GamersInfo.net: For those readers that aren't aware of Thrillville, can you give them a run down of what the game is about and what sort of high points they can expect to find in your game?

Shara Miller: Thrillville is quite literally a nonstop party in a series of theme parks that you have a hand in building up to greatness. Of course, building roller coasters and other rides is a big part of the action, but it’s only the beginning. Unlike other theme-park games, Thrillville allows you to actually interact with your park at ground level as though you’re an actual guest yourself. From this perspective, you’re also able to engage in conversations with all of your park guests, who can tell you what they like and don’t like about the park. But the real story is that you can also interact with all of your attractions, whether it’s riding a roller coaster you’ve constructed, playing mini-golf or racing go-karts on courses you designed, or even playing classically inspired arcade games you’ve placed in your park. Your success in Thrillville will ultimately be determined by how much you dive in and take advantage of the theme park smorgasbord you’ve created.

GamersInfo.net: Let's get down to the nitty-gritty of your game right away. Talk to me about how I go about building my amusement part. What sort of toys does the player get to play with and how does the game let them know if they are doing a good job?

Shara Miller: There are quite a few tools, but it all starts and ends with a truly good-feeling coaster building tool. It was designed by Frontier Developments not only to make coaster building easy and intuitive for just about everyone. But it’s also the basis for how people will build race tracks and mini-golf courses from scratch also, so once you learn one tool, you’ve pretty much mastered them all. With instant access to tons of great coaster pieces, as-you-go feedback about your creation’s stats, and information that shows you why you can or can’t build pieces in specific locations, you won’t have to feel like a mechanical engineer to make something cool and interesting. I also love “Track Assist,” which you can use to help you figure out how to link your coaster back up to the end (finishing things can be so tricky).

You can also run marketing campaigns, change ride prices, and – my favorite – change the colors and themes of all your rides. I love making all my coasters retro ‘70’s colors like avocado green and mustard yellow. While you’re going, you can check all your rides to see how much money they’re making. You can also look at the demographics of your park and even see how much money people have left in their pockets when they leave.

But just wandering around the park, you’ll be able to see and hear what your park guests think about the place by listening to their offhand comments, talking to them directly, and watching their animations. So just like in real life, you can learn a lot by people watching.

GamersInfo.net: With Thrillville, you've gone so far as to allow the player to interact with the individual attendees at his park. Can you explain to me just how this system works and what the player can do with it?

Shara Miller: You can walk up to literally anyone in the park and start a conversation. Each person has his or her own tastes and needs. After you’ve engaged with them, you can do anything from ask them about the park to share interesting facts about anything from Star Wars characters to gladiators in an attempt to get them to like you better. And heck, if you see a member of the opposite sex you’d like to get a little closer to, feel free to flirt, either with pick-up lines or the adorable Flirt Mini-game. Whenever you chat with someone a second time, they’ll remember you from before, which is helpful if you’re trying to convince someone to let you matchmake. You can also challenge all your park guests to games in the park. This is really important. Guests have “challenge” needs, and if they don’t get to play games, they become unhappy and leave. Challenging park guests to play games with you not only makes them happier, but it also gains their friendship.

GamersInfo.net: I hear that you've gone slightly over the top with the number of mini-games in Thrillville, from the ones that the player can place to the ones that are part of the development of the park. What are some of your favorite mini-games, how many did you end up putting in the game and what made this a feature you really wanted to focus on?

Shara Miller: From the start, the goal with Thrillville was to go beyond giving players the experience of managing a park, by letting them dive in and enjoy it too. Of course, any good theme park has a cool arcade, some shooting galleries and some race tracks, so the team at Frontier created a bunch of great mini-game anthems to those experiences in real-life parks. There are about 20 games in all, maybe a few more.

Saucer Sumo is probably the staff favorite at LucasArts. As many as four people can play in an arena where you control a little flying saucer whose objective is to knock everyone else out of the ring. Simple and straightforward as the gameplay mechanic is, this is totally a game about psyching out your opponents.

A few others include a quirky Japanese-style 2D platformer called Sparkle Island, a couple of arcade-style shooters (both horizontal and vertical scrolling), some first-person shooters, the mini-golf, the races…and much, much more! Check out www.thrillvillegame.com for a full rundown of the minigames and everything else.

GamersInfo.net: Simulation games are largely open-ended, but you have tightened it up a bit with Thrillville. You've laid out a story for the player and have included over 100 missions for them as they explore your world. What made you decide to go the story and mission route instead of the open-ended route?

