Over the Christmas break, I became absolutely obsessed with Jurassic World: Evolution. The theme-park building game from the Cambridge-based developers at Frontier has a compelling gameplay loop that sucks you in and doesn’t let you go, as you figure out how to run Jurassic World without all hell breaking loose. It wasn’t long before I was recommending the game to my friends, and they ended up sinking significant chunks of their festive free time into it too.

But how does a company craft a game that is quite this engaging? Keen to talk about my obsessive dinosaur-wrangling, I reached out to Jurassic World: Evolution’s game director Rich Newbold to pick his brain about just that. The overarching gameplay loop – which sees the player completing a number of challenges on an island in order to unlock another island, and then completing challenges on that island to unlock another island, and so on – was one of the first things we talked about.

“We tend to design gameplay loops in two stages,” Newbold explained. “Firstly, we look at the mechanics and loops that work in the macro time such as a few minutes. These are then expanded over a longer period of time and combined with other gameplay to create the overarching structure of the game.”

Lots of thought and effort go into the smaller tasks in the game, even when they only take up tiny chunks of your time. For instance, if you want to make a new dinosaur, there are quite a few jobs that you need to do first: you need to send dig teams to find enough fossils, then you use your fossil center to extract viable genomes from the fossils, then you need to incubate the dinosaur in your lab, and then (if all is going well) you’ll be able to release your brand new creature – this comes with a nice bit of fanfare and triggers a sizeable endorphin rush.