Art Steam
Time for another Art Stream! Join us on Wednesday at 2pm PST on Garrets Twitch channel to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.
Devlog
It’s almost exactly 2 years this week since we started working on Parkitect, so we thought we’d do something different for the devlog: let’s take a look back at some pictures from the very beginning of development, from before this blog started :)
Alright!
It all started out as an experiment on simulating coasters, so naturally the first gif shows some early coaster physics. The tracks are just lots of boxes placed along a curve. This must be from the first couple days of development.
A few days later there are multiple trains, a station, banked segments, and the tracks have been cleaned up to get an idea how properly looking coaster tracks could be done.
Fast-forward a week and there are guests who can ride the coaster, get some food and sit on benches. That hot dog is the only programmer art that’s still in the game! I’m somewhat proud of that.
Another week later we got some very basic terrain and path building tools. Until this point there were no building tools, everything from the previous tests was placed in the game from code. The first terrain experiments were voxel-based, but it was clear very quickly that this wouldn’t work very well from an isometric camera perspective and it would be too ambitious for a single programmer considering with how many other systems (paths, coasters, water) it would have to work.
Coasters learned to derail, although they didn’t always behave like you’d expect.
With some very basic coaster building tools it was now possible to sort of build a park!
Balloons have been in the game for a very long time.
Garret joins the project mid-April and creates this mockup for what the “final” art might look like.
Around the end of April the first proper art is being put into the game.
And the work on flat rides begins - the first one is an exciting square beam to sit on!
By the end of May a lot more art has been done, including some rides and shops that are still in the game.
The long and tiring process of searching for a name for the game begins, and we start working on intuitive building tools that normal players can actually use.
Near the end of August we have enough of the game working in a very basic but presentable state to have an idea what it’ll take us to finish it. It gets Kickstarted and this blog begins :)