Devlog Update 149
And the new ride is…
Paddleboats! It’s an entirely new type of ride that works completely different than anything else in the game, so it’s taking a bit longer than usual to make :)
If you look closely you can see that the water received yet another small overhaul too, and I’m finally pretty satisfied with it.
And we also added some nice new animated decoration objects:
Devlog Update 148
Hey, we’re back!
Actually, Garret is still on his plane home right now, but he already made some nice new Western theme objects anyways! They are inspired by some of the theming we saw at Phantasialand:
And Luuk added an option for building blueprints without scenery. This is especially useful for scenarios when money is tight, or if you want to theme the ride yourself.
And we’ve done some work on a new ride - more on that next week :)
As some of you know, we went on a trip to 3 major theme parks in Europe a week ago. The idea was to gain some insight into real park operations, and collect reference and research for scenery and new rides (and also have some good old fashioned fun).
Our trip started in southern Germany, where we visited Europa Park. If you’ve never been, it’s a very large park with incredible theming and high production values. We rode all eleven coasters (some twice) and a number of scenic rides.
We got a behind-the-scenes tour of Blue Fire, allowing us to see the trains up close from all sides. That was pretty cool after years of trying to figure out details on blurry images off the web :D
Our favorite coaster at this park was Wodan, a very fast wooden coaster. Not the most intense ride in the park but a really fun one!
Next was Phantasialand near Cologne. This is the smallest park we visited, but it’s still home to some excellent coasters (many of them hold some sort of record) and great theming. Again, we rode every coaster, most notably the twin-launched coaster Taron, which is the 4 of us’ favourite coaster of the trip.
I would recommend visiting this park just to ride this coaster. We also spent some time on the other rides, and got plenty soaked on River Quest (a river rapid ride that’s impossible to leave dry in our experience) and Chiapas (the log flume with the steepest drop in the world).
Lastly we visited Efteling in the Netherlands. A large, fantasy themed park with some heavy theming and a couple bigger coasters. We rode most of the rides we wanted to, though sadly Villa Volta broke down as soon as we entered it. I’m pretty sure our favorite coaster here was the dueling wooden coaster Joris en de Draak.
We took plenty of pictures of scenery and rides to help us add more content to Parkitect. We’re especially interested in adding LIM/LSM segments to coasters in the short term as well as some interior rides and calm/scenic rides that are more raised-track friendly. We can’t wait to share those with you as we build them in the near future!
Devlog Update 147 + Alpha 14
Alpha 14 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
As previously mentioned we’ll be on our theme park tour now. The devlog will return to its usual schedule around the June 10th weekend. See you then!
Garret added some nice new objects that I’m sure some of you will be very happy about:
Tim added notifications for some global park problems. They are supposed to help new players.
Luuk extracted some more information from blueprint files to show them in the UI:
- added Flying Coaster
- added glass walls, cacti, stone walls, fountain jet
- added wooden supports adapt to terrain changes
- added employee list to zone info window
- added sorting employees by zone
- added shops can get dirty
- added buttons for calling mechanics/janitors for unscheduled maintenance/cleaning
- added notifications for global problems of the park (tired guests, shops out of stock etc)
- added displaying some more information about a blueprints content
- added subtle texture to most things
- added recolorable ride entrance booths
- improved camera when building tracks
- improved balance of tracked ride costs
- improved performance when moving blueprint build preview over occupied locations
- improved finance overview
- enabled Steam Cloud support for all Steam users
- fixed Ghost Mansion Ride having wrong intensity ratings
- fixed wrong orientation of Calm River Ride boats on slopes
- fixed cases where rides derailed when building them from a blueprint
- fixed object pipette hotkey not working properly while deco window is minimized
- fixed garbage not being cleaned up after loading savegame
- fixed a very rare case where guests could randomly drown
Devlog Update 146
We added the Flying Coaster from last months Art Stream. It‘s capable of some rather unique inversions:
Zones received a staff tab that highlights all assigned employees:
And Luuk restructured the finance overview a bit. All irregularly occuring transactions such as construction costs and land purchases went into the “Other” group and there’s a new “Operational” subtotal that excludes this group. That should make it easier to figure out how well the park is actually doing. All groups can also be collapsed since that window is getting a bit tall.
