We got a bit carried away with continuing last weeks work. Paths now don’t connect through walls anymore either:

There are some edge cases with the rounded and diagonal walls, we’ll have to see how well those will work during normal gameplay.

The queue signs finally work:

So we also added signs that can be customized. We needed a font for them with partial unicode support for all the languages with a non-latin alphabet like Russian and Chinese etc., which means there are also some symbols available that could be nice to use. And yes, they can also be set to “no entry” which has been requested quite a lot.

Placing one of these signs at the front of a queue replaces the default queue sign. Flat ride fences can also be replaced by building a fence/wall next to them, which allows for some nice customizability.

(The option in the ride settings for selecting a fence style will be removed as it doesn’t have much of a use anymore now)

And finally, the brick set received some more tiles, a couple of fitting props, and there’s a new path style :)

Alpha 2 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We added the Inverted Dark Ride this week:

It has powered trains and the seat rotation can be controlled by the track.
It’s also a bit of a hybrid between a dark ride and a coaster - the track can control the trains speed, so you can make it run slowly through some thematic scenes and then speed up and get quite fast (for a dark ride at least) to add some more thrilling parts to the ride:

We also added Dutch and Danish translations - thanks so much to everyone helping with translating the game over on our translation website!

Community Update

H-POPS released Mod Spark this week, his Parkitect modding tool. It has support for creating all sorts of custom park objects including flat rides, shops, path types and even coaster trains. This tool makes creating mods as easy as it can get, so if you want to get into creating mods for Parkitect you should definitely give it a look :)

Alpha 2 Changelog

- added Inverted Dark Ride
- added “Overview” window that gives an overview of rides/shops/staff/guests and allows searching for them
- added marking staff/guests as favorites to more easily find them again
- added graphs for park population, park ratings
- added synchronized product prices across shops
- added brakes for gentle slopes
- added lift ends act like block brakes
- added UI scale option
- added option for snapping camera to isometric angles (45°)
- added guests remember their favorite ride
- added rebinding for more keys
- added volume setting for people voices
- added spinner buttons to number input fields + changing values using scrollwheel
- added Dutch and Danish translations
- adjusted how much guests are willing to pay for park entrance depending on prices of rides in the park
- improved track builder usability
- improved attraction safety stat (didn’t really work as intended previously)
- improved interaction of block segments with stations
- improved handling of shopkeepers
- improved handling of errors during game startup
- improved initial game loading screen to be responsive while loading and added a loading animation so it’s clear that it didn’t crash
- improved savegame and blueprint load/save times by up to ~20%
- overall performance improvements
- fixed finance graphs and improved them
- fixed guests would never throw away their trash except on paths with trash bins
- fixed guests releasing balloons while on rides
- fixed guests staying stuck in queue if queue is deleted below them
- fixed a case where guests could step onto employee paths
- fixed a rare case where people could get stuck
- fixed a rare case where a guest would never leave the park until the savegame is reloaded
- fixed being able to place Star Shape, Spiral Slide in invalid positions
- fixed being able to build tracks below 0
- fixed a case where employees would stop working
- fixed balloons still having color in visualization views
- fixed background music

Art Stream

Time for another Art Stream! Join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday at 1pm PDT (=1h earlier than it used to be) to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

We spent this week on addressing some general usability feedback and often requested features.

First of all we added an option for scaling the UI up or down. The UI always automatically scaled depending on your screens DPI which is fine for most situations, but on small laptop screens it’d use up too much space; or if you’re recording at a high resolution the UI would look fine on your screen but too small when watched on YouTubes scaled down resolutions. So that can be manually adjusted now.

One thing we always saw people struggle with in the track builder is that after selecting a special segment from the list on the right they got confused by the curve and slope buttons getting disabled. They didn’t know how to deselect these special pieces. The buttons for the special pieces were simple toggles, so to deselect a piece you’d have to click on it again, but we noticed people would try to click on about any button in the builder UI (including the disabled ones) instead of clicking on the selected piece again to deselect it.

So we’re not disabling the curve and slope buttons anymore, and clicking on any special piece but the selected one will deselect it.

This allowed us to add another thing that got requested a lot: building a piece by clicking on the already selected option a second time. We couldn’t do this so far because that was already reserved for deselecting pieces.

Sometimes it wasn’t clear what certain pieces do or why they can’t be built in some situations, so we added tooltips to help with that.

Input fields for currencies and other numbers got formatted properly and received spinner buttons to speed up doing small adjustments. You can also adjust values using the scroll wheel if you’ve got one on your mouse.

And finally, shops received an option for keeping their prices synchronized across the park.