How the Fictional Language of Planco Speaks Life Into Planet Coaster 2's Parks
Frontier's dialogue manager, James Stant, and principal lead audio designer, Benjamin Scholey, discussed how Frontier used the Planco language to enhance the atmosphere, adverts, and music of Planet Coaster 2.
Posted 8 days ago
After rattling around roller coasters for several hours straight, you’d be forgiven for speaking gibberish. Presumably while tottering gingerly toward the nearest bathroom. But the thrill-seeking inhabitants of Planet Coaster 2 are built of sturdier stuff. The noises they trill ahead of leaping into a flume or stopping for a bite at Chief Beef might sound like nonsense, but there’s genuine meaning there. That’s because Planet Coaster 2 (along with the original and Planet Zoo) is one of a handful of video games to create a fictional language. Say hello, or indeed hayo, to Planco.
For simulation and management games, the language spoken by the tiny folk plodding around under our godly gaze is rarely given much concern. Even The Sims’ iconic Simlish features only a handful of consistent words. But Planco is comprehensive enough to have its own official dictionary.
To understand why, Restart reached out to the Planco professionals: Planet Coaster developer Frontier’s dialogue manager, James Stant, and principal lead audio designer, Benjamin Scholey. They divulged why the team went to such linguistic lengths, and explained how the made-up language worked its way into Planet Coaster 2’s signs, adverts, and even soundtrack.
Water rides are the main new attraction in Planet Coaster 2, and they brought plenty of new Planco words with them.
©Frontier
Worldbuilding through words
Dedicated fictional languages are typically the purview of fantasy; ancient scripts or otherworldly tongues to be spoken only by elves, aliens, or long-lost empires. A game about designing water slides and scream-worthy coasters hardly seems as obvious a fit. But much like Planet Coaster 2’s players and their parks, Frontier views its series from a wider perspective.
“A lot of people see a management sim and don't really think storytelling, which is something we really strive to do with the Planet series,” Scholey says. “Anything we can do to really embellish, and create immersion, and do those little storytelling bits is always worth it.”
Concept art for pool signs showing showing Planco instructions. No Tiidliller!
©Frontier
“A game like this, it's got so much freedom that players can take the camera as close as they want,” says Stant. “We wanted that granularity, so that when you get that close, there's conversation, there are emotive expressions in each of the crowd members, because we're talking about hundreds, thousands of crowd members that need to be given a voice. And what [Planco in] Planet Coaster allowed us to do was give a universal identity, so that every player, regardless of what language they speak, what language they're playing in, got the same experience that we've crafted as a cohesive soundscape.”
Far from an afterthought, the idea of creating a novel park sim language was sparked in the earliest days of design for the original Planet Coaster. It was a means by which to devote consideration to a vital yet easily overlooked element of the genre.
“There's such a focus on the rides and the roller coasters in a theme park management game,” Stant says. “But the crowd is a big part of that too. The way that they're fluidly moving around the park, playing such a big role in whether you succeed as a park manager. We thought, right, this is a fundamental aspect of what we're trying to build – the identity we're trying to emulate. It was a natural thing that we thought we need to do this well and give it the detail and attention that it deserves.”
Creating a language has other benefits, too. Looping, repetitive voice lines are an irritation familiar to players of all genres. But with dialogue shifted to a lively but unrecognizable lingo? Your brain will need a lot longer to build up that frequency fatigue. Essential when tweaking a park for hours at a time.
Parsing Planco
To forestall any linguistic and dialect experts from firing off terse (but expertly worded) emails, it’s worth stating that Planco isn’t truly functional. Like many fantasy video game languages, it uses the structure of English as a foundation, swapping out words with new creations and expanding from there.
But to dismiss Planco on those grounds does a disservice to the effort Frontier has dedicated to it. And more crucially, skips over the entertaining and ingenious origins behind each entry in its lexicon. Without a background in linguistics, Stant took a far sillier approach, relying on onomatopoeia and comedic concepts to generate each word in Planco.
Viking (or duhreng in Planco) attractions offer plenty for park visitors to chat about.
©Frontier
“There are three main approaches to creating words [in Planco]: word association, onomatopoeia, and similarity to an existing language, with fun driving all of those,” Stant explains. “For word association, a word like credit, my word is ‘lukma’, which is basically: ‘Look, ma, I’m in the credits!’ Something like wood is ‘donc’, because I thought like, ‘donc!’ [Stant bonks himself on the head] – that's a nice hollow sound. I've got that sound designer ear that [means] everything's what I'm hearing as well.
“Then with similarity to an existing word, something like ‘toitelle.’ You see that on a sign in a theme park, you can probably guess that might be the way to the toilets. So it's a combination of those three helping generate these thousands of words.”
