Having just finished reading Steve Brusatte’s ground-breaking ‘Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs’ and then immediately balancing out this intellectual achievement by watching Chris Pratt wisecracking as he’s chased by an assortment of Dinosaurs in the latest Jurassic World, it’s safe to say that I’ve gone a little Cretaceous crazy. Dinosaurs are everywhere at the moment, both in the mainstream media and also, quite literally, all around us.
After all, birds are dinosaurs. Follow their family tree far back enough and you’ll find velociraptors and even the mighty T-Rex. These direct evolutionary links between birds and dinosaurs have been made possible thanks to the myriad of new species of dinosaur discovered in China, with a new dino being dug up every single week of the year. This has allowed palaeontologists to witness the gradual transformation of towering theropods into tiny tree tweeters.
It was my new found interest in Dinosaurs that led me to have a chat with the team of Reptoid Games about their casual action-adventure game, ‘Fossil Hunters’. I’d covered the game in a previous PWH and it’s concept really interested me. I wanted to explore how Reptoid Games had used the science of palaeontology and the discipline of real life dinosaur hunters to inform the design decisions behind their game. This led to a fascinating conversation with lead programmer Ryan Miller and producer Jayme Last, in which we discuss blasting fossils with dynamite, six legged dinos and why Ryan wants to be a Zuul crurivastator.
TSA: What initially drew you to create a game themed around palaeontologists and fossils?
Ryan Miller: When we first started Reptoid, Simon came up with a game called ‘Mine-o-taur’. It was a simple four player deathmatch game inspired by games like Towerfall and Samurai Gunn. You played as a minotaur trying to get the most kills. We kept iterating on it, adding and cutting few features with each pass, until we thought to hide fossils in the diggable dirt blocks. Finding and collecting those felt really fun, but the rest of the game wasn’t really appealing, so we focused in on the fossils and ditched almost everything else. That’s when we knew we had something special.
TSA: Were there any particular elements of palaeontology that you incorporated into the game design and, inversely, which aspects of palaeontology simply weren’t suitable?
Jayme Last: Of course, real palaeontology is slow and painstaking, and much less exciting than it is in Fossil Hunters. What we wanted to capture is a modern aesthetic combined with the gold rush excitement of the early fossil hunters, when the dinosaurs themselves weren’t as well understood or researched. Sometimes people believed dinosaur bones once belonged to dragons or other fantastical creatures, or constructed skeletons based on fossils that later turned out to be incorrect.
With the gameplay of Fossil Hunters, we really wanted to focus on that spirit of adventure and discovery, where you’re not quite sure what you’ve found, but it’s exciting and new and it’s up to you to figure out what it’s going to turn into. So the game is less a palaeontology simulator than it is chasing after the feeling you had as a kid wanting to hunt for dinosaur bones – a feeling of adventure, discovery, and experimentation with your fossils to create something no one’s ever seen before.
The fossil sweeping mechanic, which cleans the fossils and makes them more valuable to sell, is inspired by the detailed, meticulous cleaning that makes up a huge bulk of palaeontology work. The opening of that scene in Jurassic Park when the palaeontologists are brushing the bones in the desert with the tiny brushes is a classic, and I think one of the things that made palaeontology seem so neat to so many kids of our era. We wanted to recreate that feeling of not just discovering fossils, but also cleaning them off to really showcase them.
TSA: Were there any famous dinosaur hunters that informed the design of your four playable characters?
Jayme: We were definitely aiming for a classic “adventuring scientist” look, inspired more by characters like Indiana Jones or Lara Croft than real scientists. The first character we finalized, Lila, sports a ripped and well-loved lab coat, suggesting an iconic scientist look combined with practical adventuring garb.
Professor Buff and Herb’s snappy suits bring to mind the typical depiction of fossil hunters of the Victorian era. The professor in a suit look combined with the rough-and-tumble of adventuring makes for a fun contrast that helps show the game doesn’t take itself too seriously and isn’t meant to depict accurate or scientific palaeontology.
One of the fun facts we learned during development is that fossil hunting was often done with dynamite, and the fossil hunter credited with discovery of the T. Rex, Barnum Brown, was famous for blasting for fossils with dynamite. Even though we didn’t have his physicality in mind when designing the characters, dynamite-happy fossil hunters were very much the inspiration for the fire-haired, bomb-loving Karin.
TSA: At any point during development, did you consider for the player to only be able to find fossils based on real dinosaurs?
Jayme: We did early on, when we were first designing the fossil pieces and trying to decide between going for scientific accuracy or a more free-form type of play. We knew that people who are into dinosaurs, especially kids, tend to be really into dinosaurs. So we knew if we went that direction we’d have to be incredibly accurate in order to satisfy that audience. Ultimately, we decided that making the bones evoke iconic dinosaurs like the T-Rex rather than perfectly recreating them, would work better, with the idea of being free to create whatever creatures you want with the fossils.
We also wanted to make sure the fossil pieces were abstract and iconic enough to be useful for many different skeletons, clear enough to send a message about what type of piece it is, like a skull, foot, wing, or spine. Because you never have to make anything perfectly scientifically accurate, it gives space for the creative part of the game, where you’re encouraged to build whatever you want with the pieces you find, including creatures with two heads, two tails, or even six legs!
TSA: And finally, if you had to be a Dinosaur, which dino would you be and why?
Jayme: Plesiosaur for sure. I’m all about that ocean life.
Ryan: I’d be Zuul crurivastator because it’d be cool to walk around in full dino-armor with a mace for a tail.
TSA: Good choices there. For those of you who aren’t hard-core Zuul crurivastator fans, its name actually means ‘destroyer of shins’, an eminently suitable pseudonym considering its sledgehammer shaped tail. I’d chose to be a Nothronychus. Because any dinosaur that looks like the love child of Big Bird and Harry from Harry and the Hendersons has got to be pretty cool, right?
Thanks very much to Jayme and Ryan for chatting to us. Fossil Hunters is available right now on PC and is available as of yesterday, 28th June, on Nintendo Switch. It will be released this summer on PS4 and Xbox One.
