Two Point Studios Chose A Museum Setting To Put Its Own Stamp On The Genre

Summary

Museum is a new playground for both Two Point Studios and the business management sim genre.
The expedition feature adds excitement and strategy to gameplay, while a wider range of creative tools allow players to fine-tune their buildings more than ever.
Two Point Museum retains the series' quirky British humour and features fun gameplay twists in exhibits for players to enjoy.

If you had told me previously that Two Point Studios was working on a new game, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a museum theme would not have cracked my top five guesses. We’ve had Hospital and Campus, so where does th♍e series go next? Given their previous success and popularity in the genre, a theme park or zoos would have been a safe bet. But Two Point Studios isn’t playing it safe, it’s going for something far more unique.

I spoke with Two Point Studios design director Ben Huskins and executive producer Jo Koehler, and they told me that the team has “a big old list” of ideas that they refer to 🐟and that they considered a few different settings, some of which they ⛄went “into quite a lot of depth” for, before ultimately landing on museum.

8:01

Chatting With Epic Mickey: Rebrushed's Warren Spector and Jason Mallett - D23

Eric gets the chance to speak with Warren and Jason at the D23 Expo, and both highlight the amount of anticipation and love they'r♋e receiving for bri🅷nging back a beloved title.

Posts 168澳洲幸运5开奖网: ꦛ

We haven’t real🍰ly seen a museum sim done before, at least not to the same degree of success as other business sim settings. Huskin tells me this is part of what appealed to the team about the idea, “It felt right. We can put our own unique stamp on this because there isn’t really anything else out there. This is exactly what we want to do. To make something that feels distinctive as a Two Point game.”

Two Point County has always been light-hearted when it comes to its games, and so in true Two Point fashion, the team put their own twist on museums. Instead of having dusty old dry fossils and regular dinosaur💦 bones, players will find things that make sense within the world of Two Point but that you wouldn’t encounter in the real world. Unicorn-horned dinosaur bones, statues of floppy discs, or frozen cavemen. Be prepared for the weird and the wonderful.

The series has always been known for its quirky British humour, so when it comes to the idea of Brits and museums, you can’t help but think of a𒅌ll the artefacts we have sitting in dusty display cabinets that were looted from their native countries by our Empire over the years. Artefacts we should have returned to their rightful place many yea♈rs ago.

“That was something we talked about very early on,” Huskins tells. “We want to make sure that we're framing the acquisition of artefacts in an appropriate way, right? We didn't want it to feel like you're going and pillaging from somewhere else. Every time we design a new set of exhibits, that's something at the back of our minds: what is this thing that you're getting? We don't have any references to real world cultural artefacts, but we do have some things that you could describe as parody or satire that live in the sort of larger-than-life realm of Two Point County.”

“I think there was something very simple about the museum idea,” Koehler says, with Huskins adding two aspects of the game excited the team, “The guest experience side of the game. A nice, understandable game loop of visitors coming through, and you wanting to wow them, impress them, entertain them, as well as educate them, and then make money out of the🥃m as a result of that. But then this sense of how do you build up your museum? How do you get this collection of amazing things to impress your guests? That side of it immediately kicked off lots of ideas about maybe we can have expeditions, and maybe maps.”

Exploration is a key theme in Museum, and the new expeditions help to achieve that with different locations and events for players to explore. Huskins tells me the team wanted people to get excited fin🔯ding map frag💫ments and cryptic clues, wondering what more there is to discover.

However, Two Point Studios ensured the exploration ties back to the museum gameplay so it doesn’t feel like a tangential feature, and that’s why most of the objectives for how to unlock areas are directly linked to your museum progress. “Everything that you're doing on those maps and expeditions always ties back to what's happening in the museum,” says Koehler. “If you send out your team of experts or other staff, the things that happen to them on those expeditions impact your museum. Not just what they find, but also the condition they come back in can have quite a big impact on how your museum runs.”

“That is, if they even come back from an expedition,” Huskins interjects before clarifying that experts don&rsquoꦇ;t die, but can go the way of Amelia Earheart while exploring and simply vanish.

Exhibits that your experts uncover on expeditions are random and players can experience the gacha-like thrill of opening each crate when it arrives back at their museum. Some exhibits are ♓found in parts, so you have to keep venꦓturing out to collect the whole of a dinosaur skeleton as the exhibit won’t garner its optimal buzz until it’s complete. The mechanics of expeditions have been through many iterations during development already, with the team telling me that at first, skeletons were found whole before they realised they could do more with the idea by splitting them into pieces.

“We wanted there to be strategy behind the expeditions,” Huskins tells me. “There are specific locations that you discover further down the line where you think, ‘I'm going to have to put a lot of thought into my team that I'm going to send on this expedition, what cargo do they take with them, what training do they have beforehand’. I know I'm going to find something cool and new at this place, or it's going to be one of the obstructions that I can break through to open up a new area on the map. Then you really do start to prepare for these things and think about what's the impact if this doesn't go the way I want it to go? How is that going to affect the way my museum runs?”

Exploration is one important facet of Museum, but creativity was another that Koehle꧋r tells me they ♏leaned into.

“It's such a big part of museums, isn't it? The space, the lights, how the space feels, and [how to] make it really awe-inspiring and incredible. Over the course of the production for Museum, we really worked hard on the [creativity] tools to make them accessible to use, so that there are no blockers in being able to access the tools.”

In add✱ition to the usual floor and wall stylings, Museum introduces brand-new archways, partition walls, and dynamic lighting. “All of those creative tools help you make a museum that you feel more attached to, and it feels more unique to you,” Huskins says, telling me that the team are excited to see what kind of museums players create at launch and what route they choose, whether the꧟y want to channel their visitors down specific paths using the walls and one-way doors, or whether they want a branching system that gives guests more freedom. “There are so many different approaches you can take to the museum layout.”

Children have been added in Museum, providing a new challenge for players as they have little agents of chaos to keep entertained. If the little tykes aren’t happy, they’ll run amok and make a mess. Koehler tells me that the team wanted to introduce kids to Two Point Campus, but that they “didn't quite feel right”.

Two Point has always paid homage to pop culture,🃏 so you won’t be surprised to see references and easter eggs, such as an Indiana Jones lookalike expert. The team also paid tribute to its own history, making references to their previous games and including some cheeky Cheesy Gubbins.

Huskins tells me that Night at the Museum “immediately sprung to mind” when the team began talking about the idea of exhibits not being static, but instead being items that could come to life or that guests could have interesting interactions with. Real world m🙈useums often don’t allow visitors to touch the exhibits, but in Two Point County,♓ things are very different, and you might even find a frozen caveman that comes to life bashing up a donation stand.

Two Point Studios wanted to ensure that ex🎀hibit themes weren’t purely cosmetic, although they are visually different from each other, with Huskins explaining there are “gameplay twists” to each exhibit. Some might haveꦚ special maintenance requirements and weird effects may occur if you don’t look after them. Certain types of exhibits will attract different archetype characters, such as yetis having a preference for the frozen exhibits.

“When you start mixing together the different types of exhibits you get some really interesting gameplay arising from that,” Huskins teases. “There's a little bit of crossover between some of the exhibits where there's little easter eggs that arise.”

Two Point Studios is set to raise the bar with Museum, pushing the boundaries of what it’s done before while looking to make its mark in the genre even further by using an underutilised setting. Two Point Museum is still in development and has no launch date at present, but you can read about my hands-on time with the game here.