“Consciously or subconsciously you start to understand this as a language,” Scholey says. “For the really keen players, they can go away and hear these words in the previous Planet Coaster, and then come to Planet Coaster 2. And listen to them throughout the series, and start to understand that these are actually words which are reused and they do have consistency, which is really cool.”
Planet Zoo: Console Edition (Physical)
Release Date: September 24, 2024
Choose your favorite
The Planco vocabulary is in a perpetual state of expansion. New additions to the game mean more terms in need of translation. But pushed to pick their current favorites, Stant and Scholey both opt for choices with amusing auditory connections.
“I've written it down, because it's the hardest thing for me to say, which is why I like it so much,” Scholey says. “But it's – [Scholey pauses, then stumbles over the word] – hunpomodibu, which is which is hippo! I just love it because, for me, it's the sound of it as it moves. You know you can have a kid who's in the park pointing and saying that, and instantly it gives you the idea of what the animal represents to a lot of people. The wobbliness, the circular form to it. I really love it.”
“We've got a new mascot in Planet Coaster 2 called Saguaro Guitaro,” says Stant. “He's a big cactus playing a guitar, as you do. The word for cactus is ‘ooja,’ and the reason for that was I thought: okay, what would it sound like if I accidentally got caught up against a spiny stem? And I'd go: ‘Ooh-yah!’. So, I transferred that and then [we had] ooja, my word for cactus!”
Planco features prominently on many of the park props.
©Frontier
Advertising the language
The decision to establish a Planco dictionary wasn’t taken solely for the benefit of invested players. It was a practical necessity as more members of the development team began to incorporate the language. Artists, modellers, community managers – everyone needed access to a shared resource to help design and utilize in-game elements such as signs warning attendees not to run near pools or ‘tiidlil’ in them.
With Planet Coaster 2, Frontier has taken Planco even further. Ahead of the game’s launch, the studio released a series of in-universe advertisements for the game’s food and merchandise stalls. The store names are typically English – a decision Stant likens to brands like Burger King staying consistent across the globe – but beyond that, the ads are delivered entirely in Planco.
“We have this wonderful composer in house called Michael Maidment who will go away and create these wonderful jingles which are so expressive,” Scholey says. “And then it will make its way over to our creative services team, who just completely run away with it. I didn't really believe they were going to go off and do all these wonderful little advertisements for it. They added so much storytelling into these little 20-second videos! It’s just absolutely wonderful.”
“It is surreal, but in the most beautiful way,” says Stant. “It's something that you can try developing and hope that it gets the traction and the interest, and I'm so grateful to the team at Frontier because everyone's really shown that investment in it and to really want to make it part of the Planet brand and not just what we're doing in audio.”
“It props up the story, right?” Scholey adds. “You, as a player, want to make this world something which is really wonderful. The more we can do to make people feel immersed, like their guests do care and they are actual people in this place, is fantastic.”
Say it in song
Advert jingles were only the beginning, however. Scroll to the bottom of Planet Coaster 2’s soundtrack and you’ll find a suite of songs written entirely in Planco. There’s the eel-focused Murae Murae, the tropical house track Lain Eu Ayn Allyooma, the Beach Boys-esque Jano Onda!, and many more. Music is a huge element of theme parks, and Frontier wanted to represent that fittingly, even if it pushed their Planco prowess (and that of composer Ross Fortune) to its limits.
©Frontier
“It's a very different type of challenge because I think with many songs, there's the expectation that they'll have rhyming couplets, and that's each end of the line will rhyme,” Stant says. “And that's something I've always wanted to keep with the Planco songs where possible. We have a word-for-word replacement system, but it doesn't mean the words have the same amount of syllables, it doesn't mean that they're rhyming.
“But again, it's a fun challenge. It's trying to find that theme, that story that you're trying to tell. You get those key themes [and] words that you want to form the song with, and then you're just filling in the gaps. It's, it's very, very stimulating.”
“Most people won't get that it actually does make sense and it has context,” Scholey says. “Moo Moo Milkshake is about one of our mascots called Cosmic Cow. It's a song about them and what they stand for. And people won't get that at all. But if you listen very carefully, you'll hear Cosmic Cow bouncing in the background, and all the lyrics kind of are associated with them, which is really good.”
Frontier is coy about sharing their song lyrics publicly, however. If any intrepid park designers want to learn the meaning of Moo Moo Milkshake or any other Planco songs, they’ll need to put in the hard work.
Planco hasn’t quite yet become the lingua franca within Frontier’s walls. Even Stant admits that he’s far from fluent. But the language he created has successfully escaped from its video game confines – if only to find a staple place on birthday cards shared within the company.
Restart would like to thanks James Stant, Benjamin Scholey, and the Frontier team for taking the time to talk with us about Planco and Planet Coaster 2.