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.

Art Stream

Next week is the last Wednesday of the month once again, and that means it’s time for another Art Stream! Join us on Garrets Twitch channel at 2pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

We’re all very busy currently, working on many different parts of the game at once and it feels like we’re getting lots of good stuff done. It’s exhausting, but that’s alright :)

We finally found a look for flowing water that we’re satisfied with:

The object deletion tool was improved to allow deleting stuff much faster, which is mostly useful for scenery. Simply hold and drag the mouse around after right-clicking an object to only delete objects of the same type/from the same category:

And we added the first park utility building, the Staff Room:

For now it’s simply a place for staff to take a break so they don’t have to hang out on benches with the park guests.

And another first: we added the first dark ride, the Ghost Mansion Ride!

It’s a slow ride with self-powered trains.

The cars can rotate into any direction as defined by the track designer:

Similar to brake segments the segment length influences the rotation speed, so you’ve got a bit of control over that. For example here’s a rotation on a short segment:

And the same rotation on a longer segment:

This ride is more limited in its build options compared to big coasters with their loops and whatnot, but having this rotation option makes it still interesting. Pretty happy with it overall :)

Garret spent a lot of time this week on money balance. As usual with balance it’s nothing final, but you can actually build some profitable parks now. Feels better and is a good first step towards a working economy :)

There’s been a suggestion over on our subreddit recently to allow connecting paths to the ride entrance/exit from the sides instead of just from the front that gained a lot of support, and we were able to make it happen:

And we added a toggle for looking through scenery:

Scenery can’t be clicked in this mode, so this allows to access shops, rides, paths or whatever else was hidden behind scenery, and you won’t accidentally delete it.

Community Update

You might remember H-POPS as the guy who added the first custom flat ride to Parkitect a while ago. He’s been very busy since with creating a fantastic looking modding tool that allows bringing custom objects into the game without requiring any code. It also has some other helpful features like setting up collisions on objects, which has been tricky to do for mods so far.

And most of all it has really great tools for animating rides with just a couple of mouse clicks:

It’s making use of the games code for ride animations, so ride animations created with this are able to perfectly match the feeling of our own rides.
We also gave him some of our internal tools for integration into his modding tool.
This is not available yet, but it looks like it’s progressing nicely :)

Luuk Holleman from ParkitectNexus released a nice Billboards mod recently:

These billboards can show your own images, and it even stores them in the savegame, so you can easily share them with other users of this mod!