heights. This is one easy way to easily create a moat for an exhibit. The flatten terrain tool will normalize the height of the terrain under the brush to match the height of the terrain at the center of the brush. The smooth tool allows you to smooth out any steep slopes on the terrain. This will allow you to create ramps or to create a plateau that has one or more smooth sides.
You can still, of course, place trees, rocks, plants, bushes, wildflowers, grass, etc. all over your exhibit. In some cases, some objects can overlap. For instance, you can place some grass and then place a tree on that grass. Rocks are no longer just for decoration, as some animals will climb onto the rocks to rest.
What was the inspiration behind the Habitat Editor?
Stone: In the first Zoo Tycoon, building an exhibit was a fairly rote process. If you wanted your animals to be happy, you had to follow a recipe-like formula for each particular animal. As a result, my mountain lion exhibit may look fairly similar to your mountain lion exhibit. This is one of the features that we thought we could really improve on in Zoo Tycoon 2. Zoo Tycoon offered players a lot of freedom in personalizing their zoo, but habitat building did not provide as much freedom for players as we would have liked. Zoo Tycoon 2 provides a whole new level of freedom in exhibit building.
During development, what was the most creative use of the Habitat Editor?
Stone: One exhibit that I created was a very large savannah exhibit. It contained five lions, eight flamingos, 10 zebras and an elephant all within the confines of one “exhibit.” Normally, this type of exhibit would be a disaster, but I was able to use water to keep the peace between the various animals. Everyone used the same watering hole, but because the lions could not swim, I was able the keep animals safe that would otherwise be lunch by creating subtle water barriers between predator and prey.
How does the Habitat Editor affect gameplay?
Stone: The way exhibit creation has been implemented in Zoo Tycoon 2 will allow people a greater level of creativity. There will be more personality in each exhibit. You'll be able to download someone else's zoo file from e-mail or the Internet, walk around their zoo and get new ideas for creating exhibits in different ways. We want people to look at someone else's zoo and say "Hey! I never thought of doing that!" We could very well see more fan competitions run for creative exhibit construction. In the end, this will add much more creative depth to the game.