Shara Miller: Simply stated, it serves the console audience better – and that’s who this game was designed for from the start. I’m not sure “simulation” is entirely accurate, either. We want you to have fun, and if that means defying the laws of physics to let you do that, then that’s what we’re going to do. The simulation exists to serve gameplay, not as the be-all and end-all of the gameplay experience.

GamersInfo.net: You're releasing both a console and a handheld version of Thrillville. I imagine the two different versions have to be pretty different. Can you tell me what some of those differences are?

Shara Miller: Content-wise, they’re actually quite similar with all of the same attractions and parks (although we’ve moved a lot of things around so that the same games and rides aren’t available in the same parks). It’s the missions themselves that are different. We’ve designed the PSP missions to be shorter and more suitable for on-the-go gaming. I really like the change-up between the two versions. It made me feel like I could get twice as many challenges under my belt.

GamersInfo.net: You're launching on three systems that support either online or wifi gameplay. What sort of features does Thrillville have that takes advantage of this?

Shara Miller: The PSP version also allows for ad-hoc Wi-Fi play for up to four players, and they can also trade their ride designs with one another.

GamersInfo.net: The amusement park simulation game is a subset within a niche within a genre, which is already pretty crowded with other games, some of which you helped put there. What made you decide to do a game of this type and what sets your game apart from its competitors?

Shara Miller: Almost every single other theme-park game out there was designed primarily with PC audiences in mind, an audience which is largely more concerned with the pure simulation and management aspects of running a park. It’s very absorbing, but ultimately it only capitalizes on one tiny part of the theme park fantasy, and in my mind, it’s not even the most viscerally satisfying part of that fantasy. On consoles, pure fun and giving you the feeling of actually being within a theme park are the goals. LucasArts would not be publishing this game if we thought that its content was too “niche” – we expect Thrillville to have a very wide appeal. The possibilities for interesting gameplay are pretty much limitless. After you play for a while, you’ll be saying, “This makes so much sense for a theme park game! How come no one did it sooner?”

GamersInfo.net: You really pushed the music on this game, from paying homage to classic LucasArts video game themes, to commissioning original compositions to licensing music from current stars like The Vines. Could you tell me a little but about what went into the process of deciding music was going to be such a big factor in Thrillville and why you decided on the music you did?

Shara Miller: First of all, we have some very talented musicians here at LucasArts in Jesse Harlin and David Collins –four of the original, diverse songs were written and in most cases performed by them. If you know LucasArts, you know that great sound design is a staple, and guys like Jesse and David are a big reason for this. Frontier also worked with Alistair Lindsay, an incredibly talented musician who was really the workhorse for the project. Most of the music heard in the mini-games was composed and created by Alistair.

As far as the music from past games is concerned – or as we like to refer to it, “legacy music” – it just so happened that tracks from games like Monkey Island, Gladius and Grim Fandango fit perfectly into areas themed around pirates, fantasy and monsters, for example. And this is some great music that old-school LucasArts fans will appreciate for nostalgic reasons just as those whose first LucasArts game is Thrillville will appreciate for its general excellence.

Finally, we wanted some licensed tracks from artists like The Vines, KT Tunstall, Trace Adkins and Morningwood to lend a little “realness” to the lineup of music you’d hear over the loudspeakers at an amusement park. They’re great songs that make you feel good.

GamersInfo.net: What do you feel you really hit out of the park with Thrillville?

Shara Miller: As alluded to earlier, we really think we’ve created a theme-park experience that everyone will enjoy, not just a niche audience concerned with how much salt is on their popcorn. Whether you’re 8 or 80, boy or girl, you’re going to have fun with something in this game.

GamersInfo.net: What is your favorite part of the game?

Shara Miller: I’m totally into putting goofy hats on the guests and then making them flirt with each other. I also enjoy making and riding wooden coasters because they look cool, and they always provide a smooth ride. But my favorite-favorite part of Thrillville is in Ghoul Gunner (the spooky-themed shooting gallery). There’s a little girl who walks across the left side of the gallery. If you clear all the obstacles in her path just perfectly, you get a surprise. I totally never knew about this until the very-very end of the project when Jonny Watts, Frontier’s Senior Producer, showed it to me. I freaked out. I was like, “This is why this game is so awesome. You just never know what little secret you’re going to uncover.”