Alpha 1 is now available for download! As previously announced, aside from any remaining bug fixes this is the version we’ll release to Steam Early Access next Thursday, so if you find any serious or new problems with it please let us know!
The best place to report issues currently is on our subreddit.

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.

Steam Launch Day Stream

We’ll do a Stream on May 5th at 8am PST, right before the Steam launch. If you simply want to hang out and chat a bit we’d be happy if you join us on Garrets Twitch channel :)

Devlog

There’s a new visualization for last weeks station synchronization feature that shows connections between all synchronized stations of a ride:

It includes all indirectly synchronized rides, too - for example, the above screenshot shows the synchronization setup for the coaster, which has synchronization configured between its stations and the Drop Tower. The Drop Tower is synchronized with the Carousel though, which means that the coaster can’t start before the Carousel is ready even though it is not directly synchronized with it.
This will probably not be a common situation but it can happen.

There are also a few new decorative objects:

Aside from that there’s not too much to say this week as we’ve obviously been focused on fixing lots of small bugs and annoyances and adding some polish to make a good first impression on Steam :)
You can find the more notable results of that in the changelog.

Alpha 1 Changelog

- added Giga Coaster
- added Monorail
- added Steam Workshop support
- added synchronizing attraction stations
- added compressed .park savegame format for up to ~85% smaller savegames
- added ride music volume slider
- added spawning supports if terraforming below ground-level tracks
- added option for closing the park only for new guests
- added German translation
- changed attraction “maximum waiting time between new guests” setting to overall minimum/maximum waiting times
- improved people loading speed by ~70%
- improved people animation performance by ~40%
- reduced people RAM usage by ~95%
- improved guest queueing behaviour
- fixed windows could be inaccessible off-screen after changing game resolution
- fixed tracked ride stats resetting to 0 if ride breaks down
- fixed tracked ride stats being wrong on first run after loading a savegame
- fixed tracked rides sometimes allowing to use one car more than the maximum that can fit into the stations
- fixed some graphics options not being applied when loading a new park
- fixed a case where guests would drown if loaded while the car they’re on is above water
- fixed a case where people would not find paths even though their destination was reachable
- fixed a case where guests would walk into a queue without queueing after loading a savegame
- fixed queue lines getting messed up after loading savegame
- fixed guests sometimes playing walking animation when they weren’t moving
- fixed guests sometimes not properly walking through ride entrance gate when entering a ride
- fixed guests moving before “check map” animation finished playing
- fixed firing a hauler deleted the delivery crate he’s carrying
- fixed an issue where trains would drop off passengers at stations that don’t have an exit
- fixed some spinning flat rides doing one additional round at very slow speed (which would also throw off their ratings)
- fixed trash visualization not working for some path tiles

Hey! Looks like our Publicity Management Engineers crafted another trailer for you - check it out!

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!