Art Steam

Due to the imminent Steam launch this months Art Stream will be a week earlier than usual - come join us on Wednesday at 2pm PST on Garrets Twitch channel to watch him live while he’s creating some new art for the game.

Devlog

If you’ve played the game you probably noticed that some of the audio volume seemed a bit off - especially coasters were way too silent. The problem is that our game is a bit of a special case with its near-orthographic camera and its huge range of heights at which objects can be placed: you can have certain objects like drop towers or coasters that are 50 units or so above the ground that you want to hear, and at the same time you want to hear everything that’s going on at the ground too…but not stuff that’s going on at the ground and 50 units away from the center of the screen, because if you’re zoomed all the way in, the stuff that’s on ground level and 50 units away is way off-screen.
Instead of Unitys default volume attenuation that determines volume depending on world space distances we needed one that considers whether an object is on screen or not, and we got a first version of that working now.
In short: coasters and other things should start to sound better over the next versions!

Most of this week was spent on Steam stuff though. I’ve integrated Steams content delivery systems into our build tools and can automatically create a new game build and put it onto Steam with a single click now, which is really nice :)
And we added support for sharing savegames and blueprints on Steam Workshop!

We’re designing the content upload tools in a way that should allow it for other services like ParkitectNexus to plug into it too.

And the track builder got an update so it can adapt better to the requirements of whatever ride you’re currently editing because we were running out of room for slope buttons with the new steeper slopes on the Giga Coaster. And for example for rides that can’t be banked the banking wheel is entirely gone now:

Less uselessly confusing visual clutter!

Yes! That big milestone is finally close - we’ll be releasing Parkitect on Steam Early Access on May 5th.

Our Steam store page is live already, so don’t hesitate and put the game on your wishlist! :D

We prepared a cool new trailer over the past few months for this occasion, made by Marlon Wiebe and Gordon:

And we also revamped our website and updated it with a bunch of recent screenshots!

The beautiful parks in these shots and in the trailer have been created by the awesome Silvarret and TheDeeGee.

So what’s changing now that the game will be on Steam?

Not too much for now for you guys, really! We’ll keep up our regular development schedule, so the weekly devlogs and monthly Art Streams and new game versions continue as usual (although - we hope we’ll be so busy talking to all the new players on Steam during May that we’ll have less time for development, so don’t expect a huge May update).

We’ll finally change the game’s label from Pre-Alpha to Alpha, so the next release will be called Alpha 1. The plan is to release this to everyone who owns the game on Humble a few days before the Steam release, just so we got a bit of time to iron out any last-minute bugs.

And we’ll also finally bump up the price slightly from $15 to $17.99, starting on May 5th (only applies for those of you who haven’t bought the game yet, of course). As was the case with the current price we expect this to stay stable for quite some time, with another small increase once significant amounts of new content and features have been added again.

Pre-Alpha 9 is now available for download!

Grab it from the download link that you received back when you purchased the game.
Use the key resender if you lost your download link.

The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We finished the UI for creating and building blueprints:

Building raised objects has been improved to be faster and easier:

And we spent some time on performance improvements. Especially guest performance is much better now, so we increased their spawn rate too :)

Pre-Alpha 9 Changelog

- added Tourbillon
- added general purpose blueprints (can contain about anything now)
- added cobblestone and gravel path styles
- added changing fence style of flat rides
- added Tilt Shift option to graphics settings menu (disabled by default)
- added options for hiding paths, attractions
- added renaming people
- added new settings screen (+ changing resolution, rebinding keys)
- added a few missing scenery structure pieces
- guests without a map can also head for specific locations like shops and rides etc. now, but less frequently
- did a tracked ride excitement rating balance pass
- made it possible to raise fences
- changed rocks to be recolorable
- improved raised object building
- improved save/load dialog performance
- improved people performance
- overall performance improvements
- increased guest spawn rate
- improved error handling when encountering problems with loading modded objects
- fixed people sometimes getting stuck
- fixed ride entrance/exit sometimes rotating towards a path it couldn’t connect with
- fixed a case where deleting a bobsled coaster station would crash the game
- fixed a case where guests would never leave a coaster
- fixed round settings of some flat rides getting reset
- fixed zoning tools and other mouse tools deleting objects when right-clicking
- fixes issues on Linux with Nvidia GPUs