Alpha 8 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We’ve added the Power Surge ride that Garret created during this months Art Stream. There’s also a new Pizza Stall:

Tim and Luuk added tracking for a bunch of additional statistics:

And Gordon delivered 3 new ride songs!

And we’re making a distinction between sandbox mode and “normal” mode now when creating a new park, with the only difference so far being that you can’t spend money anymore when you’re in the red in “normal” mode.

Changelog

- added Car Ride
- added Power Surge
- added new notifications UI + ongoing notifications
- added 3 new ride music songs
- added Pizza Stall
- added new props
- added a bunch of new sounds
- added more statistics
- all kinds of balancing improvements across most parts of the game
- fixed people leaving queues after loading savegame (can still happen on first load with Alpha 8)
- fixed not being able to pick up people while game is paused
- fixed tracked rides not restoring customized train colors properly
- fixed loans not getting paid back
- fixed dozens of smaller bugs

Just a quick update this week since we’ve continued the balancing/polishing/fixing work started this month as expected. The coaster intensity ratings look pretty good to us now so we’re moving on to the nausea ratings next.

We’ve also overhauled the notifications UI. They slide in from the right edge of the screen now:

But most importantly there’s a new “Ongoing” tab to inform you about everything happening right now that might need your attention.

We plan to spend this month mostly on improving existing content - fixing bugs, polishing, and most importantly doing some balancing, starting with tracked ride stats. This means playing the game for a while, taking note of things that feel wrong, changing some numbers around and then repeating that as many times as possible.
It’s a slow process that takes a lot of time, so to speed it up a bit Luuk built a tool for us that takes a bunch of ride blueprints, automatically builds them in an empty park, and saves some test results into a nicely formatted table that looks like this:

It tells us the current stats of the coasters and how they changed compared to the previous run of the tool, so we can easily see the impact our changes make and work on something else while the tool runs in the background.

We’ve also collaborated with StolleJay to bring his custom props that nicely fit the new Go-karts and some of his other custom scenery objects as official content into the game :)