Art Stream

It’s the end of the month, so it’s time for another Art Stream once again! Join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

Garret has been busy with making all kinds of decorative objects for the medieval theme:

And there’s also this brick wall and scaffolding set:

I made slopes and supports work for the transport system, and transporting trash out of the park:

And Tim and Luuk continued with the scenario editor. Still a bunch of UI left to do though and we also need to make sure that old savegames still work with all of these changes.

So here’s how trash and deliveries will be handled in bigger parks:

A new “Deliveries” building will replace the current crate and trash stacking tiles. It can be connected through pneumatic tubes and conveyor belts to “Depots” that can be placed throughout the park. Shops can be associated with a Depot; if they are, crates will automatically travel to that Depot, from where they then get picked up by Haulers and manually transported the final meters to the shop instead of all the way from the crate stack. Inversely, trash can be dropped off at a depot and then gets automatically pumped to the Deliveries building.
This might sound weird and unrealistic at first, but at least the Disney parks are known to really use a trash disposal system that operates like this (AVAC)!
I’m not aware of a park that uses an automated system for transporting goods, but there are warehouses and airports that operate huge conveyor belt systems like that, so it’s not entirely unrealistic at least - and it should be fun and makes sense for gameplay reasons to have this, so we’re taking that small liberty here.
So far I’ve got the tube/conveyor building working (it works like building paths).

Luuk continued with the scenario editor and made progress with creating tools for defining the owned park area:

Tim added tracking of shop and attraction revenue:

Still lots to do to get all of this operational! Usually we break work down into much smaller tasks that don’t all necessarily have to be completed at once, so even if some tasks aren’t done in time for the monthly alpha update we can ship whatever is ready at that point and it’ll still work… but with these things either the whole system is complete or the entire feature needs to get delayed.
We have a couple weeks left to make it happen but it still makes me a bit nervous…we’ll see!

We added a deco object pipette/cloning tool:

I think this one has been suggested a couple times, and it really speeds up building quite a bit. Simply select any deco object in the park and you can instantly build copies of it (including the same custom colors and custom size of the selected object). Pretty useful and not too complicated to implement, that are my favorite features :)

Between the Alpha 4 release and a patch for it we’ve started working on some bigger tasks that’ll likely keep us busy for the majority of this month. Luuk started with the scenario designer which will ultimately allow us to offer different starting parks with different settings and challenges instead of just the simple empty flat sandbox you all had to put up with for so long. That’ll come one step at a time though and the first task is just getting some UI working and allowing to create different terrain sizes :)

Meanwhile I’ve started working on something that’ll improve handling of trash and shop resources - you’ll certainly need that in bigger parks :)

More on both of these probably next week once there’s a bit more ready to show.