Art Steam

Time for another Art Stream! Join us on Wednesday at 2pm PST on Garrets Twitch channel to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

It’s almost exactly 2 years this week since we started working on Parkitect, so we thought we’d do something different for the devlog: let’s take a look back at some pictures from the very beginning of development, from before this blog started :)
Alright!

It all started out as an experiment on simulating coasters, so naturally the first gif shows some early coaster physics. The tracks are just lots of boxes placed along a curve. This must be from the first couple days of development.

A few days later there are multiple trains, a station, banked segments, and the tracks have been cleaned up to get an idea how properly looking coaster tracks could be done.

Fast-forward a week and there are guests who can ride the coaster, get some food and sit on benches. That hot dog is the only programmer art that’s still in the game! I’m somewhat proud of that.

Another week later we got some very basic terrain and path building tools. Until this point there were no building tools, everything from the previous tests was placed in the game from code. The first terrain experiments were voxel-based, but it was clear very quickly that this wouldn’t work very well from an isometric camera perspective and it would be too ambitious for a single programmer considering with how many other systems (paths, coasters, water) it would have to work.

Coasters learned to derail, although they didn’t always behave like you’d expect.

With some very basic coaster building tools it was now possible to sort of build a park!

Balloons have been in the game for a very long time.

Garret joins the project mid-April and creates this mockup for what the “final” art might look like.

Around the end of April the first proper art is being put into the game.

And the work on flat rides begins - the first one is an exciting square beam to sit on!

By the end of May a lot more art has been done, including some rides and shops that are still in the game.

The long and tiring process of searching for a name for the game begins, and we start working on intuitive building tools that normal players can actually use.

Near the end of August we have enough of the game working in a very basic but presentable state to have an idea what it’ll take us to finish it. It gets Kickstarted and this blog begins :)

Blueprints got a lot cooler this week - they can contain about anything now!
Scenery…

Paths, Flat Rides, Shops…

And any combination of these really, even multiple coasters:

You might remember from last years Blueprint announcement post that unlike savegames they can only store up to a certain amount of data, but don’t worry:

There is a lot of space - you could put entire small parks into it. The above blueprint is only filled to 40%.

You pick the objects that go into the blueprint with a rectangle or individual object selection tool:

We can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with!

We also added new cobblestone and gravel path styles:

Pre-Alpha 8 was released on Monday, so we took some time this week to watch people play to see what common problems they encountered and to find the areas that we need to improve most. The time right after a release is also great for fixing long-standing issues and improving old code, because if I break something now we’ve got a couple weeks left until the next release to notice it (on the contrary, doing bigger changes a couple days before release is always a bit scary).

We also worked on giving our website a makeover. Almost done! Won’t go online for a couple weeks though :)

We added a tilt-shift effect (blur near the top and bottom of the screen to make everything look more like a miniature):

It is disabled by default, but if you want to take some nice screenshots or record videos or even play with it there’s an option for it.

 And we added the Tourbillon ride:

It looks a bit like something out of a science fiction movie, but it is a real ride currently in development. The movement pattern in the game is randomized.